I Like #171

I turned 40 last week and my parents, sister, and the kids came to spend the long weekend with me.  It was really the very very best adult birthday I've ever had.  It was so wonderful to have my family here with me, such a blessing.  We didn't go anywhere or do anything exciting, but just being all together was great.  We stayed at home and ate/cooked delicious food, baked tasty treats, played lawn games (when it wasn't a million degrees), did craft projects, did a few home improvement projects, played board games, did sparklers, and had squirt gun fights. 

It started on Thursday when Becky and my folks arrived with a balloon and honking and sign bearing parade.  The kids made this fantastic sparkly pink sign they put on the camper, and now I have it in my garage.  Becky put up all kinds of fun decorations in my house too. I think they ran out of space for "is"  So sweet.

Becky brought me a tasty homemade birthday cake, and when we'd finished that, I made a cake and the kids decorated it for Fourth of July.

Mom helped everyone to make pom pom animals.  This is Alex's mouse.

The pups got lots of extra snuggles and were sad the last couple of days to be back in a one-person household.

Mom brought a game called ladder ball, you toss these things that are two balls connected by a short rope at a ladder thing.  You get points for looping it around the ladder. I am completely terrible at this game.  Mom is great.  Becky is great. The kids are pretty good.  But I'm terrible.  Dad was also pretty terrible but I was just really glad that we got him to play at all. 

One of my birthday presents was this teddy bear from my sister.  She's been making them for all our family members using shirts from my two grandfathers who have passed away.  Each bear also gets a unique "accessory",  my bear got a kite.  That's particularly special because flying kites was something we used to do with my Grandpa Wilbur.  The kite is even more fun because on the back of it is a grandmother's flower garden block stitched by my great-great-grandmother.

My great-great grandmother (my grandpa Kit's grandmother) was named Mollie Mae McBride Kittrell and my sister is named after her.  She was born in 1856 and although I never knew her (obviously) I do have a couple of pictures.  In the second one, my grandfather is the youngest little baby there.  She left a partially pieced grandmother's flower garden quilt that my mother finished several years ago, and some of the fabrics from it were from clothes my grandpa wore (and remembered) from when he was a little boy.  Really special. 

There was a box of her extra fabrics and extra flowers that didn't go into the final quilt, and my mom brought those to us this past weekend.  My sister kept one to include on my bear, but most of the loose flower blocks are now in my studio.  Hopefully I'll be able to incorporate them into an art quilt sometime in future.  One of the other things that was in the box of her piecing was this partially stitched sunbonnet sue.  I was so excited to see it,  it's just so hard to imagine having something an ancestor was working on around sometime around the turn of the last century.  Fantastic.  I'm not sure what I'll do with Sue yet,  but I'll finish her somehow and incorporate her into a project.  It's such a privilege to have so much family history, and so many well-labeled photographs.  

It's been a really great week here, of course everything is getting nutty with the virus again so I'm definitely staying at home and it's sort of empty now that people have left, but it was great to have such a bright week amid what's been a pretty crazy few months.  I hope you are all hanging in there; click on over to LeeAnna's for more things to like this week!