Many posts ago, in a different life, I wrote about why I don’t like knitting in the round. Most of what I wrote there is still true; I love seaming, most circular needles bug the crap out of me, and stockinette stitch worked in the round is enough to drive a guy insane.

What I’ve realized now that little Mr. S and Miss M are here is that insanity is relative, and something that drove you crazy at one point might be just the thing to cure what’s flipping your cookies right now.  After the first three sleepless weeks, I had such a craving for a mindless knitting project that, as per my last post, I voluntarily decided to rework Yankee Knitter Designs’ rollneck raglan to be worked in the round.  More than anything else, this was a sign that I was no longer myself.

This other self had a pretty good idea, though. Knitting in the round might be terminally uninteresting, but it is freaking fast. I knit the body of the sweater, from hem to armholes, inside of a week. Sleeve number one was finished in two days. What you see here of sleeve number two was accomplished within twelve hours.  And all of this happened between feedings, diaper changings, soothings, and pretending to sleep.

This is no special skill on my part; I attribute all of it to the speed of working in the round. When I started this sweater, I didn’t think I’d manage to finish it before the end of my paternity leave in February. Now I’m nearly positive that I’ll be wearing it on my first day back to work.

My little twins are two months old now. They’ve turned that magical corner into the place where they actually sleep for more than two hours a stretch at night. When I wake up in the morning, I’m actually waking up——not just noticing that the sun has, in fact, come up. Little Miss M smiled at me the other day, and Mr. S did the same a few days later. It won’t be long before my brain works well enough to do something like, oh, knit a sweater with cables, or color work, or something that actually requires a modicum of attention. When that happens, Mr. S and Miss M. are in for some dangerously cute sweaters.

So I had this grand plan a little while ago to make a bit of a comeback here.  I was well on the way, with a bunch of proto-posts logged in my drafts folder.  All of that was based on Z’s due date, which was in the middle of December.  Well, surprise surprise, twins tend to come a little bit early.  Little Miss M and little Mister S were born in the middle of November.  So, as you can imagine, Z and I have been a little bit busy.

But not too busy to knit!  I mean, “knit”.  Our knitting habits have been modified right along with our sleeping habits.  Z’s approach has been to knit small projects with big yarn on wide needles.  She’s whipped out more cowls and hats in the last two months than in our entire marriage.  As for me, I ended my long-standing moratorium on the roll-neck raglan, which used to be my most-requested sweater.  This time I’m knitting it in the round, in one piece, from the bottom up.  These means that it doesn’t matter when I start or stop working on it.  When the planets align long enough to put both little S and little M to sleep at the same time, I can bang out a few rounds without having to tend to the neurosis that requires me to stop at the end of a row.  With only knit stitches to work, it means that I don’t have to pay very much attention, which is in short supply these days thanks to sleep deprivation.  It also means that, by then end of my paternity leave, I might actually have a nice new sweater.

That said, I did manage to finish Miss M’s first sweater during the first month of her life, which you see in the picture above.  Still a little big on her, but I’m sure it’ll fit in about, oh, five minutes.  By the way, if that sweater looks as cute to you as it does to me, you can buy the pattern at my Ravelry Store.