Dave's Batman Quilt

Dave has been requesting a quilt from me for a while- but he had a specific theme in mind. He wanted to have a Batman quilt. This proved to be a bit difficult since he wanted to have the bat symbol as the center of the quilt.

I was trying to think of ways to make this without having to piece the bat symbol myself. 

During one of my many trips to wal-mart, where I swing through the clearance aisle faithfully, I found it!

They had a twin sized batman sheet set and curtains on sale. The sheet set was just what I needed - the pillow had the bat symbol!

When I brought it to the counter it was even more on sale- it was only $9!

I had this sitting for a few weeks in the guest room/quilting room. Then Dave asked me when it would be ready and that he would like to hang it up for the Family and Friends Fun Night at work.

This.was.in.two.weeks!

I had to get moving!

I had to rip the seam in the pillow

here are the sheets

choosing colours

Dave wanted to have the colours expand as they radiated out. this quilt quickly grew larger then the wall hanging he was expecting. 

it fit the top of the bed!

I used the other side of the pillow case on the back to make the backing sheet fit. I basically created another quilt top for the back. 

I also had to make a way to hang it. I used the trim from the sheet to make the sleeve for the curtain rod to go in.

Having 2 quilt tops made it very difficult to quilt together and line things up straight. I quilted it by machine to get it done in time. I had a lot of puckering then I would have gotten if I quilted by hand.

Here is the back of the quilt where I was sewing up the seam with Zeke "helping"

I got it done by Thursday morning with the event on Friday.

And here is the final product- hanging large and proud at work for Dave. 

Dave loves the size. He never did measure how big that he wanted the quilt to be. He just wanted something to hang in the glass divider. The other side of this wall is the ping pong table and pool table. On his side is his and his co-workers desks. 

The guys seem to like this :)

And on the back - Batman keeps an eye on the pool players.

a couple of videos

Zeke has been walking with his hands behind his back lately

Adventures of Sgt Fuzzy Boots and a warning.

We have been adopted by a cat.
One that is very friendly. you can read about him here.

I iz baby?

I iz in control

what?

And I would like to remind everyone this holiday long weekend NOT to drink and drive. (unlike my son)

be safe!

Happy Yanksgiving

UPDATE: I have hit over 1000 page views. I noticed this number today: 1,070 whoo hoo!!


Well its the American Thanksgiving. 

As Canadians we have already celebrated the Canadian Thanksgiving back in October. We combined Zekes birthday with Thanksgiving and a non traditional meal of KFC. 

This Thanksgiving we were alone, just the 3 of us, but I wanted to make a yummy dinner anyways.

A turkey would be just too big so I got a chicken. 

I smothered it with canola oil ad sprinkled on some Thyme, Sage, Paprika, Onion powder, Pepper, a dash of Rosemary and I think thats it. 

I had read that baking a chicken breast down made more moister breast meat. 

Another thing I read was to put a 1/2 onion and garlic in the cavity to make it even tastier. So I did that too!

When I took it out of the oven I could see that the juices were sealed in the skin- I had to puncture the skin to get the juices to make gravy. 

This was one VERY tasty chicken -if I do say so myself.

Add glazed carrots, mashed potatoes, squash, stuffing, cream corn, gravy, and rolls and you get a feast!!

For dessert (an hour + later) we had chocolate cake and desert. 

I. am. full.

We have lots of leftovers for the next few days. Since Dave gets a 4 day weekend the extra lunches will make things easier. 

I have soo many things to be thankful for this year:

God - He's Awesome to provide all these blessings

Dave- a great husband and dad (and blogger)

Zeke- cute and pretty good too!

my family

my friends

my house

heat 

hobbies 

random vacations

and soo much more!

I keep thinking of the lyrics "every blessing you pour out I turn back to praise"

our whirlwind adventure part 2

you can find part 1 here

So Sunday morning dawns bright and early for us. We are still on Eastern time so we wake up at 8 (which is 7 in Nashville) We take our time (a bit) in going to eat breakfast. We let Zeke do a lot of walking in hopes of tiring him out. Besides how much trouble can you get in a hotel hallway?

going to find breakfast

Once we get all packed up our plan is to to the Grand Ole Opry to see what we can see. 

We pass a park and I say to Dave- "I bet there is a Cache in there." This gets Dave a thinking and we turn around.

On the way back to the car we see this hawk watching for its prey. As we watched we saw it dive into the bush behind it and grab a small bird.

