No foolin'.........yep, it's a long post.........

That's right........no foolin', we got snow last night. It will probably have melted by the time I get up in the morning. Not the case further north where they got much more snow and blizzard conditions. All that on top of the flooding!! Yes, here in Minnesota, March definitely went out like a lion. Hopefully the waters will slowly go down and the danger of more flooding will soon pass.

So, have you been fooled yet today? I have no plans to fool anyone. I will be heading out to the post office in the morning so I will be watchful for those that might want to fool me. I am sometimes quite easy to fool which is not always a good thing. My son describes it as "mom is a little gullible". I guess that means I would have bought the Brooklyn Bridge. LOL!!

I am nearly finished with that penny rug I posted yesterday. I would be completely finished if I hadn't misplaced the thread I am using for the final border. I've looked up and down and it's just not showing up so I will try again in the morning. In my search for the thread, I did get my box of threads all organized so some good did come of misplacing it.
Speaking of misplacing things, I must now confess. I would have posted the April blocks but I have misplaced the snowlady I drew a month ago. I was going to be so organized and got the sketch finished so I could post on April 1st. Well, I have pulled so many files and papers in preparing for programs and such in recent weeks, that my sewing room is in a terrible state and I cannot find the stack that has the sketch in it. Yes, I am that messy that I have misplaced the sketch.
I think it's time for me to take a vacation. I haven't had one since a trip to San Diego in December of 2005. My trips to Iowa don't count as vacation. I'm talking about a spring getaway type trip. I imagine a warm climate. San Diego in fact, would be just right. There would be a trip to Rosie's Quilt Cupboard that would make me smile, then dinner at Casa de Pico or Casa Guadalajara in Bazaar del Mundo in Old Town San Diego. Then we could go to the beach and watch the sunset and delight in the fact that we didn't have to wear a winter coat. Sounds divine, but it's not gonna happen anytime soon.
I do need a break though, to get re-energized and bring some order to my sewing room so here's what I'm going to do............. I'm taking a break from blogging for the next five days. I'll be back on Monday. I'll have the blocks for April for you and will finally post the ornaments on my Christmas blog and will have news to add to the crazy quilting blog. Also, I mentioned earlier this week that I am going to be making some changes to my blogging and here are two............first one is that I'm going to take Sundays off from now on and not do any blogging at all. Several bloggers follow this path and I think it's a good idea. Second thing..........I had originally set the 1st Wednesday of the month for my Tea and Stitches post but last month and again this month, I want to do the tea just before the holiday in these months. So, from now on, the date will not be the first Wednesday of each month. Instead, I'll post the date for the next tea in the upper right corner of the Tea and Stitches blog. There are other changes coming, too, but that's enough for now.


Now before I take off for my Spring Break in Sewing Room, MN, I have to share the story behind the yo-yo cross you see in the picture. My mother, Mary, made it in September of 2007. My dad was in the Care Center and my mother was living in an apartment nearby. To cheer her up on her birthday, I asked as many of my quilting friends as I could think of to send her a card and include a fat quarter. Didn't have to be a new one, just one that she could use for hand-sewing blocks while she visited my dad. My friends came through big-time and sent cards and wrote notes and included multiple fat-quarters for her. She brought the cards to the Care Center to show to my dad and he thought it was so cool he was sure it should be written up in the local paper. There were all these cards from all over (some friends told their friends, etc. so some cards came from people I didn't even know) and it was a really neat thing. She decided she would make yo-yos from the fabrics but wasn't sure what she would do with the yo-yos once they were made. That was all in September. A little over one month later, my mother fell ill with complications from kidney stones and developed sepsis in her blood stream. The outlook was not good. My brother, sister and I spent long hours at the hospital while she was in intensive care. I brought my dad to visit her and it was so hard for him to see "Ma" so sick. I would stay the night at the hospital and my brother would come after he took his daughter to school and I would go to my mom's apartment to shower and then return to the hospital. I had Kaiser, our beagle, with me and my cousin, Faye, walked him when I was at the hospital.
On the fourth day that my mom was in intensive care, I was at her apartment and Kaiser was snooping around when he started chewing on something. I thought it was a bundle of fabric until I picked it up and saw that it was something made of yo-yos. Then I realized it was a cross. I took it with me to the hospital and I taped it to the wall at the foot of her bed where she could see it if she woke up. And after five long days, she began to respond with just the tiniest squeeze of her hand - hard to feel because she was retaining so much fluid - and eventually she got stronger she moved from ICU to a regular floor. She left the hospital after a couple of weeks and was transitioned for rehab to the Care Center where my dad was living. He was so glad to have her nearby. I learned that she had made the cross just shortly before she fell ill. It hangs now in her living room. There have been many ups and downs for her with her health in the last year and the passing of my dad last spring made it even a little harder. But this is a new spring and she's doing well and as you know, we get out and do some serious shopping and such when I visit her. :-) So where am I going with this.........well, I'm not sure, I just know I wanted to share the story. This is, for lack of a better word, a "tender time" for us because it was just a year ago about this time when my dad's health failed rapidly and he passed away. We all grieve in our own way but I think when this spring comes and we see the headstone and green grass and share more stories, it won't seem quite so sad. It's funny, though, because my mom said that sometimes she'll read something in the paper and think "oh, Melvin would like to read that" and then, of course, she stops herself and knows he's gone. I do the same thing, too. I thought I was crazy until someone on one of the Yahoo groups that I'm in said that they did the same thing. It takes time to heal. And so, I need some time right now, need to take a break. I'll see you on Monday and be fresh and ready to get back to blogging.
Thanks for listening.
Sandi