Before James was born (and he’s nearly two now!), I would get up in the morning, make tea, and sit in my living room rocking chair, drinking my tea and knitting for a while before the day began officially. I returned to the chair in the evenings and knit for at least another half-hour before it was time for bed. I got my best ideas for knitting designs during long runs or bike rides. I had something new to work on when my knitting group rolled around each month.

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Enter James, and all of that changed. I wake up whenever he does, usually between 4:00 and 4:30, to his calls of “Mama doin? Mama doin! MAMA DOIN!?!!” I don’t drink tea anymore because the caffeine keeps him awake, and decaf tea just isn’t worth it. When he naps, I work. When his babysitter is here, I work. (I am self-employed.) I have about twenty minutes after he goes to bed before I have to head to bed myself — that is, if I want to get eight hours of sleep, and I do, I really do.

For the first twenty months of his life, I spent that twenty minutes lying down and reading, not knitting. For about eighteen of those months, I had to lie down because my back hurt from hauling James around. Then for another few months, I wanted to lie down because I was just so tired. Now, finally, I am getting enough exercise and sleep that I’m not so tired before bed, and my back doesn’t hurt at night. I can sit up for those twenty minutes. So I’m knitting again.

I finished the Hemlock Ring Blanket first.

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Then I finished a sweater I call Veronica, which I started before James was born. It’s the Kangaroo Pouch sweater from Elizabeth Zimmerman’s Opinionated Knitter.

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Perhaps I’ll get around to doing finished object posts for those two soonish.

Meanwhile, I’m working on a Neiman sweater for my friend Tina. According to my records in Ravelry, I started it in June 2008. (Poor Tina.) This sweater, knit in the round from the bottom up, has a body, and I knit one sleeve before I inexplicably stopped working on it. Well, maybe not so inexplicably. I’m not a big fan of knitting sleeves.

The first sleeve needed to be reknit a bit wider, and before abandoning it I did myself the favor of writing down exactly what I needed to do. It may be the case, however, that two years of barely knitting tightens up one’s gauge. The new sleeve, which I have nearly finished, is coming out small. It took me a while to confirm for certain that I was using the correct needles. I was. The mystery now is whether the sleeve is just small because it’s unblocked — I had blocked the body and other sleeve-in-progress, so I can’t compare unblocked gauges — or whether it is small because my gauge recalibrated itself over the intervening months.

If the former turns out to be the case, woohoo! But if it’s the latter, I’m going to have to redo the calculations for a third time and knit that darn sleeve over again. And then I’ll have to knit it a fourth time so the finished sweater can have two sleeves.

Let’s hope that’s not my penance for leaving the sweater to languish so long in my closet.