What a wonderful auntie you are going to be! I predict that there will be a very spoiled (in a good way) niece in your future. Best wishes to you and yours.
Heh-Laura is a great name for a blanket making Aunt/sister.
My daughter’s name is Laura!
Also, keep in mind that if this babe comes into the world–it will have tons of clothes, toys etc.
Maybe you could also plan for a special “off to Kindergarten” quilt or similiar.
Ok, maybe I’m jumping the gun a wee bit! Sorry, got fired by your enthusiasm!
This kid is going to get more blankets than s/he will ever need. I know, I gave birth to the World’s Most Perfect Grandson and was shellacked in blankies ( of the most horrid kind.) until my SIL out begat me and had 3 boys and one girl ( the worlds most perfect girl evar, in 5 years.It’s ok, she can have all those blankets.)
What you want to do is out shine/out-gift the rest of the family. That is what this is all about. ( really, it is.) You want to Be Different Just like eveyrone else! Not settle for Super Auntie but UberFcukinCool Auntie!!111!!.
You are doing this for two reasons: One to catapult yourself heads and shoulders above the rest of the wimmen in your family ( whom you love, but they drive you nuts.) and, this is important so pay attention! when you have a child of your own it will be guilting your own sister into the same level of care and time and money involved ( which she won’t have since she will have a child/ren and have no money/time/marbles left) that you spent on her child. Then she will then be forced to surf the web for something of ultra coolness that you really really wanted for the baby ( but the baby doesn’t need anyway.) and she’ll spend more money on you for shit you probably don’t need anyway, but you are basking in the glow of knowing that You Won and you made your sister Your Tool. Warfare, my girlfriend, is a peice of cake after dealing with gift giving rules of Da Family.
You didn’t know this? Did you miss the email?
These things have to be planned meticulously and ( this is key) packaging & presentation are of utmost importance. (It’s all in the presentation, baby.) You want the other women ( your mom and grannies and other aunts) to be* Just Amazed * by your Sheer Genius!
Fortunately, since you are a Doper, you are more than 1/8 of the way there to Genius Level. ( once you reach Genius Level you get …ooooh, I can’t tell you …it would break the #1 of the SDMB Club: Don’t Talk about the SDMB…but I’m still unable to walk straight, lemme tell you!)
Now, since you don’t know me from Sodom, and I don’t know you, it allows me to tell you exactly what you need to do * to stage this ** Major Coup* against the Estrogen Sleeper Cell that is running rampant in your *Very Own Family * and was activated the moment your sister pissed on the Whiz Quiz stick and got a “+”. !!!1111!!! Your sister is Bin Laden in the grand scheme of things in a cosmic way. It’s all her fault and she is bringing this all upon herself.
It needs to be Creative. No pressure here.
It needs to be time consuming ( really , your single. You have no life. I mean, you are here, aren’t you? ) but not so much it isn’t portable. No serger needed.
You need to be able to obsess about it 24/7, but not have it break the bank.
It has to be cool, which means interesting material which translates either loads of fabric stores…:::::fabric stores:::::: or surfing the web to get that Right thing.
It needs to be something that can never, ever, never uh-huh be chucked out into the Donation Pile or Given to the Next Baby That Comes Along. Which that baby will get shit compared to This Baby. Trust me on this.
You are going to create ::::bangs Chinese Gong:::: A real heirloom peice. But not your granny’s heirloom peice, comprende? It has to have function and not itch.
This or this and maybe this one too. and possibly this
and in cast any of those don’t make you jones for it, I dare you to resist the power of this and, it is the only one that comes in engrish. Nice lady, too. Very helpful. However, if your sister has a boy, the last one probably ain’t gonna fly.
I have one of the first few…something very similar that this ebay seller doesn’t have. she taunts us with it about every six weeks and it gets bought up like that. I bought it…got it…and shit if I don’t just sit there and look at all the ca-ute pictures of doggies that someone made so much better than I ever could with material I will never find in my life time at a price I am willing to pay and the japanese instructions are easier to deal with than anything I’ve ever tried in english. Yet I still go, " Fark. That’ll never happen. But I loves it so much." Lather Rinse. Repeat.
