Working while in the middle of ---life

When my oldest was a pre schooler someone had given her a beautiful book called The Napping House.  In that book, all of the various occupants of the house first fall asleep and then wake up. The tagline of the book was "This is the napping house where everyone is sleeping." When my youngest is home from college and my husband is int he middle of his busy season, unlike The Napping House, at any moment of the 24-hour cycle, someone is sleeping, someone is awake and someone is eating.

With so much eating going on we had turned into a version of Mother Hubbard's kitchen. To stock our empty larders, we went to Costco. We went home with a taxi trunk filled with food. 

I loved the twilight views from the back seat of our cab.

Our trip was delayed for a long time by a fender bender that luckily took place right in front of the emergency room of Metropolitan Hospital. We waited behind the excitement until it all got sorted out and then we were safely delivered home and our pantry and freezer are once again, full.

I realized that the hat I had made for my great-niece to be was nice, but needed something else to make it a truly wonderful hat.

The missing element was a pair of eyes. it took me several days to figure out the best way to go about creating eyes for this hat. Buttons are easy but are a potential choking danger to a baby.

I wanted to create eyes that were washable because anything that touches a baby is bound to get dirty.After pondering a variety of options I decided to make the eyes out of embroidered velveteen.

I drew a pair of eyes on the reverse of a scrap of cotton velveteen using a Sharpie. I then stitched over the drawn lines using my sewing machine. I stitched each iris using a mix of machine and hand stitching.

This is the result.

 Living with a newborn can be difficult.

A silly hat can help make up for some of the misery of sleepless nights.