hopefully something rhetorical

Me: Caleb, what do you want for your birthday?

Caleb (our nephew who was turning 5): Oh, lots of stuff!

M: Okay, what do you want me to get you?

C:  Whatever you want!  But, nothing girly!

I love a kid that knows what they want!

Well, we made it to VA.  It has been a pretty crazy three weeks.  This is the breakdown.

• Friday before Memorial Day, we drove to the boy’s mom’s house in Indiana, where we stayed for the night.
• Saturday, we woke up and drove to Ohio for the wedding of our token Air Force buddy.  We stayed there until Tuesday.
• Tuesday, we drove to Michigan to stay with the boy’s grandparents for the night.
• Wednesday, it was back to Indiana to the boy’s mom’s.
• Friday, we went home to Kansas.
• Sunday, we had an open house, and at 6pm that evening, we left for Virginia with the great dane and three cats.  We arrived in VA at 3pm the next afternoon.
• We stayed in VA until we flew back to Kansas on Wednesday.  While we were in VA, we got an offer and sold our house.
• Friday morning, we drove to Oklahoma to see the boy’s family before we moved back to the east coast.  We got home Sunday night.
• Monday and Tuesday, we hung out at our house in Kansas for a few days while we were getting ready for the movers.
• Packers came on Wednesday and Thursday, and the movers came on Friday.
• My wife also flew in from Belgium on Thursday.  In one of those weird twists of Army-fate, she moved to Kansas (albeit Leavenworth instead of Riley) five days before we moved to VA.  It was so wonderful to get to see her and her family over the weekend, though.
• Sunday, my mother and my brother flew in to help us drive to VA.  The four of us and our boxer left in a Penske truck and my car around noon on Monday (our house closed at 1:30, so only owned it for an hour and a half when we moved), and we got here at midnight on Tuesday.  We did stop overnight this time though.  We moved 7,240 pounds of stuff ourselves.
• Thursday, my littlest brother graduated high school, so we had family and friends in town for that.
• Today is father’s day and my mother’s partner’s birthday.
• And tomorrow, the boy goes back to work for the first time in two years or so.

So, that is where I have been and what I have been up to.  So far, we are here and getting settled into VA nicely, and I think we are eager to get settled into a routine soon.  I will post pictures of our cute little summer place above my mother’s garage as soon as we get everything moved in completely.

Thanks for letting me share.   It helps to write it down, so I don’t forget!

Well, I posted this on facebook already, but I know that I have some people here that I would like to share this news with too!

We have lots of big news going on, but this is one that most of you don’t already know about. In amongst the crazy last few months getting ready for a new place to live, we have also been getting ready to welcome a new family member.

I am about 11 weeks pregnant, and I am due on New Year’s Eve. We had a sonogram on Friday to let us know that everything is okay, and so far we look pretty good. The boy and I have been trying for quite a while, so please send some happy thoughts our way that all stays delightfully normal!

I will make sure to keep everyone up-to-date on the progress in a manner to be determined. I will probably add a page on my blog to give updates!

Just wanted to drop in and let everyone know that I am, indeed, still alive.  It has been a crazy couple of weeks with weddings, lots of trips to see family, and the start of the great migration to the east coast.

We officially will land in Virginia on Tuesday of next week, so at least until then, things will remain quiet.  But, I will be back sometime soon.  Lots of fun summer plans and news to share.

Three little words that seem to be describing a lot of what I have been doing lately.  Caught up with grades.  Caught up with school stuff that is way too late.  Those are all the have-to’s.  But, I am excited to also be working on the want-to’s as well.

This week, I got caught up on the quilting bee I am a part of (see a few above).  I was wicked late getting my blocks together, but I love how the ones I have done have turned out.  Now, I am looking forward to getting caught up with my friends and loved ones as we make our great transition east!

We are sad to leave those we love behind, but we are so excited about the move.

Amy over at Park City is doing this wonderful thing for all of us that can’t travel to Quilt Market.  We are having a virtual quilt festival, and I thought that I would join in the fun.

My favorite quilt that I have ever worked on is actually not one that I made, well completely.  It is the generational quilt I posted about last summer that I made for my mother-in-law.

This was made from a quilt top pieced by my husband’s great-grandmother.  The piecing was by hand, so I decided to quilt it by hand as well.

Needless to say, it took me quite a long time to get it all done.  I loved the pattern, and it made for a really pretty back, which is warm flannel!

I love the way it came out and that I was able to add my own little touch with the binding.

The funniest part was that I really didn’t like the quilt top until I got it all quilted.  Taught me a valuable lesson about judging a quilt top before it’s finished!

So, thanks Amy for creating such a fun time to share our pretties!

Just wanted to share that I have decided to join Brené Brown in the read-along she is doing on her blog.

I just finished listening to the first podcast, and it was wonderful!