My work is done here.
Shirley Ujest you are the funniest person ever. GREAT ADVICE. And I’m all over it too. I remember that one of my aunts gave me my first toy ever. I was way ahead of the game, since I was the only one who knew for a few days (besides the baby’s FATHER of course). So I already had a stuffed animal purchased prior to the grandparents even being informed! Ha! I win!
Now that I was FIRST I also have to come up with the BEST, which is going to be difficult because my mom and dad have agreed to buy the baby a crib. I’ve made a pre-emptive strike against the rest of the family by sending three books on pregnancy…one for the father, two for the mother.
I’m a TERRIFIC knitter. I love doing complicated Aran work. Doesn’t the baby need a bath robe? And frog slippers? Also, I was thinking that something others may not think of is wall decor for the baby’s room. I personally think they should paint a mural of ME on the wall. But short of that, I could knit/quilt/paint something really spectacular.
I SO love the stuffed animal links though…those are great. They look difficult!
And it is so easy being a good sister to this woman. She is the best sister in the world! I loved her before she was born.
Oh, and it helps greatly to use materials the other women in your family don’t have access to. I’ve got this gorgeous little Noah’s Ark/alphabet print that has been recently discontinued. It’s primarily yellow, but has blues and greens and pinks and purples all through it, and it makes the most precious baby quilts ever. I could potentially be persuaded to part with a bit, being’s as these are somewhat special circumstances.
What I did for Sammy, The Grand Empress of Cuteness and Perfection and most perfect baby niece EVAH, left all those other female relatives in the dust. And that was just the one I did for her shower gift. Anybody can make an alternating snowball and nine-patch quilt. But it takes Fun Auntie Tamara and her Sewing Stash O’Cuteness to use two different sets of nine-patches (both involving an adorable animal print, thankyouverymuch), applique pairs of animals on the snowballs, put on a Noah’s ark border, and then quilt pairs of animals all around said border. This is her playmat, and has a permanent home either on the floor under her or in the laundry.
For her Christmas quilt, I did a whole-cloth quilt. I found this precious fabric with all these cavorting cartoon kittens and hearts in pastel colors, and a perfectly coodinating lavender, plus this adorable flannel that was pink with all these little cat eyes peering out at you. The top was lavender with the kitten/heart print as a border, and the flannel for backing. (Soft, fuzzy, snugglesome backings are essential for baby quilts. Absolutely essential.) Then I quilted the top with flowers and kittens batting at butterflies and dragonflies in all sorts of vibrant colors, and the border got quilted with interlocking heart motifs. It was smashing, I tell you, simply smashing. It goes damn near everywhere with her, and complete strangers exlaim over it once they’ve recovered from being dazzled by Sammy’s indescribable cuteness.
2-3 weeks is very early. Usually women don’t even know they are pregnant until they are 4-5 weeks along at least! Cramping or even spotting at this stage is common, especially at implantation. Early pregnancy symptoms can seem an awful lot like PMS, that includes cramps. I had cramps and some spotting several times throughout my pregnancy and everything was fine. She should still get checked out if it happens to her though, of course.
It is easy to go nuts at every twitch that goes on right now, but try to relax. Your sister is lucky to have someone so involved and happy for her though :).
Damn you, Shirley! Now I really neeeeeeeed those patterns. Sammy’s birthday’s coming up in a few months, you know.
You can see a heart in the echogram (or however you spell it in English) at 7 weeks. That’s how the gyne convinced my sis-in-law (who is also a doctor) that yes, the positive in the babytest was real and not just some kind of hormonal dysfunction. SIL has been known to have hormonal problems before: she was put on the pill for 6 months to see if that regulated her a bit and it seems to have worked.
At 7 weeks the baby looks like a tadpole with an outsized heart, so most docs don’t let the mom-to-be see it unless she asks. We want to see the pics, but SIL isn’t showing them 
Gratz, OP’r and family 
As for colors (whether or not it’s for this baby or a future baby. Bright colors! Fire engine red and royal blue and grass green. My nephew is six months old. When he first began to focus on objects and reach for things, he was fascinated by his mom’s best friend. She’s got bright red dyed hair (manic panic red, not auburn) and wears a lot of contrasting colors, black and white, etc. He couldn’t stop looking at her. His toys are brightly colored, as are his clothes.
