The Menagerie

I'll be honest and say that this new phase of waiting is getting me down a lot more than I expected. You know, at this point, I really thought it would start to get easier to buy baby presents for other people. I thought I would hear the big announcement ('it's a boy! We've decided to name him Krazy Klingon Kupcake the Third!) and, rather than feeling nauseous with jealousy, and also angry because Kupcake was MY choice of name, I would just swing by the baby store on the way home, buy the obligatory tiny jumper with a frog (or a weasel, or a cat, or whatever) on it, maybe check out the nursery furniture while I'm there and then just happily trot home.

Yeah, not so much, as it turns out. I'm left wondering: when does this start to get easier? When does the fact that we will have a child in the future start to feel more real than the fact that we don't have one today? I thought it would be now. I was wrong.

Maybe it's not just the waiting, though. I just feel like a fool because I assumed January was going to be a great month. Finally, our time to start with all the preparations that normal parents make! It will be a halcyon time of love and laughter! Instead, it's brought wave after wave of unwelcome news: telescoping timescales, family illness, uncertain immigration requirements and a bereavement. All the adoption bad news feels really messed up with other difficulties until I hardly know what it is that I feel sad about.

So: when your head's in a mess, engage in unnecessary craft activities. That's what I'm telling myself. I haven't been a crafter at all for about twenty years until I picked up the kneedles a few months ago. In fact, I had some very unkind things to say about people who crafted. Mostly including the words 'if you wouldn't buy it, why would you make it?' and 'honestly, who needs a macrame duck?' and 'does she really have that much spare time on her hands?' And then one thing led to another and now I've been crocheting too, and sewing - an activity I swore I'd never engage in. And I'm forced to eat my words.

I love the William Morris quote ' Have nothing about you that is neither beautiful nor useful'. I think beautiful is out of the question, at my level of skill, so I probably should ry making something useful, but so far, no. Instead, I've been going crazy making baby toys. I think my subconscious believes that, if I can just make enough toys, a baby will be irresistibly drawn to our house because of the sheer density of playthings.

So. Meet monster.



He was the first thing I sewed (and I had a bit of trouble with the tension on his mouth, as you can see). J finds him a bit mystifying. He hasn't quite said 'face it, Claudia, no child is so deprived that they are going to want to play with THAT' but I know he's thinking it. At least he was made from an actual pattern, which is more than can be said for sketchy lion:


who was loosely based on the monster pattern, but, errr, obviously completely different. Sketchy lion is not just any lion - he's culturally appropriate (check out the dark brown in his mane, like an Ethiopian Lion) and mildly educational (his mane is made of ribbon tags, for little fingers to play with, and the ribbons are varying textures: grosgrain and satin). Also he has a very fetching tail (although due to practical difficulties it appears to be located halfway up his imaginary spine).


And in the interests of finishing before everybody reading this slips into a coma, here is the rest of the family portrait (so far):

Including blue bear & brown bear (brown bear taught me an important lesson - STAY AWAY from fuzzy angora yarn. It's pleasantly soft, but the heartache of trying to find your next stich just isn't worth it) and mini-kevin (who you have already met).

I think that's probably enough, but I've begun to think about finding a good pattern for a penguin. It seems that the aim is, by the time the baby arrives, to have filled the cot with so many random animals that there will be no room for an actual baby. At the rate I'm going, and the rate that the DC.SF is processing paperwork, I don't think that's unrealistic.