This pregnancy has been entirely different from my first one. I have had more symptoms - nausea, aches & pains, other little discomforts - that were absent last time. But most notably, I have a toddler to take care of now. With my first pregnancy, I was entirely mindful of the life I was growing each moment of the day. Every thought and action was colored with this new experience, every meal, every work day, every movement. Truly, though I worked about nine hours a day, I had an extravagant amount of free time - time to sit and contemplate my pregnancy and my changing body and this growing baby and this new life we were embracing.
Now we are completely immersed in that life, and my days and hours and moments are full of motion and planning and doing. Whole sections of the day fly by when I completely forget that I am pregnant. And so, between playing and cleaning and cooking and grocery shopping, between snuggling with Juni and flipping pancakes and chasing deer out of the yard, I've been trying to set aside some moments of pause. Moments to sit and be mindful of this baby, our son, her brother, to feel his movements and let the joy and anticipation and excitement wash over me as though he were the first and only.
Yet another difference this time around, a good one, is that we already have most of the requisite baby gear and accoutrements. With Juni, there was a long list of "stuff" to accumulate and assemble and arrange. Now there are just a handful of things that we truly need. And thanks to my tendency at the time to dress little baby Juniper in rather gender neutral colors, we don't even need many new baby clothes. And so, I've been focusing my nesting efforts on making handmade things for our little boy.
These are two receiving blankets I make a while ago. I couldn't believe the amount of blankets Juni ended up with when she was born. I thought it was ridiculous at the time, but we used and loved every one of them. Babies and snuggly blankets just go hand in hand, especially for those Autumn/Winter births.
Taking a cue from her blog, I used Anna Maria Horner's luxuriously soft Little Folks voile for one side of the blanket and her warm and cuddly Folksy Flannels line for the other. The binding is bias cut from her solid voile collection (as it turns out, making and attaching bias binding from voile is not as trivial as I thought, mistakes abound). The blankets ended up being around 34"x44", perfect for swaddling up a brand new little baby. As you can see above, Juniper has determined that they are snuggly indeed.