Why Mommy Can't Knit

String Bean had an excellent suggestion in the comments yesterday, and I quote: "It would be horrible not to have time to knit every day (EVERYDAY!!). But I don't have children, so I'm probably missing something. Teach the kids to knit! Once they get the hang of it, you can finally sit down and knit (a few months later...) while they quietly sit still and knit. Quietly...while sitting still. No noise. Maybe?

Yes, it really is a great idea. Two of my four can knit, and two of them are probably too young. Well, at least the seven month old one is. She, however, really enjoys chewing on yarn. And the knitters? There is almost nothing my children cannot do while talking. Really.

At any rate, I don't mean to make my situation with my children stand for anything more than one person's life with four small people. And my idiosyncratic small people at that, too. Somewhere there is a family with four or more children the ages of mine, and this family probably has lots of time to knit. Heck, they probably have time to meditate. All of them. Calmly. Together.

My experience is different.

For whatever reasons, nature, nurture, bad karma, a life well-lived, I have the children I have. And right now, that means that I don't have purt near any much time to knit during the day. I take the time I do have, and I try to make as much time as I can, but I do knit rather slowly, given my "knit two, rip one" credo. Plus, it's not all bad. The kids are diverting, sometimes more than diverting, and I read while nursing.

So, those Jaywalkers? They're now about 3" or 7.5 cm (I'm going to stick to metric from now on; it seems so much more). Green sweater? Well, I've got ribbing. This evening's knitting time?

I spent it being helped to plant seeds, because I now have some of these:



Please accept my apologies for the quality of the picture. It had been a long day. Just about half of my new garden beds are there. Enough to drive me to my seed boxes and pencils and whip me into a gardening frenzy.

Plus, the ladies are now behind bars.

I can plant without fear of chicken depredation, being used as a landing perch by the overly friendly hen, or inadvertently encountering. . . well, poop.

Even with only a smidgen more sock, it all adds up to a good day.