Lions, and Tigers, and Babies - Oh My!

I sat down tonight to start a baby blanket for a friend of mine. I’ve putting this off for a while. The yarn - beautiful. Ok, maybe not entirely baby appropriate. All right, totally not baby appropriate. Fine, baby alpaca on the label? It does not, apparently, mean alpaca that is suitable for babies. I bought it before I knew that, but I’ve been saving it up for this little fellow. Not actually knowing he was a fellow and totally thinking the color was lavendar when I was in the store. lavendar being one of the pre-approved gender neutral colors for this little-guy-to-be. However, I have no idea what else I would do with 400 yards of the stuff. Let alone what I would do with 400 yards of it in striped cream and periwinkle.

So, I cast on. I looked at it. I haven’t decided if, after three rows in, I’m truly lovin’ it. It’s a little looser than I usually knit. I’m going to try a few more rows and then decide. In the meantime, it’s super duper soft in all of its softy goodness. Sigh, I love babies.

All that being said, it’s like the cosmos is trying to tell me something. Seriously, three friends have either birthed a kid or gotten pregnant in the last 18 months. That is, on average, one every 6 months. That’s a lot of babies. OK, not really a lot of babies, but a lot of babies to be entering my rather insular little world. Now, I guess I should say that at this point, it’s probably a good thing I wasn’t voted Miss Popularity my senior year in high school…or college…or law school. Regardless, it’s a good thing. If I had that many friends of breeding age, we could potentially repopulate the entire country of … ok, some country of previously low population growth. (I would have inserted Ireland, but they’re doing a darn fine job on their own. Nifty fact, they’ve gone from a population of approximately 1.5 million in the 1960’s to 3.5 - 4 million depending on whether you include Northern Ireland in the present day. Thank you tourguide to Newgrange!) That being said, it suffices to say, my friends? They’re fertile. Very fertile. The kind of fertile where you begin to wonder if it’s possible that their husbands simply sneezed on them and got them pregnant. I’ve started keeping track of which ones live out of state so that I can safely know that there is no chance that it has something to do with the water I’m drinking. In all honesty, with all this glorious repopulation of our planet, it’s no wonder that I’m preoccupied with babies.

I’ve hit the age where kids are an inevitability. I’m cool with that, in theory. I always wanted kids. I still want a child - singular, not plural, of as yet undetermined gender. I’ve been putting off this whole baby blanket project for the last six months knowing that knitting a wee little blanket was going to cause the ovaries to speak to me again. Yes, my ovaries speak to me. Well, the eggs that live there do. They bang against the organs, and I can hear them pounding their nonexistant fists screaming, “Fertilize us! Fertilize us!” And so, I’ve begun answering the wild animal call. I see a baby, and I become totally enamored and make a royal fool out of myself. “Who wuvvvs you? Ahh, who’s the cutest wittwe man? Yes, yes you awe. You are my favowite wittwe man.” Seriously, when did I become an LOLme? “Iz in ur fallopian tubes, waitin’ for ur fertilzation.”

It is not nearly as fun as it sounds. Seriously, the idea of that much intimacy should be great. It seems like such a fabulous idea, in theory. Then, however, you start the planning. This whole planning out your relationship takes a bunch of the joyous fun out of things. I find myself saving up my energy. Plotting, planning, counting. It’s no fun. The waiting, the wondering, the curiousity about what’s going on. All of this is not nearly as fun as what I thought it would be. Movies make it seem so easy. Goodness, health ed in high school made it seem like staring at a guy got you pregnant. So, all of this? It’s new. It’s different. New and different? They are not positive words in my vocabulary. Yet, the eggs…it’s  like the call of the wild. They want me. They scream out to me. I’m overtaken by something that is beyond me and out of my control.

I’m skipping down that yellow brick road, my friends. Skipping towards something unknown and new and different. Lions and tigers and …babies. Oh my…