 A few more caches later we arrived at the Grand Ole Opry at just before 10 am. It was Time for Zeke to have something to eat but the Opry didnt look like it was open to the public.
I should also note here that this is where there was a lot of flooding in Nashville a few months back. The mall that it is right beside is still closed but the Bass Pro Shop just opened.
Back to the Opry- Dave walked around as I fed Zeke and was looking like we were not going to be able to see it.
But at 10 am the gates opened up (Dave missed the sign that said gates open at 10.) Im glad that we did the geocaches first since this put us here at the right time.

The Opry has a beautiful courtyard area! There are a few more pictures in the album below.

After the Opry we went to go to the Gaylord Opryland (some resort or something) because I had seen a huge white Nativity scene from the highway just before we got off to see the Grand Ole Opry. 

From there we did another couple caches getting 5 in total Sunday and 2 on Saturday.

where is it?

 I cannot say how pleased Dave and I were with how well Zeke traveled! He spent a lot of time sleeping or playing by himself. There were a few fussy moments (and they were not much at all) when we knew it was time to stop. We had him timed out pretty good.

common mom

We left Nashville at 1pm (grabbing McD's to go) and arrived home at 7pm. Zeke stayed awake until 8 (not a surprise since he was up late the day before and slept a lot in the car)

I think both Dave and I slept well last night as well!

Daves blog about the trip is here and his post about the concert is here

now here is the rest of the photos:

a whirlwind adventure Part 1

On Monday I learned that Petra was getting back together.

I had not heard of Petra that much before I met Dave. Dave has been a fan for many many years.

"I wanted to see Petra before you could probably even say Petra" he told me today.

They have been apart for at least 10 years (these members that are playing havent played together since 1985) and decided to do a reunion tour. To kick it off they are going to air a live recorded show on some TV channels. They need to record this concert first.
This concert is free.
This concert is in Nashville (7hour drive.)
This concert is this coming Saturday!

I email this information on to Dave and he gets really excited, but cautiously so. I agree to let him go. The first thought was that I have too much to do at home this weekend in order to go- he will have to rent a car to go. 

I decided that if I went then I wouldnt be able to go to the concert anyways- because we wouldnt have a sitter for Zeke. Dave reserved 1 free ticket for himself and booked a room. The details were then left to me.

I decided that I would like to go to Nashville. I now needed to cover my plans for the weekend. 

Pet Partners was having an event on Sat. I made sure that we had volunteers. I got all the right things to the right people. I would miss the quilt drawing (for the quilt I made and donated to raffle) but it was all taken care of.

I had "Room at the Table" meal for homeless people in town on Saturday night. I was doing main dish. I confered with the other person doing the main dish to see if it would reheat well. She assured me that it would. She also agreed to warm it up for me- I just had to get it to the church Friday night.

I also had agreed to help at church for the yearly advent festival Sunday afternoon- I told them what was going on and they let me skip out. 

I was now able to go to Nashville.

...........fast forward to Saturday..........

All my stuff was done by Friday night, the car was packed and we were ready to go. 

Dave got up at 5 am and put the rest in the car, I picked up Zeke and put him in the car seat. (he is very cheerful in the morning). It took him about 45 minutes but he fell asleep again. I also dozed a bit. We stopped for Breakfast at Cracker Barrel (love Cracker Barrel- almost every road trip requires at least one stop at a Cracker Barrel) at 8:20. We took a while before we left again. We let Zeke walk around and get some exercise before we put him back in the car. 

Such a good traveler

We drove down the road a bit and stopped for gas and Zeke got boob (yes I'm still nursing) and fell asleep for another 2 hours at least before we arrived in Nashville.

We arrived in Nashville at Centennial Park at 12:10 but Dave's phone said 11:10. This confused us and Dave went to ask a local and we found out that we crossed a time zone line somewhere.  We now had an extra hour in which to explore Nashville. The concert doors were opening at 6 and Dave wanted to be there long before that. (first come first served seating.)

Zeke on the way to the Parthenon

  We parked at Centennial Park where they have a replica of the Parthenon. It was really cool. We ate our packed lunch here and Zeke enjoyed being out of the car seat. 

Bad picture of me but the boys look good.

The Parthenon was originally built to house a huge stature of Athena the Goddess of War.  You can read more here . But just to give you a bit of scale- the person she is holding in her hand is 6 foot 4 inches.

