Great Expectations

Look who is four years old!  She's waited most impatiently for four.  It was a magic number for her. The day of her party finally arrived with sunshine, blue skies and great expectations.

 Adelaide is very proud of this stunt.  I'm not surprised.  She is half mountain goat. Big sister Elizabeth thinks she's crazy to try such things.

All of the cousins were there and the backyard looked like a bee hive with little ones running around flying glider airplanes, swinging, sliding backwards down sliders,  sandbox treasure hunting, kicking balls, eating grass (Michael).

Happy Birthday, Adelaide!

Sometimes

Sometimes when I read blogs I can forget I am reading about real people instead of just the beautiful quilts or the luscious looking recipe on the page.  We ( I ) scroll down looking through patterns and quilts and read a recipe and then either comment like everyone else does about how nice or yummy the post looked.  The comments are not all that different or personal from each other and so we ( I ) can sometimes forget someone real posted the piece.  Someone who fights traffic to go to work every day or struggles with a teenager or whose car broke down or is sick or .... whatever. 
Sometimes we  ( I ) forget there is a lot of background noise in each other's lives because what we put out on these blog posts is usually something cheerful so we ( I ) forget there are layers to our lives.

This is a personal posting.  I thought about whether to do this, but I am doing it so you know I'm a real person with layers and issues.   And so is she.....

This is my mom.  She died today.

change of season

We went to one of Charlie's soccer games yesterday.  It was one of those perfect fall days that just begged you to go out into it. 

Ceci is such a happy little girl.  She managed to get Grandpa to share a book with her. It wasn't a hard sell as far as Grandpa was concerned.

 Michael is losing his black hair, he's  now 7 1/2 months old!  Crawls like he's in a race to the finish. But being number three, if he wants to do what the big kids are doing he has to keep up!

 Charlie is better now that his broken arm has healed.  You can see it didn't keep him down for long, though he thought 6 weeks healing time was ridiculous.

 My projects pile up.  There are four on this table.  Five if you count what's waiting on a chair ... no, six!  The stocking is for Michael, the trees are for retreat gifties, the small strip squares are waiting for a friend to come today to show me how to quilt as you go...they are scrap squares for learning on. The circle is a project in the planning.  On the chair are some pillow cases for the kids and the red on the far left is my red quilt from previous posts layered, pinned, bagged and waiting for retreat weekend.   I need to get my act together! 

    I titled this post 'change of season' because there is a distinct chill in the air...especially since the nights are getting really cold.  As in frost advisories.  Well,  I kind of have a pattern of not turning the heat on till October 1  and turning it off May 1.  We can always put a sweater on, though there are days when I should bend that rule a bit.  Like Friday, when Patient Husband used the turned off but still warm oven to warm his hands.  He stood there complaining he was freezing so he opened the door and rubbed his hands together over the residual heat from the cookies I just finished baking.  But look!  He is in his bare feet on a tile floor...of COURSE he was cold!!

 

Day 4

...of retirement, that is.  I've kind of been saying to myself,  "oh, yeah....that's right....!!"

One of my "ok, you have the time now" tasks is to get a handle on the projects I need to be working on, starting or finishing.

  This one was my first priority.  I wanted to get it finished and  layered so I can take it to quilt retreat in October and spend the four days working on quilting it.

The clothesline was full of shirts this morning so I found a low branch and pinned it to that.  Turned out nice, don't you think?  It's been YEARS in the making.  When you put a project down you do have to remember to pick it up again.  If I liked it enough to begin it, then I must like it enough to finish it.