I just sat down to write this post, and I turned on Pandora, and the first song that came up was Keep Breathing by Ingrid Michaelson.  It seems like a perfect sentiment for this afternoon.

I don’t know if I have shared yet, but the boy and I are going to be moving back to Northern VA.  I am ecstatic about the chance to live near my family again…to go home.  My grandmother is getting older, my brothers are starting their grown-up lives, babies are being born, and I am feeling too far away.  All this causes the draw I feel towards home to be stronger than normal.  So, finding out about this move was wonderful!  But, as with any move, my life has to be rewritten.

Even though this is a move back to a familiar scene, I have to rewrite the day-to-day adventures.  And, it is important for me to rewrite, not just fall back into the same old roles I have already lived there. This is hard to do.  Those old roles are comfortable and safe, and they are what people expect of me.  I am also a little scared of falling back into the hectic pace of life I am finally trying to ease my way out of, particularly since it seems so clear lately that additional stress is not good for my health.  So, I decided when we found out that this was going to be a moment this year for me to think about my word.

I have been embracing this move and all the possibilities it presents.  I have a lead on a new job, and I have already sent in an application.  We have a decision as to where we will be living, at least for the short term.  And, I have an idea about what the next step in my career will be, and my application to the program is underway.

This last one has presented a little bit of a problem for me in the “embrace” department.  Part of the difficulty I have had with this word is that I am not sure what to embrace from time-to-time.  I keep questioning whether or not I am falling back into the same patterns or whether or not I am pursuing what I really want.  I have said for a number of years that I really regret not having completed my minor in college, and now, I have a chance to work on a masters in the same area.  This new degree would allow me some flexibility with teaching opportunities as well.  I could potentially teach a few classes with a lightened grading load.  It seems like the right step to embrace.

Completing the application, however, has been a test of this decision to embrace this step.  Asking for recommendations has struck a nerve that I was hoping to avoid with this familiar moment of putting myself out there.  The boy’s job makes my career difficult to navigate.  To do what I really want, I need more education than I have now, and that requires that I ask for help from others, which is something I am definitely not comfortable with.  Bottom line is I am trying to figure out if this is a moment to embrace the opportunity for quiet or if this is the time to fight for what seems natural.

For now, I think my decision will be to embrace the choices I have already made and just keep breathing my way through the process.  I think I will be listening to this more often though!  Never hurts to have a reminder.

I thought I would share the second installation of handmade Christmas.  Yes, I know Easter on Sunday.  Yes, I know that it is April, but I am slow.  This handmade gifting is still a little new for me.

So, without any further ado here are the gifts that went to the family from the midwest.

• Starting with my father-in-law’s quilt, this is truly a man quilt.  It is made with a cheater flannel for the blocks on the front, and it is bound, backed, and batted (wow, there are a lot of “b” words in quilting) with flannel.  After it was washed, it was this yummy, heavy quilt that would be perfect for a cold day.  It was hard to part with this one!  But, I did.  And, it is loved in its new home.

• The other quilt I “made” was for my brother-in-law.  I already posted about this one asking for advice.  Ultimately, I left it the way it was, and it was loved as well!  Now, I am just hoping that Sam will actually use it!
• Next, I made the my nephews crayon and colored pencil rolls.  And, as I posted before, I love these little things.  They are particularly great for little boys that want to draw.  And, mom is loving having a quick set of crayons to take to dinner.  I was most interested in the fact that the three year old put away each crayon after he used it!  That made Mom much happier with them too!

• To create a reusable gift bag for each kid, I just went to Hobby Lobby and got canvas and denim bags.  With a quick bit of fusible interfacing, I added a monogram for each child.  It was an easy way to gather up all their goodies.  And, I felt great that it wasn’t a huge tone of wrapping that just got thrown away.

• For my sister-in-law, it was a cute, cheater panel table runner.  There will be more of these in my future.  The pattern is super cute, and it was a great way to practice my stippling a little more.  (Sorry for the awful picture on this one!)

• And, finally, for my mother-in-law, I made a quick little apron to accompany her crafty gift card.  The apron is nothing overly complicated, but I really have fun doing these. It is the same pattern I used for my giveaway apron back in December.  They are just a dish cloth with a tie and some binding.  The colors on this one are pretty cool, and I was happy to be able to add a little something handmade with the rest of her gift.

So, that wraps up the midwest portion of the Handmade Christmas.  Now all that is left to show off is the stuff for my family!  I will post that soon, so I can finally get this all up and mark Christmas 2008 as actually done.

The other day, I posted about my family’s cleaning tradition.  We had always called it mumphing.

However, my mother left a comment on that post about the fact that she and my father had decided it was spelled with two “m”s.  I didn’t think much of it until today when an old family friend looked it up on urban dictionary the way I had it spelled.

Mom wins.  Two “m”s from now on!