Family, A Great Find, and Other Important Stuff

On Monday, which was Bruce’s only day off this week (he is “retired”, heading up The Tinkering Garage at The Leonardo Museum in Salt Lake City “for fun”), we had a visit from Bruce`s daughter Emily, her DH Chad (who is between Special Agent training courses in the USAF) and our sweet grandkids.  We were really looking forward to seeing them, especially our sweeties Deacon (age 5 1/2), Abbie (almost 4) and Gunner, 7 months.

Deacon plucks the uke

One of the fun things we try to do with the grandkids when they visit is to have a Jam Session, where all of us on our varying instruments play and sing together some of our favorite songs like “Old MacDonald Had a Farm”, “You are My Sunshine”, and other standards.  The kids love to pick silly animals for Old MacDonald`s Farm (like kangaroos and giraffes) and we have to all figure out what they say.  

Watch out Jethro Tull - here is Abbie on the flute!

Anyway, for Jam Sessions, Bruce whips out his ukelele, and we drag out our stash of instruments, which include another (toy) uke, a flute (bought that for $3 in the Bahamas, so you an imagine how *ahem* “fine” it is), maracas, harmonicas, a Fisher-Price xylophone, our drum (old oatmeal carton), etc.    Wow, were we ever wailin’ on Monday!  ;-) 

Gunner on maracas (and bumblebee toy)

The most AMAZING thing happened while they were visiting us that afternoon.  We were having our annual chimney cleaning done, and can you guess what the chimney cleaners found in our chimney? A torn piece of sooty red fabric that had been in the chimney since, oh, probably last Christmas!  We adults were trying to figure out what it was and how it got there. But Deacon and Abbie figured it out first (wink) and excitedly told us adults that it came from Santa`s outfit!!  Oh my!  You can just imagine what a thrilling event this was! Deacon and Abbie wanted their picture taken with it.  We gave it to them so Deacon could take it to Show and Tell at Kindergarten the next day.  I tell you, the fun never ends around here!  

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A month or two ago I did some Angel work (substitute stitching) for a Crazy Quilting International round robin.  The block was mostly done (and nicely so), but I was the last person to work on it and tried to tie things together and fill in the blanks.  My humble contributions included the leaves to the large flower (upper right) that was already there, seam stitching in upper left, adding some flowers to the arrangement above the heart and the ribbon topiary and swirly stitching on the left.

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Well, I guess I have no shame.  This post has been full of gratuitous pictures of Cute Kids  and Lovely Stitching.  What am I missing? Oh!  Baby Animals, of course.  ;-)

So, without further ado, here are a couple snapshots of my sweet little troublemakers, kittens, Alfie and Darla.  Alfie’s picture was snapped a week before the one of Darla, and he is noticeably smaller.  They are growing up too fast!!

Alfie “recharging"

Darla - “I’m too Sexy for my Fur"

Yep, they’re really dignified, aren’t they?

Until next time,