I was freaked out about miscarriage until fairly recently (I’m 18 weeks tomorrow). I’ve had cramping since the very beginning, and for some women, that is normal. I had bleeding around the time my first period would have been due, that is also apparently normal for some women. I’m sure your sister is freaking out (and it seems like you hear about miscarriages all the time when you’re pregnant) but optimism can’t hurt. Trying to remain guarded left me in a constant state of anxiety.
I second everyone’s suggestions to hold on to the gifts for now. Hubby and I have barely bought anything, but we waited until after we heard the heartbeat (13 weeks in our case). Hearing that heartbeat is such a monumental relief.
If you’re looking for a craft project to totally outdo your relatives with ultimate coolness, as Shirley did so wisely suggest, try Craftster. It has hip, unusual, creative, and completely non-boring craft ideas of all stripes. A search on baby found:
Ugg Booties
Unique and beautiful star-shaped crochet blanket.
Or maybe all of the crafty ladies in your family would want to work together on a crayon quilt?
A picture (because baby threads need baby pictures).
Big, but should resize when loaded.
Brody
I just talked to Sis. The nurse told her she’s 5 weeks and 2 days pregnant. How the heck do they know that!? Her due date is December 14. I’m hoping they’re off a little because MY birthday is Christmas Eve! Hurrah!
Everyone in my family is freaking out!
Or in my case, 13 weeks! (yeah, scary ainnit?)
As for colors, I second the “bright colors” bit. Babies are drawn to bright colors and lots of contrast. Black & white is also good. Pastels? Meh.
My sister in law crocheted a really awesome, vivid rainbow blanket for Dominic when he was born. That thing was cool.
They calculate it based on the first day of her last period and the length of her cycle. You can find various conception calculators online. I think the 2 days is stretching it a bit, though.
I also wanted to let you know that I had to take oral progesterone for the whole first trimester and everything went just fine.
That early on, they calculate from measurements on the ultrasound, and only verify it with her last menstrual date. (It’s pretty widely assumed that of course women don’t know their own bodies and can’t be trusted to REALLY know when they got pregnant. :rolleyes: ) It’s amazing to think about, considering the later variation in size and shape of human beings, but up until about 12 weeks, embryos are very much the same size at the same time. Not only that, but they’ve been able to pinpoint developments of certain structures not just to the week, but to the day and sometimes even to the hour! They are very uniform for all early embryos, so much so that narrowing it down to a few days is not that hard. Later on, of course, fetuses vary greatly, and the instrumentation becomes less reliable for predicting age and weight.
I sure didn’t know when I got pregnant. Of course, it was the last thing on my mind at the time and was a huge surprise, and I didn’t realize I was pregnant until I was already after my first trimester, so whichever sex it was was a distant memory by then.
Sorry if that came off snarky towards moms, it wasn’t meant to. I know lots of women don’t know their conception dates. It just drove me nuts that at every single conversation I had with a midwife or doctor or nurse, they blew off the date I told them and checked the ultrasound dates. Except, see…I had been celibate for three months beforehand and two weeks afterwards! I have also been an FAMer for 3 years! So I was able not only to tell them the night of intercourse, but the night six days later when ovulation happened, and due to that enormous time difference between the two, my 90% surety that it was a girl! (And, as it turned out, I was right on all three accounts!) But I kept getting these irritatingly patronizing pats on the head and told they’d check the ultrasound “just to be sure.” Grr.
If you’re getting stuff, don’t forget the Maya Sling!
You know, you are just going to be the coolest aunt ever, right?
If you really want to give her something, but since it’s too early for the baby stuff, why not make something your sister can use while she’s pregnant? Maybe a small afghan to bundle up in? Some soft, comfy pillows for those days when her back’s bothering her? She might really appreciate that, and then, if something DOES go wrong, it’s not something she’ll look at and cry.