Baby Surprises

This post is about a certain sadness and how you can’t hang on to things, how time passes and how sentimental you can get all along. About first and last times and about NOW, not then.

Last week I had to say goodbye to the baby surprise jacket Carolina had been wearing since she was born.

She started looking too tight in it. Within these six weeks Carolina had turned from delicate newborn into a chubby baby girl.

Well, well, I thought, give it a good last wash, put it on her for the last time, take one last picture – and put the jacket away for further (grand)children, together with some exquisite memories (or had I promised Clara to give it to her doll Lilly?).

Anyway, it went into the washing machine with some cloth diapers and Clara’s big sister dress (a machine first-timer, too). I had softly hand-washed the jacket for the last weeks, but after checking the kept wool label I was assured that machine-wash would be fine. So I thought.

When the laundry came out of the machine, the cloth diapers looked as always. Fine. So did Clara’s dress. But the baby surprise felt different... it had slightly felted! Oh no, I felt a sinking feeling in my heart, I will never be able to put it on my granddaughter...

But should I be sad about a jacket I was about to put away for the next who-knows-how-many-years and that might be moth-eaten and forgotten by then, if I could enjoy my life and my baby now? No.

While Carolina was growing in and out of the baby surprise jacket, I worked on another item of the Zimmermann surprise series – the baby bonnet, like she wrote in “The Opinionated Knitter”: „in the same idiom, but not quite so surprising“.

Stitch by stitch I knitted, row by row, sometimes only a few stitches a day and sometimes my mama brain struggled with EZ’s “pithy instructions”, especially when I had to pick up and knit the back of the bonnet. My Ravelry notes here.

And as the baby surprise jacket is too small now, the baby bonnet is still way too big, probably something for the next fall/winter season. I will pack away the jacket now, pink witness of Carolina’s first smiles. And when the times comes round for the bonnet, which first times will it see – first tooth, first word, first step? Surprises.