Much like my mother, I am so busy working I have no idea what day it is or how much time has passed. Really? That long? I honestly and literally have my calendar in front of me to jot down notes of what I did since last we met.

Quilt show – our local guild had their biannual quilt show (yes, every other year) at Carleton House, and I did a volunteer stint on Friday night at the door. I entered two old quilts I have, one of my own, and one of Meaghan’s that she did. Had a great time, lots of running around. My face was still a teeny bit swollen but I did okay. They even had a marketplace where I had a few things for sale and made over twenty bucks, which immediately went to a package of quilt batt.

Can’t remember what we did for mother’s day – Oh wait! Now I remember. Went to Florenceville for Chinese food, only to get there and see a sign that said if you wanted the buffet, you can sit down, anything else was takeout. So we got takeout and waited, planning to sit next to the river. Got all settled and… no forks. Drove home.

It was really good chinese food though. Took me 3 days to eat mine. (Ron and I always get the same stuff: some combo of rice, chicken balls & chow mein. If they serve an eggroll, I take his.)

Sarah came up for the next weekend, and we had just finished moving Emma into her new room. Which used to be Sarah’s. So Sarah got to be a guest, poor kid. Ron wasn’t feeling good, so I drove Sarah home & visited Izzy. We wore each other out. I had made her a wall hanging that says “I love you,” and when I put it on the floor in front of her, she body slammed it and rubbed her face in it. I think she liked it.

Another trip to the dentist for a cavity filled, on a tooth where the previous silver filling was bugging the crap out of me. I amused myself by tweeting from the chair. The dentist threatened jokingly to use my phone to tweet a pic of me with my mouth all suited up.

Went to a yard sale, got a load of books, some skates and a homeschooling starter book for Izzy’s parents.

Sewed some more. Tried out one of the shop demos of the fancy schmancy sewing machine / quilting/ embroidery / makes coffee / so pricey you drive it home kind of deal and loved it. Gulped at the price tag. Died a little inside when she said it was 49% off. Still freaking expensive.

One of the tops I made, someone is paying me to finish up and send off to a mutual friend who is having a baby. I’m really pleased with how it’s turning out. There is a few spots I did on my regular machine I wasn’t as pleased with, but in the end won’t matter much. Just me being picky.

Meaghan went to visit Sarah for the weekend, now that Sarah has a 9-5 job for the summer and has a life on weekends. It’s funny when your quiet kid isn’t home how quiet it gets. When Sarah is here, it’s like 2 or 3 extra people. When Meaghan is not here, the three of us rattle around this big old house and lose each other.

Also? I wander into the kitchen and things are just as I left them. Even the dirty dishes. It’s weird.

She’s making plans to go away more often, so I guess we’d better get used to it. When we picked her up that time, we went to play with Izzy again and got her to say Nana. But she wouldn’t say it again and she didn’t get it meant me. Yet. We’ll wear her down.

Did I mention she’s the smartest cutest baby ever? No? Well, it must be a given then.

I’ve been starting to clean out more crap we own and just let go of a bunch of it. Anything I’m not sure will be able to be resold will just be donated. No point in trying to squeeze a couple bucks out of everything if it’s going to take me hours to do so. I have a box of scrapbooking stuff someone will buy, took 4 bags of clothes to Global to donate, then cleaned out two bags of fabric (none of it suitable for quilts).

I also got my hair cut. My bangs were in my eyes.

My friend Jo came to visit since she was in the province, and she brought Sarah with her for the day. She was impressed I put on a bra. I also conjured up supper from “nothing” as we’d kind of forgotten to get some groceries.

Grocery shopping has been weird lately. We try and get at least a week’s worth, but somehow manage to run out of enough things after 5 or 6 days to ensure we go again. Or even forget stuff so we go 3 or 4 days later. But we also put in another order at the pork place up the road and that will be ready Friday. Good, because we are mighty tired of chicken.

That’s what someone called me on twitter when I posted how much stuff I’d done in the last couple days. I can’t help it; I had to run with it.

Since last weekend with the igloo, I’ve been quilting. Not so much sewing tops, but getting over the creative hump and *quilting*.

Oh, and I painted two coats of beige on the new bedroom walls.

So, that helped – even though it was tiring – and the one quilt I was working on became drudgery, so I bagged it up and set it aside and told myself I had two small project to quilt, and it would be easier without stuff all over my table.

And it was!

Really, it’s mostly mental. I discovered a few things:

- you can make your own rules
- machine quilting freehand / free style is SUPER FUN
- perfect only counts in competitions

By own rules, I mean this – you usually do all the quilting then bind, right? On the pink baby quilt, I did all the straight quilting, then I bound it, and then? I went back and did the free-motion quilting.

WHOA.

Then on Friday I tackled the border to the blue Christmas wall hanging mom pieced for me, and I did swirls and snowflakes. I had drawn it on there with my chalk pencil, because I was inspired and thought it would look good. It did, but not near as good as when it was done!

Shelley told me the loop-de-loos I was doing both on the pink quilt and between flakes, was one of the things beginners find difficult. I thought it was easy, once you get the hang of machine quilting and the feeling of guiding your fabric through the machine counter to everything else you have ever been taught.

Then I got to thinking I should get some small projects worked on, because now my perspective isn’t fear of quilting, it’s that each quilt is practice. And my mistakes are someone else’s “you made this FOR ME???” I bought a small table topper pattern and made it while super was cooking, and a bit after supper. on Saturday I quilted it while Ron made pancakes for lunch.

I also made two runners from striped / border fabric. I’d seen the pattern at the quilt shop, thought it was super-easy, came home & looked it up online, then just… figured it out from the picture.

I also laid out another baby quilt, cut 40 white-on-white blocks to go with the 40 4″ pastel 30′s prints and stuck it on my design wall.

Then today I gathered fabric, printed off instructions, and free-pieced an airplane block. On top of that, I folded & put away about 6 loads of laundry.

The only down side to all this creativity is that it is probably a side-effect of having a stagnant boring to-do list for my work. If only I could switch. :-/ Just for a little bit.

Emma, as you may have gathered, has been obsessed with Lego and immersing herself in it pretty much daily. I get to hear about new sets arriving, what’s up with the Lego website, new characters, what awesome play value it has (no really, she used those words) and sometimes it leads to other things.

Lego animation? Check.

Lego bible stories re-enacted with Star Wars Lego.

Even her Star Wars interest is pretty much Lego based.

She’s off taking pictures again, because of this site. We had a conversation how it was okay to basically copy what the other guy was doing, because in doing so, you were not “copying”, but learning the techniques yourself.

I’m also subjected to the occasional rants:

How the brick show host mis-pronounced the name of a Clone Wars character.

How Nick Jr or YTV (one of them) had too many Lego ads plastered all over the site and did Lego know about this? It seemed overly commericalized.

How the Lego aisle at our big box grocery store is labeled “Boy’s toys”. (I had to speak to a clerk about that.)

I suppose this is par for the course, for us and our children. I’m just writing it down before I forget. And for when I forget.