New arrival, or welcome to the land of sleeplessness...

Yes, baby Rebekah finally made her entrance into the world last week, 13 days overdue and weighing 7lb 6oz.  Not a great labour (induced) but not too bad either, and no pain relief again, although not by design (I'd just decided I wanted an epidural when she decided she was coming - the anaesthetist didn't even make it in time).  My hospital report, under pain relief, just says 'attendant support' (wonderful husband!) but there was also a bit of knitting in there too, until the cannula in the back of my hand made it impossible and I had to give up.  I can recommend it though.

So we are now in that peculiar version of hell when all three children are up in the night for varying lengths of time, and I have no idea what day it is or what time, and just sleep when I can.  Admittedly we are no strangers to sleeplessness, given Hannah's ideas on when and how much to sleep, but unsurprisingly it just got quite a bit worse last week.  Just as well these babies are damned cute then.

But I have discovered one thing that makes the nights bearable - knitting podcasts!  I can listen whilst feeding (it's a two handed job at the moment a lot of the time, and takes about an hour per feed) and get my knitting fix that way, even if I can't actually do any knitting.  My current favourite is Lime & Violet, but I'm still trying different ones out.

Pin wars

I bought myself some new pins the other week, because I don't have enough left in the old box for most projects.  I thought they were pretty much the same as the old ones, a pin's a pin, right?  Apparently not.  These pins are rubbish, the attrition rate per project is astounding.  Worse than slightly bent pins is what happened to these two:

 

That kink went right down between the feed dogs and got stuck.  I've never seen that happen - usually either the pin or the needle breaks.  I've since had one more do this, and then one that shattered, and I mean shattered, the needle (think bits flying everywhere and Chris threatening to make me wear safety goggles).  

So, I've gone back to the old pins.  No problem there, and I've now finished the mini-quilt project I was working on, and yes, it did get finished in time for Saturday.  It was a 90-patch quilt, for my Nana's 90th birthday:

For the observant among you, the other 9 patches are on the back.

Lastly, I managed to get a photo of the pinwheel blanket in progress, as I was transferring it onto the next size cable:

 

It's quite a bit bigger now, each round is over 300 stitches, and I've gone up to the longest cable.  I'm going to try and keep going till I've finished the ball, no point having a small amount of yarn left over now is there?