Another Baby!

We went over to see our lawyer about my mom's estate yesterday and he mentioned in passing that his sister, also a lawyer here in Lancaster, is going to make him an uncle next week. Naturally I started rummaging through my stash the instant I got home. It was easy to decide on Elizabeth Zimmermann's Baby Surprise Jacket but harder to decide on the wool.

I don't know exactly what Shetland wool is, but I deduce it's roughly sport weight, with six stitches to the inch. Nor do I know how many yards there are in 3 oz of it. I don't believe in giving new mothers baby clothes that have to be hand-washed, which means a lot of my stash wouldn't do. I also don't believe in synthetics for babies or children, because they (the synthetics) burn like sons of bitches. Wool, on the other hand, is self-extinguishing. I hope everyone will remember this when they're knitting for babies.

I broke my own rule, though, because I'm knitting this BSJ in acrylic. Lion Brand Microspun in French Vanilla, to be exact. The parents don't smoke, the yarn isn't fuzzy or furry, the jacket is fairly close fitting, it's washable, and I'm in a hurry. I'll issue the appropriate warnings, of course. Plus, I've got three skeins of the same dye lot at hand.

I'm a half stitch off gauge, with 5.5, not 6, stitches to the inch, meaning that the jacket will be a bit on the large size. However, babies are bigger these days than they were when EZ sized the pattern and it's the beginning of summer and this jacket isn't going to get much wear for a few months, so I figure it's OK. I'd show you a photo, but how exciting is a six-row strip of garter stitch in cream yarn?

In other news, I scored my first victory as the administrator of my mom's estate this morning and bent the Bank of America to my will. We got a notice two weeks ago that BofA had deducted the yearly rental for a safe deposit box from my mom's former account. That was the first thing we'd ever heard about her having one and we were pretty surprised. Yesterday I went over to my mom's house and looked around for the key, which we found almost immediately. So today I took the key, my copy of the Probate Court order appointing me as administrator, my mom's death certificate, and my dad's death certificate.

It took over an hour to actually get through all the steps required to even get the box open and well over half an hour for the bank employees to inventory the contents. Then it took about half an hour to close the box and get a refund for the rental. I didn't rent another box or anything, because nothing current in the box was irreplaceable.