FINALLY!

He's nearly 5 months old and it is 104 degrees outside, but Jasper's quilt is FINALLY done!  This is the first one of my Auntie Claire quilts that I put a name on, and I kind of like the personalized touch.  I only have 1 more to finish for Levi, and I will be caught up on the quilts for the 4 nephews that our family welcomed in the last year.

Here is the recipient :)

Cupcakes!

This was a white onesie from Target, that I dyed purple and then sewed a cupcake applique on. The cupcake is actually from a flannel fabric that I had leftover from some sweet sleep pants I made Rachel. I have lots of cupcakes left, so look for more of these shirts in the future! I am hoping that once washed, the dye doesn't bleed onto the cupcake... that would be tragic. I washed the onesie in woolite in the bathtub probably 6 times, but I am still nervous.

See you SOON, Alligator

It is not often that I have pictures of the recipients modeling the things I make for them. I made this little alligator onesie for my nephew Thomas, for his 1st birthday last month. I like it because the gator wraps around to the back. Sorry Thomas that I waited so long to send it to you and thus, it is too small!

I can't wait to see him and all my little lovelies (mason, stella, oliver, and levi too) in less than 2 weeks when we visit home! Hopefully I can get my act together and bring home lots of homemade gifts for them all.

Rudy News

I just realized this morning, that I've been meeting with my learner, Rudy, for more than 3 months now, and have yet to update how he's doing.
It has been a long few months! We got along really well, right from the start. I was really impressed with his dedication to improving his reading and really excited to be a part of his journey. But the program starts off slow and after a few weeks, Rudy started to try to take over. "I just want to read today." Most of the time, he'd concede and let me teach him a small lesson. But for someone who reads at a 4th grade level, I can understand that learning the letters over again would be kind of boring. Sometimes I would concede and we would just read aloud (or actually, he'd read aloud and I would sit there, bored, and correcting his pronunciation).
Occasionally, it would come up that I would think of something brilliant to teach him to go along with the phonics lesson. Punctuation, Homophones, Paragraph Structure... Little blips of something I'd learned long ago would come into mind and I'd pass it along. I can tell when what we're learning is really interesting to him.
So, more than halfway through the initial six month contract we'd signed, we're still working out the kinks. I do believe that Rudy is becoming a stronger learner, but we still have a long way to go.

Tweet, Tweet, Tweet

Triplets are three times as sweet!

I made these three birdie onesies for a friend's baby shower. She's having triplets!

Flautas are not poisonous!

Last week I made flautas. I wasn't 100% sure what this involved, but just knew that we used to have them at Tres Hombres when I worked there. I wanted to make Caleb's with pork, and had an idea that putting in shredded BBQ pork would be just the way he'd like it.

This is the only picture of the meal that I have, but I figured, I'd go ahead and post it, half eaten and all. I made the flautas for CB with the pork, and for me with just beans and cheese. I made my special homemade guacamole recipe, and found the recipe for the rice online. I think it was cilantro-lime rice. Anyway, the meal was very delicious and as homemade as it was... not so hard. CB wolfed his up.

The next morning though... he woke up very ill. I was not sick, so his first thought was that the pork must've been bad (being the only thing he ate, that I didn't). Guilt, guilt, guilt. I thought I'd poisoned him, after all... But later that afternoon he had a fever, and we found out that a 24 hour flu bug was going around. Whew. I had already thrown out all the rest of the frozen pork, though, so it still might be awhile before I try this dish again!