We explored the area around the Parthenon. There was a large pond with leaves and ducks and all kinds of fun things for Zeke. 

he wasn't sure about the leaves until we showed him how to throw them!

A statue from when we were driving around Nashville

We got to our hotel, went out to eat, and got up to our room just in time for Dave to leave to walk over to the Concert (10 min walk)

Now I am at the hotel with Zeke. He was so wired and not wanting to go to sleep. He was literally bouncing off the walls- falling over because he was tired. He gets giddy when he gets tired.

Shrek was playing on TV and Zeke got suckered into it and wouldnt sit or lay down in his crib and I couldnt turn the TV or hide him much but I KNEW that he was exhausted. I finally had to turn off the TV, turn off the lights and hide in the bathroom for about 10 minutes. Thats all it took! It is also where I started this Blog Post.

Here you can find part 2. 

Lenoir's Christmas

(Do you like my new background? Orange for fall- a bit late though.)

Every year the downtown area puts up trees and local schools and groups decorate them. 

This tree is done by a robotics club that Google helped get started. 

"I cant ctrl my holiday spirit"

They do a nice job of sprucing up the town

While we were there we saw Santa. 

umm- who are you?

Im not entirely sure that we didnt scar him for life.

Why am I here?

poor boy.

By the way this is a dueling post with Dave.  I forgot my camera at home so we only have these pictures to share for our blog posts. Dave wanted me to wait until he posts his before I post mine.

Here is his link

I didnt read it before posting

first blood

Well it happened- Zeke finally caused himself to bleed.

Actually thats not completely true. A while back he was just learning to sit and fell forward hitting his tooth off a cement floor (covered by a small quilt) and bled then.

But this was a walking Zeke.

Today we were at a Baby Time Play Group. There were about 10 babies there ranging from 6 weeks to 20 months.

Zeke was being nice to most and not crawling/walking all over them- which is excellent if you know toddlers.

He went over to join the older ladies (by that I mean the two 20 month olds) at the kid sized table and chairs in the kitchen area of the room. Zeke was standing there chewing on some plastic food (I think it was a hamburger) for a while and all of a sudden - boom.

Zeke had fallen straight down into a sitting position as he normally does. But to accomplish this feat he slightly leans forward as hes falling which caused him to bump off the table. He started to SCREAM. I have never heard that scream from him before. Not even if we pinch his skin in a buckle.

I had seen him fall and was just 2 steps from picking him up.

So I grabbed him and he was holding his hands to his mouth with the hamburger still in his hands.
I started to see a bit of blood so I took him in search of a bathroom with paper towels. We found a kitchenette and that was good enough. I just grabbed some paper towels and turned on the cold water. I tried to get him to suck on it or at least get it in his mouth. He wasnt having anything to do with me but he let me put it in after a bit. Three paper towels later (wet ones dont soak up the blood as much as dry ones) and the bleeding was slowing down.

He sat on my lap and snuggled for a bit. In about 8 minutes Zeke was back to playing (a bit slower) and soon ate a banana. (oh and he still had his hamburger toy)

 Im proud of him that he got over it quickly enough. He has a bit of a fat lip- but nothing to serious.

Not bad for his first big boo boo

And if you dont know me that well- I'm fine with blood so I wasnt shaken up or anything.


Do you have any first aid tricks up your sleeve?

Hint that I have heard- Use red or dark coloured cloth to soak up blood because the kid wont see it and freak out and neither will mommy if you are apt to freak out.

looking for Tupperware in the woods

Saturday afternoon was a rare day. Both Dave and I had no plans. (well I had morning plans)

By 3pm Dave and I were both ready to head out and go somewhere. 

We were not sure where but we decided to go geocaching since it was so beautiful (Zeke and I were playing outside anyway)

Our first stop on the way to Wilkesboro was Moravian Falls.

 There was this nice falls and mill there

Next up was Wilkes Community College. They had a nice playground there for Zeke and I to play in while Dave went looking for the cache

Zeke even tried to climb up the slide and almost made it too

After some playing we went to a nearby park. They had Box Stock Car races. (RC cars)

 We watched a kids class race.

 Zeke got a first class ride

and enjoyed chewing on daddy's head

gotta love the baby but crack!

pulling off the hat 

It was a very successful day. 5 caches looked for and found!

I think this is a hobby that we will continue as Zeke grows up.