With all the chatter in this space about both babies and knitting, it must be time for another post about both.
I love baby knits. I think I’ve been clear about that at least a million times. I love knitting for little people not yet born, and praying over their safe arrival, and their walk with God, and who they will become.
I love it even more when the babe I’m praying for is one of my own. And by that, I mean a baby I claim even if it’s not one I’ll personally rock through sleepless nights. I don’t have any sisters, but I do have a best friend— the kind of best friend whose heart is grafted to my own with the same sturdy threads that bind me to the children that call me mother even though I did not birth them. And even though it’s been years since we’ve called the same town home, a daily flurry of texts and photos keep our lives as entwined as they were when our afternoons were spent watching our four, then five, then six, then eight little ones swing and slide and eat endless bowls of popcorn in their bathing suits under the soft Washington sun.
So naturally, her babies are mine in that unique way that has no real title. In Nepal, close friends are “Auntie,” and “Uncle,” and I think that comes closest to summing up the feeling. If you have a best friend like this, you understand. I have no blood ties to J’s babies, but really… how much do genes really say about the workings of the heart?
At any rate, it’s been a decade since J and I have overlapped pregnancies. In 2010, she had a little boy in the weeks after I found out I was pregnant with Birdie, and then, before Birdie was born, she found out she was pregnant again. When she shared that her ninth was on the way this spring, I in no way expected a repeat of that season, but in August we realized it was true. Each expecting a new blessing at the same time.
J is as passionate as I am about waiting until the moment of birth to discover the gender of the new little person inside, and I am usually wrong on those guesses. But this time I was right! A little man joined them, giving her five boys and four girls. He was earlier than anticipated, and tiny, but so, so precious. I get pictures of him every day and ohmygoodness, he’s a sweet little bean of a baby.
I have only managed one little knit for him thus far, a Tegan Baby Hat with Top Knot in a super squishy Hobby Lobby yarn. I’ve made her so many sweaters and vests for her last two littles that I’m afraid I’ve swamped her. But I still might whip up a sweater to match. The yarn is that lovely, and I’m pretty sure Benji needs a sweater his older sisters have yet to wear, right?
As it stands, we have 18 children between us—19, God willing, when Decimus arrives. So much to pray over, so many little fires and celebrations and ponderings and worries. The littles, we both admit, are the easy ones. Those days of agonizing over your preschooler’s habit of throwing sand (that was one of mine) or your toddler’s biting (also mine) seem far away for us both, even though we’re both still in the trenches of the early years. It’s hard, though, to really get yourself worked into a lather over the social faux pas of a two year-old when your prayer list includes the dating life of an adult child. The babies, we acknowledge, are the happy, welcome cherries on top of a sprawling family life we are both blessed to walk out together.
“This job [of motherhood] has been given to me to do. Therefore, it is a gift. Therefore, it is a privilege. Therefore, it is an offering I may make to God. Therefore, it is to be done gladly, if it is done for Him. Here, not somewhere else, I may learn God’s way. In this job, not in some other, God looks for faithfulness.”
― Elisabeth Elliot