A flaw in my plan.

So Christmas 2012 is going fairly well. Or so I thought. The pattern I'm using for Lauren's gift is totally killing me. I've cast on that darned thing about eight times and it just never works out. So I decided to design a little something and then I remembered that I have never had a self-designed project turn out properly. Sure, I've altered patterns to include a stitch I like or make it a bit more fitted or a bit more loose, but every time I try to start from scratch bad things happen. Just ask the Harry Potter quilt I designed. It's about ten squares of different sizes hidden in the back of my closet. Bad news bears I tell you.
My dad's socks, on the other hand, are going swimmingly.

With just one teeny tiny little problem. I'm knitting these for Christmas and I just remembered that my dad's birthday is in April. I forget that there are reasons to knit outside of Christmas, things like birthdays and mothers day and step-fathers day (that's a little one we invented as kids for my awesome step-dad Don). In fact, my older sister just bought her first house and I wanted to knit her a house warming afghan.
I must say that once I realized there was all this knitting to be done, I may have had a little panic attack. You non-knitters laugh but let me share something with you: knitting is love. When gift giving holidays come around, us Knitters have a field day. We know that we're going to spend hours on our gift for you. Picking out the right pattern, with the perfect yarn in the perfect color. Then we're going to spend a lot more hours actually knitting this thing we have spent hours planning to knit. We will rip it back a thousand times just to get that one row right, we will scour the internet all night to find the cast-off method that will work best with what we've made. We will pull our hair out, scream at the top of our lungs, and knock back six cups of coffee on Christmas eve, just so that your gift is done on time. And then when we finally give it to you, and you unwrap it and say: "Oh my goodness, this is great! Thank you so much." We will reply with: "Of course, it was nothing." because we love you so much that spending $40.00 on yarn and 20 hours and 30,000 stitches to bring this pair of socks to you, all that is nothing compared to how much we love you.
So I had my little panic attack... and then I cast on Lauren's gift again. Because that my friends is what it's all about. My dad's socks are now his birthday socks and I'll just have to show my love in a different form of wool come December.