Saturday

The sun is shining now, but this morning it snowed!  It's a week until March, but I think weather-wise, it's already here.  

So what have I been up to?  Lots of knitting.  I made two lace scarves for friends.  One was a birthday gift for the secretary at the school where I taught, and the other is for a long-time friend who had to retire from teaching for health reasons just when I began and gave me boxes and boxes of much appreciated teacher supplies.  I used this pattern again, making one in silver and the other in light purple.  I love that pattern!  I also finished a pair of socks.

In the sewing room I've been slowly working on a winter quilt using the Through the Winter Woods fabric.  I love how it's looking and Dan really likes it, too.  I need to add the borders and it will be ready to quilt.

My lovely "design wall" is a picnic table cloth pinned up with the flannel side out  It works perfectly and just fits the space.  It sure came in handy for this quilt because I needed to put all the pieces in place before stitching any of the blocks to be certain I had a nice spread of the colors before getting to the last block and discovering I only had one color of strips left.  The bars on my Handi-Quilter cover up the lower left side in case you wonder what you're seeing there.  :-)

And now I'm off to sit by the fire in the basement and do some more knitting.  It's a simple scarf using some leftover yarn.  Perfect for TV watching or just a lazy day project.

Happy Saturday!  ♥

Life Moves On

Life is interesting.  Most of the time, things are good and we meander along, paying scant attention to our own well-being and happiness.  But then, sometimes, we are abruptly reminded of how precious it is to be loved and healthy.  Our daughter, Ann, has been mentoring (or as we call it at our church, discipling) a young mom for the last year or so.  Dayna was living in Europe with her husband and baby when her marriage went horribly bad and she, through an amazing series of events, was able to get back to the states and settle back in our little town.  

Over the past few months, she's felt increasingly unwell, plagued with headaches.  After seeing several doctors she was diagnosed with first, a sinus infection, and second, migraines.  But still, even with antibiotics and migraine drugs, she was feeling worse and worse. Finally, two weeks ago today, she called Ann and said she couldn't take it any more and would Ann come and take her to the ER.  I was called in to watch the D-man and so the day began.  There was frustration at every stop.  From a dentist office (Wisdom teeth impacted? No.), to the local ER, to the local quick care, to, finally, the ER in an neighboring town.  Where they performed a CT scan to find a brain tumor.  So desperate was the situation that they wouldn't release her but made arrangements for her to be admitted to a regional hospital that night.  Ann and Eric drove her to a town in-between where she was transferred to the car of her brother and by noon the following day she was in surgery.  They said if she hadn't had that surgery she would have been brain dead in two weeks.  That's today, folks.

The rest of the news is that it's bad news.  A stage 4 malignant tumor.  This is a twenty-eight-year-old mama of a little blond two-year-old.  They are headed to Seattle to see about treatment options, which appear to be limited.  We are praying for peace and for healing. Sometimes it's difficult to understand why things happen, but we, like Dayna, know that God is with her.  

And so, for the rest of us, it's a reminder that life is precious, not to be taken for granted.  Health, the love of family, and home are gifts that we need to be thankful for.  Every. Single. Day.