Happy Easter

Wishing you and your family a wonderful, peaceful Easter.

 May you find joy and happiness in whatever you are doing and whomever you are around.

 



2013

I think this picture kind of sums up this year. I cannot believe that much of the first six months of this year I was still in active treatment, chemo and radiation. Events that filled almost every day, that my daily life revolved around, that consumed so many minutes to give me so much more time - dates, times, actions, results, appointments - now seem so far away. While this nasty nasty beast still unfortunately inhabits a too-large place in my mind, it has been evicted from the front room. Now it resides in more of a hall closet. It will eventually move to the backyard and then the next block, town, county, state and country, maybe eventually planet, but for now, this is progress.

 

My baby potty trained, started expounding in paragraphs of conversation, and started preschool this year - my baby baby started walking, running and semi-talking.

 

The next year I am certain will bring greater joys, accomplishments, opportunities. My husband and I, after the past two years, are more intent than ever on setting some serious and much anticipated changes in motion. Life waits for no one. The holidays will be here again in the blink of an eye and we will gather again, eyes sparkling in the bevy of twinkling lights, to celebrate and look back in awe of all that 2014 has provided. 

Happy 4th!

It's been awhile. We took a short trip up to the mountains last week and that was both great and not relaxing at all, as no vacation with an infant and a three year old will ever be.
It started out like this.....which was supposed to last two hours...it lasted 30 minutes. Oh well.


Got a cabin with some games and a foosball table in it thinking that would be great to entertain Jack. Well, it worked a little too well - he never wanted to go outside!

 Finally got him out and about although he wouldn't put his feet in the lake. I'll make an adventurer out of him yet! (although he did see his first deer while we were on an off-road trail going to find some godforsaken giant pine)

 Last time I saw a Dishmaster was about 30 years ago so I had to memorialize that. And the cute one in the sink.

 A happy 4th of July to you all from the little one, celebrating her first.

Now we are off to hunker down as people shoot of M-80s in our neighborhood allllllll night long. Happy 4th!

 

Summer...and a wreath.

Summer is here. For most people today brings visions of sunny days, cool drinks, pool splashes, and fun in the sun. For me it means that after today the days start getting blessedly shorter again, it means that I need to hide inside during the hottest parts of the day, it means that I must endure this torturous time in order to get to the most wonderful time of the year - FALL!! I try my hardest every year to ignore summer. Heat, sun and Jamie do not mix. There were days during last year's interminable heat wave that I was actually glad I didn't have hair because I was so frickin hot. However, I do have children so I do have to put up some semblance of enthusiasm about every season and holiday. And that starts with a wreath on the door - simple yet festive. I may be hiding inside but at least the outside of my house relays the message "We have some spirit!!"

I found this tutorial earlier this year and gave it a shot for Valentine's Day. I was still doing chemo so not up for anything super complicated and this fulfilled my craft fix for a bit. Also great - I love my wooden door decorations, but I do not love them when it's windy, and we get quite a bit of wind around here. I don't have to take these down or hear knocking on the door all day and night - win win!

 What I love is that after you get the idea, you can do pretty much whatever you want with it. Use whatever color yarn you want, whatever size wreath form, whatever cutouts - it's all good!  

 

 

Start with your foam wreath form (say that a few times fast). I try to remember to use my 40% Michaels, Joann's or Hobby Lobby coupons to get them, and that keeps the cost of these wreaths really reasonable. The skein of yarn was probably $3 and this is the second wreath I've used it on. A few sheets of felt and the form, and the whole thing is about six bucks! Works for me. Anyway, grab your form, whichever size you want, hot glue a piece of yarn down to start, and start wrapping that bad boy. I used red because I have a blue door...I'd probably do blue if I had any other color door, but do whatever floats your boat or shoots your firecracker in this case. I do mine pretty tight, I wind the yarn a few times, tighten and squish it back so there is no form showing through. Takes me about 1.5 to 2.5 hours to do the whole thing depending on who's screaming or how many times I need to play with Lightning McQueen.

 

I used a cookie cutter to trace some stars out of glitter felt, because I'm sassy like that, and because Fourth of July should be glittery.

 

Take your hot glue gun, which I sincerely hope works better than mine, and glue the stars wherever you would like them to be.

The tutorial uses criss crosses on most of their wreaths and you can see I did criss crosses on the Valentine's one above, but that wreath was bigger and I thought this one was too small and too busy to support full on criss crosses, so I just did one layer around. Glue a little yarn hanger around the top...and there you have it - voila! A simple easy cheap Fourth of July wreath.

 

 

Now please excuse me while I fool myself into ignoring the next three months and dream of the fall and winter ones that I can make.