{pretty, happy, funny, real} The Books and Curses Edition

{pretty}

We've had some glorious sunshiny days this week.  After weeks and weeks of cold, gloomy, rain we've just been basking in this wonderful weather.  The children had been losing.their.minds being cooped up inside for so long.  And when the children lose their minds, they usually take mom down with them.  It's good to be outside again.

{happy}

This past weekend I really needed a break so Chris took the kids while I went to my favorite used book store armed with my Ambleside Online master book list.  I did pretty well staying focused on hunting down next year's books though I might have got a little sidetracked here and there.  The beauty of using the AO curriculum is that a lot of the books I want to read are on the list for the later years anyway, so I'm not splurging, I'm planning ahead.

During this trip I realized that I am a total sucker for these older bird and animal books.  They all have such beautiful illustrations and these two also have photographs of the animals, as well as bits of literature and poetry references and interesting stories about the different creatures.  One even gives the pros and cons of keeping skunks and racoons as pets although I think we'll pass on that.  

I spent three hours wandering around and nobody yelled at me or asked me how much longer it was going to take,  Not once.  A happy day indeed.

{funny}

I think I'm on my way to mastering fried chicken, which is good because I'm pretty much craving it all the time.  Up until recently making fried chicken seemed like something that was just too complicated to even attempt, something only an expert should try to accomplish--you know like a KFC employee.  And like most things I've found in this homemaking gig, it was not nearly as complicated as I was imagining.  I've tried a couple of recipes and finally found a winner--I'm thinking of making it our staple Sunday dinner for the foreseeable future.  There's no such thing as too much fried chicken, am I right?  

{real}

I'm calling this process quilting, since I've been more concerned with the therapeutic effect of hand piecing this together and less with the final product, which I admit I haven't given much thought to.  I mostly just gathered up all the scraps from John's quilt plus some new coordinating scraps and started sewing.  I might regret this later, but for now it's really relaxing to just sew them together by hand in the evenings and still be able to converse with my husband without being stuck to my sewing machine and all the noise that entails.  Plus, I'm much better at lining up my seams by hand than with a machine--so that's satisfying.

John is very excited about this quilt for his baby brother and is always pointing out which fabrics he has in his quilt too.  It's pretty adorable.  He says the baby is going to be his friend, not Margaret's, because he'll be a boy.  I suppose we'll see.  About the friendship part that is.

He's definitely a boy.

I'm hesitant to even post this because the past two of these link ups I've participated in have resulted in the immediate destruction of at least one of the things I pictured.  Literally within hours of posting each time a favorite lamp and then the washing machine went down.  The washing machine will be saved but the lamp was beyond repair.  If something tragic happens to this quilt I might be officially convinced of the pretty, happy, funny, real curse and never link up again.

Let's hope it doesn't come to that.



As always, pop over to Like Mother, Like Daughter to find some more captured contentment and hopefully less curses.