A little about me

I've been enjoying having the older two in school again.  It's let me have time for me to work on a few projects and work on improving myself.  

I've been sewing a lot.

Here's a dress(actually it's more like a tunic - I must have measured wrong) for Woof-woof.

 Some of the details(that are unfortunately missed by everyone because the fabric is so busy).

 It was fun to do pin tucks for the first time.  They're not that difficult - I'll definitely do them again.

Another dress for Woof-woof. 

I've also been sewing pants for Sweetie - I'll post a picture of those next week.

 I'm also working on another (semi-secret) sewing project.  It involves a lot of these;

 and me spending a lot of time with these.  I'll post the finished project soon.

 I've been trying to learn new things(like how to make a black and white photo look good).

 I've been in a bread making mood(everyone in the house is shocked - it's been years).

 Occasionally I harvest some things from our garden. 

 This is our one and only zucchini to date.  We get about this many tomatoes per week.  

I cleaned our fridge.  I'm mostly excited about this because I finally changed things around to make it easier to get the milk in and out.  We had it on the top shelf(which was above my head).  This way is so much easier. 

 (If only the freezer hadn't died two days later.  I filled the fridge with everything from the freezer, it all melted and now I have a messy fridge again.  Ha!)

Everyday I try to look at the flowers that we planted in the Spring.  I love looking at them.  They make me happy!  I love the Cosmos(I'm not sure which I like more - orange or pink).  

 And I love all of the Zinnias we planted too.

(And I love the super-duper-cool new-to-me iPhone app I got that let me take those cool pictures.)

I've been enjoying reading through the new Daughters in My Kingdom book.  If you haven't started reading it, you should.

I've been reading a lot of other books too.  Dragon Slippers, In the Time of Butterflies, The Mysterious Benedict Society, A Wrinkle in Time series, Prayers for Sale, Ella Minnow Pea, and Moon over Manifest are just a few of the books that I've read in the last couple of months.  I've been pre-reading some of them for Sweetie, reading some for the book club I'm in, and just reading some for fun.  I've loved almost all of them(wasn't a huge fan of the Mysterious Benedict Society).  It's been fun to be carving out time for reading.  

I also finished the Book of Mormon: A Readers Edition.  It's a version where the author takes the text and puts it back into paragraph form.  He also add helpful footnotes and headings to help with the story a bit more.  I've found it fascinating to read the Book of Mormon this way.  There are a lot of times when a story or a long thought is interrupted by a chapter break in our current version.  In making the chapters a little less obvious I found the whole story to be really interesting.  For example: Jacob 5 has the lovely telling of the allegory of the olive tree.  If you're like me, you may have missed that the last half of chapter 4 is explaining why he's telling the allegory.  For so many years I have compartmentalized the chapters that reading this version helped me see that sometimes I was missing the bigger picture.  I'm not giving up my official scriptures for this edition, but I know that I'll enjoy reading it occasionally to help me remember to look at the big picture.  And I'm going to get a copy of the original version the next time I'm in Nauvoo or Palmyra to read that way.  I'm intrigued to see what I learn from that version.

In short, life is good.  I'm learning new things all of the time.  I'm enjoying it here in Chicago(although don't let me think about the cold winter that's coming...).  I love the school that the kids go to.  I love our ward - the people make me happy.  I love the fun things that I'm doing with the kids.  I love that I have family and friends all over the place that I can call and chat with.

Life is good.

Now go out and make it good too!