Valentine's Day

Happy Valentine's Day. Kris made some origami flowers for me. Different, but cute! Kara made up valentines for her class and added a little candy to each. She loves celebrating any holiday. One year, not too long ago, she had valentines ready two weeks ahead of time.

Kara is always prepared. Packing for vacation? She'll be ready weeks ahead. If she can't actually pack the clothes she wants because she's wearing them, she'll have a list ready.

You might imagine that I'm typing amid peace and quiet. In reality, I have two sets of kid feet dangerously close to my face as the minors in our family fight over the same space on our bed where we all landed to read. Peace and quiet are more often just words in the dictionary in our house, but love is always present, even if it's hidden under stinky feet and some mild name-calling between the kids.

Child 1 tends to provoke Child 2 just to see the reaction it causes. Sort of like a chemical reaction, though no matter how many times you see baking soda fizz up with vinegar, eventually the experiment loses its novelty. Child 1 hasn't yet lost the novelty of making Child 2 fizz up in frustration.

In any case, there's lots of laughing, joking, and reading going on right now at the end of our week. Not really the end for me--I still have work to finish for tomorrow--but for Monday-to-Friday folks, it's the end of the week.

Kris ran to Kokomo, drove rather, to pick up a new sewing machine for me. My old faithful machine, bought new in 2002, finally needs to retire after years of service and miles of hems on prom dresses. Using a rough calculation, I figured up that I hem over 10 miles of hem line in the course of a year on prom dresses alone.

I'll see if one more service will eek more life out of Old Faithful for home use, but I can't keep it any longer in my fleet of machines for my shop. I have my grandma's old machine at home, a nice machine, so this other will be a back-up for my back-up? I can't imagine having too many machines.

Okay, we're quickly descending into the "I've Had Enough" time of the day where in one split second, I go from tolerating the monkey business, to ordering children to bed on the double with heavy consequences for any disregard to the orders.

"Off to your beds!" Queen of Hearts style.