When I imagined having a family, I knew it would sometimes be hard. But I think I meant "hard" in the sense of, oh, say, an Old Order Amish barn raising. Lots of hard work, shared by cheerful people encouraging each other. Maybe they would sing songs. And at the end of it, you'd have a barn grown children. And when it wasn't like that, I expected something like a hippie tea party -- creative play, wholesome food. In general, I expected that the children would be basically cheerful and cooperative, and the adults would be wise and patient, probably kind of funny. We'd all rub along pretty well together.

It's not quite like that here.

It's hard. By "hard" I mean something like a movie with galley slaves chained in the dank hold of a ship, and large pirate-types wielding whips and shouting, "Faster! Faster!" as the oars are moved back and forth.

At least, that's what it felt like at 3:00 a.m., when the quite sad fussy baby could only sleep if I sat up and held her with her lovely little head tucked under my chin while she cried and cried, feeling stuffy and rotten. Then Thing 3 developed a rollicking ear infection -- both ears this time -- about 4:15 today, too late to crash the pediatrician's office for "just in case" meds.

I unpacked all of my home remedies and he's going up and down, but I anticipate a wild night again.

The only part that resembles my hippie tea party fantasy comes when I gather up enough laundry to do a load every 2.5 hours, and realize that someone is getting naked a lot.

Needless to say, even when the knitting is simple, there's not a heck of a lot of it getting done.

And when it's more complex?

Well, remember how excited I was about redoing that cable? And I was so thrilled I realized that I could redo the center cable too? So I was sitting in a quiet moment and thought, "Okay -- let's do it."

And I boldly ripped back the rows, consulted the charts, counted the floats, and looked at it. Then I looked at it again.

Hmmm. The stitch pattern appeared to be off compared to the center cable chart. I looked again. The floats looked. . .familiar.

Yes.




I had re-ripped the already re-done cable. At least I know that I can fix it, since I've done it once.

"Stroke! Stroke! Faster! Faster" I can hear it now.