05.04.08
Two Good Excuses
See? Less than a month since my last post! Didn’t I promise you? Now I just have to come through on the “more exciting” part.
I recently received notification via email that Lickety Knit has been featured on findingDulcinea, self-described as “Librarian of the Internet.” I’d never heard of this particular web guide, but it looks nice and I’m always flattered to be noticed within the large and noisy and varied knitblog world.
The one thing that confused me a bit was its description of my site, found here:
Lickety Knit is for those knitters who want a bit of sassy humor with their blog reading. Read about the author’s knitting projects, her cats and thoughts on life, and take a gander at her finished projects, photos from her travels and (of course) some pictures of her cats.
Certainly very kind, but it gave me pause because, quite frankly, I make a concerted effort to minimize the cat content on my blog. Don’t get me wrong, I love my cats, and with three of them, they play a significant role in my home life. And if they had their way, they’d be in every knitting photo I take. But I realize that they are just plain old cats, and therefore of limited interest to a general audience. (There are certain exceptions to this rule, including cats that are ludicrously photogenic and cooperative.) Worried that I had become a cat blogger without noticing, I went back to check: my cats appeared on my blog exactly once in 2007, and zero times so far in 2008. Why on earth were they so heavily featured in that description, then?
This question did not keep me up at night, but it did get me thinking about how I would actually describe the content of this blog. I’ve decided it breaks down as follows:
- 25% knitting content
- 15% sarcastic humor
- 15% self-deprecation
- 45% repetitive excuses as to why I haven’t knit or blogged much recently
The rest of this post is going to be rooted in that last 45 percent, because (and this is for real), I haven’t read a single knitting blog nor knit a single stitch in about 8 weeks. That’s my most egregious truancy ever, so it’s only right that I come up with the best excuse for it ever. Will it be good enough? You, my blog readership (or “bleadership,” as my sister-in-law calls it) will have to be the judge of that.
Let me begin by admitting that deep in the recesses of my basement, carefully tucked away in gallon-size ziplock bags, in a box inconspicuously labeled “curling irons and hair notions,” is a small treasure trove of tiny knits that I’ve accumulated over the last three years. Some were originally intended to be gifts, some were started for no reason at all, and some were made with the faint hope that I might have a use for them myself someday. (Two were started with the intention of donating them to Project Linus, and the fact that they never made it there is admittedly embarrassing and more than a little shameful.)
Hmm, I kind of made it sound above as though I was going to be dropping a series of hints that would lead you to my excuse, but I can’t imagine that there are many of you who haven’t already arrived at the correct conclusion…well, at least part of it. For the 5 percent of you who are slow on the uptake (no, you don’t have to admit who you are), I will tell you that last year at the Yarn Harlot book launch in New York, a knitter in the audience asked Stephanie whether she’d ever heard of knitting causing or aggravating severe nausea during the first trimester of pregnancy. Stephanie answered encouragingly (”yes, but I promise you it goes away”), and while at the time I was only half-listening (because I was furiously knitting away at my charity blanket square in a futile and ultimately humiliating attempt to keep up with Minty), lately I have replayed that exchange over and over in my mind in an attempt to convince myself that my favorite hobby is not lost to me forever.
Anyway, by now I’m sure all of you have figured out that I’m pregnant. Yep, thirteen weeks tomorrow. Most of you probably have not guessed that I am pregnant with twins.
I know, seriously. I don’t really know how it happened either. (The TWIN part, people. Please do not transcribe the chapter on the human reproductive system from your college physiology textbook into the comments.) This news has thrown the Lickety Knit household into happy turmoil, and in the last three weeks we have entered an agreement to buy a new house (ours, which I adore, is definitely too small for us + twins + their crap + the parade of friend and family helpers that we are lining up), put our house on the market, signed an agreement with a buyer (whew!), and begun to contemplate our lives without any sleep whatsoever. Actually, I don’t have much time left over to contemplate that, thanks to the bone-crushing exhaustion that sends me to bed at 8:15 every night.
Here they are looking vaguely less like nothing. Still, thank goodness for the tech’s helpful labels.
So that is the best excuse I can come up with as to why I have neglected my knitting and blogging and blog-reading (bleading?) duties for so long. (And Andre and Meghal, if you’re reading this, now you know why your son has had to endure the first weeks of his life without the knitted turtle I promised you ages ago. It’s coming, I swear.) I wish I could assure you that it will get better from here on out, but I can’t be certain it will. I am clinging to the hope that my nausea will subside and I’ll get at least a sliver of my former energy back, because I have twice as much knitting to do as I originally thought I would! Suddenly that little secret treasure trove of baby knits is looking mighty paltry.
