Christmas has been grand but it is time to move on...

Having the grandchildren around for the holidays meant baby-proofing the house which meant taking down my sewing station in the dining room. But, sadly, my son and daughter-in-law are taking the darlings back to the West coast today on an evening flight ... one more worry in this increasingly dangerous world. My husband is driving them to the airport four hours early to make sure they can get through the more rigorous security. I find myself grateful for the increased security but I don't envy Sean and Christina having to keep a two year old and a six month old happy during the four hours in the airport and another five and a half hours on the plane. I don't imagine they'll want to fly home very often over the next few years. It'll be easier for us to travel to them.

It has been a wonderful visit, though. I got to spend quality time with Liam while I babysat. He cuddled into me as we read several books before his nap, we played with his father's old Brio train set [which I will now pack up and send West] and we watched some of the old 1980s and 1990s Disney movies on VHS. I saved some of my children's things against the time I would have grandchildren and it is paying off: I am a fun grandma with lots of interesting "stuff" at my house. Next year, I'll bring out the wicker rocking horse ... and I'll be a real hero. Like her brother, Piper is a darling, smiling and very personable, always engaging the adults around her with her skilled flirting ... and I swear she is brilliant. While she is obviously not talking yet she vocalizes very prettily and I do believe she has an extensive "understood" vocabulary. She was sitting on the couch playing with a small stuffed giraffe and I made the typical goofy adult comment, "oh, you have a giraffe!" She looked straight at me, smiled and lifted the giraffe toward me. My husband says "coincidence" but I say "intelligence"!!!

Well, tomorrow morning I'll set up my sewing station up again so that I can finish work on the eight pillows I have in various stages of finishing. In order to control the mess, I will only bring down what I need for the pillow work. Once I am done with that, I'll bring down just what I need to finish my partially asssembled totes. By the time I return to work on January 4, I should have a substantially reduced "finishing" basket. I hope to have caught up with all my finishing by the end of February at which time I will re-christen the finishing basket as the UFO basket. One of my goals for 2010 is to gather, inventory and prioritize my UFOs and then systematically work on finishing them.

But, in the meantime, I shall just continue to focus on my Autumn Faerie today ... I am working on the border at present, since I really need to see more actual progress. Working on the wing as I have been is such slow work since I have to change needles every dozen or so stitches ... it'll be exquisitely detailed when finished, to be sure, but I am ready to move on to something a little less exacting. Switching to the border yields some immediate gratification: stitching long stretches of a single color or blend in simple rows or regularly repeated motifs covers so much more ground so much more quickly that I feel like I am really accomplishing something.