The Finished Quilt and Thoughts on Having a Daughter

So I finally finished the most time consuming baby quilt in the history of baby quilts, but the final product was so worth it!  Don't mind my quilt model.....he's just really annoyed I was holding up our park trip for ridiculous things like blog photography.

The whole thing took a good ten weeks from start to finish but apparently I haven't had my fill because I just started a matching pillow for the rocker which I can hopefully finish up before the baby arrives....and also the crib skirt that I have all the materials for (including pom pom fringe!) but haven't actually begun.

I still have two whole weeks so I should totally be good.......

I decided to go ahead and bind each individual hexagon which was just as difficult as the quilt shop lady said it would be and did involve a lot of hand sewn repair work from where I didn't get my scallops quite right on the back side with the sewing machine but it turned out even better than I expected and, let's face it, it was going to have that certain special homemade look about it no matter what I did.......

It's even cuter now that I've washed it up and it's gone all crinkly.  And yes, yes that is my gigantic baby belly there.

And here's David, excited because he thinks the photo shoot is over.......

........and then more than a little put out when he realizes that it is not.

It's so much more fun crafting for a girl than for boys.  I feel like a whole new world of options has just opened up for me--not that the boys didn't appreciate all the things I made them but it was definitely harder to find projects to do in general and once we moved to Florida and they really didn't need anything knit for them I was pretty much reduced solely to cardboard creations.  With a daughter I can make all sorts of things--with lace!--or any fancy trim I want :)

The idea of having a daughter is also a little terrifying though.  With the boys there was a sense that I could just do my best at mothering until they get big enough to be handed off to dad for all the how-to-be-a-man lessons.  With a girl (and she definitely is a girl--I had the midwife double check last week when she busted out the ultrasound machine for a head-down check!) all the responsibility for teaching her how to be a woman falls to me.  I'm the one who will be responsible for all "the talks" and I'm who she'll be looking to as an example for, oh, everything....so no pressure there.  It's probably a good thing I started with boys because I am a much better woman now than I was at twenty-five.  And hopefully by the time she's a teenager I'll have grown into someone really worth emulating.