Baby clothes

My best friend's daughter was due to give birth in January. However, her waters broke on Friday and despite the efforts of the medics to delay matters, she went into labour on Saturday night, four weeks early. Baby arrived early this morning after a far from straightforward labour in which at every stage, things failed to go according to plan. Thankfully, I just heard an hour ago that both mum and baby are going to be OK. Baby has confounded all expectations and weighed in at 5 pounds 9 ounces which is apparently quite good. He is also breathing unaided, which the doctors hadn't been sure he would be able to do.

However, baby had no clothes to fit because mum hadn't bought anything below first size. So all weekend, people have been knitting to create a wardrobe for the new babe. We didn't know the gender, and had no idea just how small the babe would be. The new grandma knit a cardigan in neutral shades whilst simultaneously running her own business singlehanded, keeping everyone up to date with developments and chewing her fingers to ribbons because she couldn't go to the hospital to be with her daughter. My mum knit two cream hats and a pair of cream mitts, both with lemon ribbons. And my contribution is shown above. I knit in blue because that was the yarn I had on hand. The biro in the photo gives the scale of these impossibly small items. The mitts and socks just fit on one of my finger ends. I started knitting with what I had on hand as soon as I knew that the baby was coming because babies need things that have love knitted or sewn into every stitch and it seemed urgent that I start right that very minute and not spend time faffing about looking for wool rather than actually knitting that love into something. So I sat up late on Friday, and Saturday, and I knit as fast as I knew how to, and all the time I was knitting love into those garments and hoping little babe and the mum, who I've known since she was less than a year old, would be OK. Because, when nature takes over and you can't do anything to really help someone you love, you knit, or you sew, or you do something, anything, that might somehow help to make the outcome work out well for everyone involved in the process.

And it worked. It really worked. So that set of tiny little preemie garments that you see up there, together with the cream and lemon items, two pairs of normal sized baby socks, a baby sleep sack made by mum, and the baby blanket that took me forever to knit in the summer, will all set off for their new home tomorrow and I hope that all that love will mean that little Zack can come out of ICU tomorrow and spend some time with his mum and dad.