Have a baby and the knitting goes all to hell.

All this time spent changing diapers and cooking and feeding and bathing and clothing and carrying and hugging and kissing and playing and not sleeping has seriously cut into my knitting time. Seriously.

As if that's not enough, the baby has a tendency to kick me in the wrist while I'm changing her, leading to chronic pain flareups (I busted up my hand and wrist about eight years ago), which leads to taking narcotics for pain. Let me assure you, taking narcotics is NEVER good for your knitting. Ever. (We should make that a public service announcement. "This is your knitting. This is your knitting on drugs.") Saturday night I spent an hour knitting off a graph that was UPSIDE DOWN without noticing. The truly scary thing is, I knit six rows CORRECTLY before I realized what I was doing. I am reminded of those studies where they give spiders drugs and watch how they spin their webs. Not a good scene. (My knitting looks most like the caffeine web. Maybe I should worry?)

THEN, my cat, in another attempt to protest the idea of a baby in her house, has taken to CHEWING ON MY YARN. She slurps it up like spaghetti if you let her. Not good for the cat or the yarn. I'd broken her of this years ago, when I first got her (after she chewed through the yarn on a Dale of Norway sweater and ate about a foot of it), but apparently you bring a baby into the house, and all bets are off with the incumbent cat. I'm buying more of the yarn keeper thingies but they will do nothing to protect the two feet of yarn between the keeper and the knitting. We shall see what happens. Squirt guns are also a possibility.

So far as I can tell, this is the only up side to the whole baby thing:

All right, it's gratuitous cuteness, but damn, look at that smile!