Knitting In and Out of Trouble

My wife and I have been thinking about a craft that we could do together for the holidays. My first suggestion was to make construction paper snowflakes, but apparently she wanted something more challenging. Can you believe that? I think cutting intricate patterns with safety scissors would be plenty difficult! It wasn’t to be however and we ended up going with learning how to knit.

Kristy knitting my scarf!

Pretty much Kristy went to Micheals last Friday and picked up a starter kit and apparently knitted 2/3 of the day! When I got home she showed me what she had done and I was impressed. She had just done some practice squares but I still thought it was cool :). She showed me how to start so that I could start XPing my “knitting profession” right away (WoW people know what I mean). I picked up casting on pretty quickly but it wasn’t until I watched a video at Knitting Help that I really got down the right approach to knitting. Now I am going strong and knitting a scarf from some really nice brown/red/orange yarn. Though some how I went from starting with 20 stitches, up to 24?! but I’ve gotten myself back down to 22 which I will probably stay at. You can see the increase along the edge of the scarf unfortunately, but it is for my wife and she said its ok that its not perfect. This is funny though since she expects the scarf she is making for me to be perfect, but hopefully she believes my assurances that I will like it no matter what; that the fact that it is handmade by her, for me is the big thing that matters :). I can almost hear the “audience” go “Awwww” :). Well don’t get your hopes up that the weekend was all knitting fun.

Kristy and I had a decent sized argument on Saturday, which for me always sucks because I hate arguing, with a passion. But this is compounded by the fact that most of the time when our arguments are over, I am still fuming about it and the anger just kinda sits with me for a while. As you can imagine this doesn’t help my wife feel any better :/ and can even lead to more arguments. >< Fortunately, the anger goes away eventually (typically after a day but sometimes faster like this weekend ), but when I think about it, it is frustrating to me that my wife and I, who love each other deeply, can become mortal enemies so quickly (I probably see her that way more than the reverse, but you would have to ask her ). I know the saying is that “you hurt the ones you love”, but I was never expecting the kind of hurt I feel, nor the amount of hurt I want to dish out, when we said “I do” nearly three years ago. I know I am making it sound bad, and it feels that way in the heat of the moment, but it has gotten better. Especially if you could see the progress my wife has made, you would be amazed, but if she is the star student, I feel like the class drop out who is struggling with his marriage GED. It is sad to think about, but the one thing I have progressed on is trusting more in God that whatever argument Kristy and I are in, He will pull us through and out of it. For the first year plus I was pretty oblivious to this, but one good thing about having a long run of fights under your belt is that it becomes possible to realize that the fight will be over eventually, and things will return to normal (I like to tell Kristy, “We will get through this, we always do”). This clarity still doesn’t shield me from being hurt or staying hurt and angry, but it does give me hope that I won’t be hurting forever.

And of course I am not hurting, a little sick but only physically. We made up in a great way and are back to enjoying the fact that we are knitting one anothers scarfes, which I will try to post pictures of tonight (unless of course you see them in the post, in which case I already did post them ).

The ninja mask, I mean scarf, I am making for my wife :)