A Baby Stitcher (Literally), Progress, A New Start & The Hospital

So... It's been a while, huh? I'll get to the reason at the end of this post. For now, the fun stuff. Leah has been determined to stitch so I finally grabbed some extra DMC, and some Aida I inherited that I know I'll never use and let her go to town. Here are the results. She got tired of it after about 5 minutes, but it was adorable to watch her fierce concentration. :)

Here is the progress on the Wheels Announcement... I've decided to take a little (a week?) break from this. I've been working on it faithfully as much as I can, and can't wait to bless my friend with it... but I am facing burnout with it. This pattern is totally not my style, and I never would have chosen it to stitch (It's a good thing Amy chose it b/c if I had chosen for her I would have been waaaay off base in my pattern selection) so it has really been feeling more like work than anything.

A friend of mine took Leah to a birthday party featuring ponies (my child is horse obsessed and has been since she was teeny) on Saturday, so I got a couple hours of free time. I decided to reward my hard work on Wheels with a pattern I've been dying to start for a while now:

The kit shows these finished as pin cushions, but I'm going to get them framed instead... they'll go really well in the master bedroom. So I got a few hours in yesterday and about an hour in today, and here's where I am with it:

One thing... these are done on 40 ct... Holey Moley!!! Tanya, you're my hero!!! I think I might actually go blind by the time I am done with these! :) I can't imagine working 40 ct. exclusively... my eyes are horrible w/o my contacts, but are corrected to 20/20 when they're in. My eyes actually crossed trying to adjust to seeing the tiny holes, lol!

I am going to work on this first one (the ladies) this week, and on Saturday when I get to crash my dad's place for a full day of mommy/ stitching time. After that I'll start a regular rotation of 2 sessions on Wheels, followed by 1 session on Mrs. Abbott.

So... where've I been... well, my mother in law ended up in the hospital the day after my last post with a perforated ulcer. It was definitely touch and go for a while. They actually had to go in and do "do-over" surgery last Monday. My husband has been at the hospital as much as possible throughout, we've had family coming in and out of town to see mom, and I've been trying to see her as much as I can while also attempting to maintain a relatively normal existence for Leah. We are all cautiously hopeful at this point that mom will eventually recover, but we certainly don't expect her to be back to pre-incident levels at any time in the near future.

On a hospital tangent... I have to say, for a highly rated hospital, I have not been particularly impressed by Fairfax Inova. Leah had a procedure done there last fall and everyone was great, but this experience... communication has been horrible, and while the Dr's have been very nice... I don't know, blah blah blah. I just expected a bit more communication, and a bit more of the doctors in terms of some tests she appears to need, tests that still haven't been read (sonogram on the heart a week ago, and still no results?? Hello???!!)... We'll see.

Well, thanks for stopping by! I hope you've had a great weekend!!