Time has certainly been rolling along, and my life has changed dramatically. There will be a lot fewer posts about Navy life as I get more senior and things I say start to matter more. I'm still loving it, though I'll admit that at 25 years, I'm starting to get tired of the moves and the long hours. One of my mentors mentioned to me after she retired that she didn't realize how physically TIRED she was after 30 years of service. I told her that I figured it out when I was on maternity leave (12 weeks, because for once the military is more progressive than American society in general...see, that's the stuff I have to be careful about saying. But it's true here.) The enforced slow down made me come to a complete halt...it was an emergency C-section, on the 4th of July, and I had post-delivery complications. When you've stopped running for the first time in 23 years, you realize how hard you'd been working. And then I got back on the treadmill, with a little added (welcome) baggage.
Anyway, we are doing great, and I'm still knitting and sewing. The advantage of traveling as often as I do is that I get uninterrupted knitting time on many flights. That offsets the no knitting I do at home.
The first things I knit for her were leg warmers. My first two trimesters I was working 18 hour days, coming home and crashing, then getting up at 4am to run with the dogs. So...that's all that got made. And I was working on the pink and greens ones while waiting for the c-section. The little sweater had been intended for someone else's kid (long since aged out of a tiny sweater) and only needed to be seamed. I have no idea why I didn't finish the darn thing.
When I first went back to work, I pumped in the awesome lactation rooms at the Pentagon (seriously, haven't found better ones yet, plus a tight community of mothers who all know the challenges of working stupid hours while getting through new mom life.)
These two sweaters were knit entirely while pumping...sadly, my Italian nanny managed to felt both of them within two weeks of starting work. At least she was about to grow out of them. The pink one is Garter Babe (on Ravelry) and is a rarely knit sweater that is really quite awesome. I need to make a second one as soon as I figure out how to size up correctly.
I did make a cute kid, didn't I? (Not quite current photo...Thanksgiving in Prague at a playground we found thanks to the Rick Steves walking tour of the city.)
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