Option 3 it is

Mr. Tinks and Frogs went back to work today so this is my first day home alone with Tadpole. She's napping at the moment and I know this means I should be napping, too, but I couldn't pass up a chance to engage in an adult activity that didn't involve eating solid foods. I've got about half an hour before she's going to wake up again so this is going to be pretty random. Don't say I didn't warn you. Hmm, maybe less than half an hour but it looks like the moby wrap is going to buy me a few more minutes, especially if I bounce while I type. This should be interesting.

On the knitting front, or rather the yarn acquisition front, my stash diet has taken a bit of a beating these past couple of weeks. In my defense, I will say that the exceptions were very, very good.

Exception #1: being in labor. I'd been having regular but still rather mild contractions for several hours when my LYS posted on ravelry that they now had tosh sock available. The store had had worsted and lace weight Madelinetosh offerings for a few weeks but I had really been looking forward to the sock. I was ready to take another walk, we had already gone to the good coffee shop in the neighborhood earlier in the day, and the LYS might be sold out of all the good colors before I had another chance to get there (or so I told myself). All very good reasons to head in that direction. Living within walking distance of a lovely yarn store is a dangerous thing, and I came home with a skein of Jade tosh sock.

Exception #2: we (Tadpole) needed something that screamed "I'm a girl." Apparently my sophisticated, relatively gender-neutral color palette of handknits (not to mention the little notation next to her name on the chart) makes it too difficult for the nurses at the pediatrician's office to notice that Tadpole is a girl.

She looks like a girl, right?

We're switching pediatricians (there are other reasons, too) but I thought a little something extra was in order to avoid this sort of thing in the future. Hence the need for another trip to the LYS.

That should help. Assuming I ever get them knit up into something, of course. Each skein is slated to be a hat plus something else (the something else will probably be a sweater, but that has yet to be determined).

On the knitting front, Laminaria is done. Or rather, the knitting is done and the ends are woven in but I still need to block the piece and that's not really something that I can do while wearing a baby. Although I just might be able to do it if I put the blocking mats on the island instead of the floor so I don't have to be on my hands and knees the whole time. Certainly something to think about. Or I could just wait for Mr. Tinks and Frogs to come home and put him on tadpole duty for half an hour.

More importantly, how did I manage to actually finish this piece? I knit the bulk of it while I was waiting for a certain little someone to make her appearance so I only had one repeat of the flower chart and then the edging charts left to do once we got home from the hospital. I knit a row here and a row there while Tadpole was napping. And then I managed the bind off like this:

Now you're never going to believe this next bit. I've been spinning! After breakfast, I popped Tadpole in the wrap and sat down at the wheel after she had fallen asleep. I managed to finish up a bobbin of BFL that I've been working on for a couple of months now.

The second bobbin of what is destined to be a (hopefully) lovely 2-ply yarn is about half done and needs only another couple of hours worth of work to complete.

I hadn't really enjoyed spinning the last few times I had sat down at the wheel during the final months of pregnancy. I was worried that I was either falling out of love with spinning or maybe just falling out of love with my wheel. But then a friend of mine suggested option 3: perhaps I just couldn't sit comfortably in my spinning chair. After spinning several times in the past week, I can happily report that the correct answer is option 3.