A few days ago I heard my mother’s baby sister Mary in Canada is about to become a grandmother for the first time in September. If you think I’m excited you should read my aunt’s email ... and I think she asked me to knit something for the baby. Her exact words were “Now you can get started with some creative knitting, that old pattern book was so cute,” so I’m going to take that as an invitation.
I’ve been through my pretty small baby pattern stash twice looking for that perfect little something ... and hasn’t the world changed? Not just patterns ... now it’s all growsuits (onesies) now, and the yarn types and colours are really different. I love all the natural fibres (cotton and bamboo) and the stronger more solid colours, even for babies, and I’m really excited at modifying (just yarn and needles) the patterns to make something sweet.
But this has got me started thinking about my family and how scattered we all are. My parents and one of my mother’s brothers migrated to Australia during the early very 1960s, with my auntie Mary emigrating to Canada at around the same time. The upshot of this is that I’ve barely met most of my extended family, including my auntie Mary. Her kids, including Holly who’s pregnant, I’ve never even met.
My family is especially topsy turvy when it comes to age ... let me give you an example. There’s about 6-8 years between my Mum and her sister Mary ... but my cousin Holly must be 25 years younger than me which makes her much closer in age to my daughter Miss W.
And don’t get me started on my father’s family ... he has an uncle barely younger than him so that his daughter (my dad’s cousin) Helen in the UK is a little younger than me, and her kids are pretty well the same age as mine.
It makes me sad to have missed out on the opportunity of getting to know them as I grew up ... and it’s a lot of missing because it’s anywhere up to 100 people (my mum has about eight siblings and my father was brought up with his 10-ish aunts and uncles). But the two I really wish I got to see more are my second cousin Helen, and auntie Mary who I met last year for the first time as an adult. (Oops ... I missed out on my aunt Maureen. Better not forget auntie Maureen).
It would be so nice to see everybody more often ...
1 comment:
Hey gotta love those 'Old' baby knitting patterns - Just wondering if the circular shawl is in that Yellow book.
I feel for you not knowing your extended family - as I grew up with a large extended family and a few years ago we had a reunion to celebrate my Aunts 80th birthday - there were 4 generations of the family, with less than half attending we had over 100.
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