Baby Bailey Beretta

Daniel's sister had a baby girl a few weeks ago. I made this snowflake quilt for little Miss Bailey Beretta Woertz.  She is a beautiful baby (she has gorgeous parents!) and I had a fun time working on this quilt. 

It was a bit out of my comfort zone with the quilt not being symmetrical, so I wasn't loving it at first.  But after I had it quilted, bound and washed, I spent an afternoon cuddling with it and I fell in love with it. Sometimes I have a hard time parting with the quilts that I make. When I pulled the quilt out of the dryer, I was tempted to hurry and wrap it up and ship it out to Florida, but I'm glad that I let it live with me for the weekend, because I got to appreciate the quilt!  (I get really nervous when I ship a quilt out.  I am so afraid of it getting lost in the mail.  I can track the package, but even if it got lost, I'd never be able to replace it, so I'm always a bit nervous until I hear that it has made its way to the new home!)

The quilt has a lot of pink in it, but I told Julia that it wasn't diva pink or princess pink, but it was 'self-rescuing princess' pink. 



quilt front

quilt back

Owlflers

 

Jane has been excited to find lots of 'owflers' in our yard.  If you have never heard of owflers, perhaps a picture of some should help:



 

We planted a bunch of bulbs last fall and I have been overjoyed at the beautiful display of colors in our gardens!

She loves to bring them to me, so we have had to have a talk about leaving the pretty flowers alone and not hurting them. I'm sure that it is confusing to her that I don't have a problem with her bringing dandelions to me!  I remember that when Mark and Paul would bring me dandelion bouquets that I was humored, but didn't appreciate it.  I've grown up as a parent and I realize now that they are sharing their discoveries with me and I absolutely love receiving dandelion bouquets! They are precious and I am honored to receive them! 

 

Jane mixes up some of her words, like saying owfler instead of flower.  I love this stage of language development!  We have many words from the boys that have stuck in like bilbow for elbow, uscusting for disgusting, flavorit for favorite, froggy for foggy, and frip frops for flip flops.  Jane has two words that are quite different that she says the same.  For both cinnamon and medicine, she says "menicin".  It used to perplex me as to why she was requesting medicine on her toast, but I've got it figured out now!   

 

Jane is growing up so fast!  She will be 3 next month and I'm I a bit of shock that she is getting so old!  

 

She is all girl, that is for sure!  When I told her to go and get ready to go shopping, she went and grabbed her necklace, sunglasses and purse!  She loves to play in the shoe section at the store!  I have found myself navigating around the shoe sections so that she doesn't see them.  I absolutely hate buying shoes, so it amazes me that she finds shoes to be so interesting! 

 

 

 She has entered the 'Princess Stage'  I have some dress-up clothes from my friend and Jane loves to wear them!  I've had to hide them so that she will wear something more than Pink Princess or Purple Princess. 

 It actually bugs me that she likes princess stuff.  I am not a princess fan.  I don't do Disney Princess.  Just because I don't do Disney princess doesn't mean that she can't, but it does mean that I will not be decorating her room with it!  She has watched the Tinkerbell movies, but none of the other Princess movies.  Her version of princess isn't the Disney, it is more from some of the Japanimation movies that we watch.  Most of those princess stories have the "self-rescuing princess" attitude that I like! She really just likes dressing up and having fun, so I'm learning to let it roll!

 

 

 Jane and Seth are great friends.  Seth is a very tolerant big brother.  He lets her play in her room and borrow his stuffed animals.  The other night she wanted him to read a book to her at bedtime.  Seriously, it doesn't get much sweeter than watching the two of them snuggle up and read together. 

 

 

 

 

A Few Weeks

I know that I haven't blogged for a while.  I thought to myself that it had been a few weeks, but when I got around to checking out the facts, it has been nearly 2 months.  WHAT?  Where has the time gone?  I have a few 'valid' excuses, (like I got a new computer, I was sick, I've been working on other projects, I was feeling blah...) but they are all just excuses and really lousy ones at that. 

I knew that I wanted to write about my eye surgery, as I had the procedure done one year ago this week, so here we go!  Finally a blog post for the month of April. 

The first three months after I had the PRK done, I was really upset that I had elected to have a procedure done that made my eyesight worse, but it is much, much better now! My eyes just took a long time to heal and my vision was really cloudy until the skin completely healed.   My left eye is 20/15 and my right eye is 20/25, so my combined eyesight is 20/20! 

I have loved going swimming and not having to wear glasses.  I have loved waking up in the middle of the night and not putting glasses on to go check on the baby.  I have loved walking into the house during the winter and not dealing with my glasses fogging up.  Every time I open the oven door I am grateful to not have to back away so that my glasses won't fog. I'm not sure about how much I like having a clear view of things in the shower, though!  I love that I can rest my head on Daniel's chest without removing my glasses.  Overall I am very happy with my results! 

It took about 7 or 8 months before I stopped reaching for my glasses on my nightstand as the first thing I did in the morning.  

At night I would lay in my bed and look at this painting that we have on our bedroom wall.  Before the procedure, I tried to simulate what my vision was like.  It was difficult to do, and I wasn't able to get a true representation because the blur feature doesn't blur things like my eyes did- (the whole 2D vs 3D thing I believe) but this is a close approximation of what the painting looked like to me when I wasn't wearing my glasses.  (My vision was approximately 20/800)

Before



After

I was always amazed that the pendants would disappear when I took my glasses off! 

 

As much as I wished that I had done the procedure earlier, I am glad that I waited until I was done having children.  Pregnancy hormones always changed my vision quite a bit and I really didn't want to mess things up.  My doctor kind of teased me for waiting so long, but he agreed with me whole heartedly when I told him about my pregnancy vision. 

 

So, three cheers for PRK!  (But if you have the option to do Lasik, I'd totally go that route as the healing time is much faster!)