Dropping leaves

Autumn is my favorite season.

The smells, the sounds, the hoodies, the boots, the scarves.

The special days: My daughter joined us on the 8th, and my husband and I held hands in a sunny, wind-swept prairie on the 14th. Halloween and all it's glory.
Apples. Pumpkins.

(Science alert) The leaves drop from deciduous trees to conserve energy - but also to rid themselves of leaves damaged from parasites, wind, rain. Outside forces keeping the leaves from doing their food-production to their utmost ability.

They shed the damage. Pool their resources. Reveal buds for regrowth.

This has been a rough year. Very rough.

Rough enough that I couldn't bear to sit and write about it - day in and day out. Nor could I expect you to sit and read it.

The trees around our home are beginning to show their fall color. Severing the life blood from the damaged appendages. I, too, am doing the same.

I have been recovering from an emotional "woe is me" time. I'm glad to say that I'm shining on the other side. My baby is about to turn 2. T-W-O!! I just opened my online store to sell blankets similar to the ones my great grandmother made - and I still use to this day. I'm recovering from foot surgery, but I'm going to do my absolute best to pull myself back together physically. 

Life is good folks.

Where have I been?

Hi all.

It's been a long time since I've posted. Why? Well, I've been reworking some priorities.

Yes, I love writing and I miss spewing my every thought for all of the internet to read (and search on Google endlessly). I found myself overwhelmed with feeling like I HAD to write to keep my readership up. But for what? I stripped my site of ads...and they weren't making me any money either. It was a high-pressure situation for little return.

In recent months, I've redirected my energy. I've re-realized a hobby that I'd hung up since I got pregnant in 2009. I am now working on opening an Etsy shop to sell my homemade blankets.  The Grand Opening will be October 1, 2011 and I hope you'll all check it out.

If you want updates prior to the opening, follow me on Twitter @WistfulStitches or like my page on Facebook.

I'm not gone...I'm just somewhere else - usually wearing a thimble or arguing with the bobbin from my sewing machine.

What to Expect Giveaway!

I'm a factual person. I gather facts from multiple sources and make my own decisions. I'm a researcher - it's what I was trained and am paid to do in real life.

Back when we decided to try to get pregnant - the only things I knew about pregnancy were what I learned on that one awkward elementary school field trip where only one boy was comfortable enough to say the words "vagina" and "penis" in front of the class.

The rest of us just squirmed and avoided eye contact.

SO...I needed info. A lot of info.

I turned to various sources, but my favorite go-to book for conception (and associated frustration), pregnancy month-by-month what to expect, birthing process, and bringing the little thing home...was What to Expect When You're Expecting.

Admittedly, the one that I dog-eared, read and re-read was a much more dated version.

I am pleased to announce that I have partnered with WhatToExpect.com (I KNOW, I didn't know they had a website either!) for a giveaway of shiny new What to Expect when You're Expecting books!


Ladies and Gents, I have SIX books to giveaway - sitting here ready to go.

Are you interested? Do you know someone who is pregnant?  A table that is terribly off balance?

I have SIX books to give away folks!

SIX!

I'm not doing any crazy earn-an-entry stuff here. Please comment below and share the link to this page with your friends!! I will pick winners on Saturday, so hop to it and spread the word!

Duck, Duck, Vulture!

I was driving down the quiet country highway toward town to pick my daughter up from daycare.

I may or may not have been dancing and singing.

I was several car lengths behind the vehicle in front of me when out of the blue a large bird soared over that vehicle down to the pavement, and the up over my vehicle.

I did that standard wince/cringe/duck/jerk/lurch that anyone would do when a bird with a six foot wing span comes within inches of your face at 55 mph. I saw individual toes, people!

He soared over my vehicle’s windstream in that “oh, yeah, I totally meant to do that” sorta way.

Turkey vultures are like that. They’re the crazy, daredevil cousins in the bird family. They play on thermal airwaves drifting up from the earth’s warm crust in the summer. Spiraling upward and diving down on a whim. They eat the dead – no real rush in that, man.

This isn’t my first encounter of the vulturian kind.

Nine years ago, I was driving my old beater pickup truck down another quiet country highway (you see a pattern here? Country=Wildlife, Highway=Cars, Country Highway = Vulture Supper) when I noticed three vultures munching on a deer that had been hit the day before. They all noticed my truck approaching at once. One flew up and to the right over the field. One flew up and parallel to the road. The third flew up and to the left into the grill of my truck.

A huge puff of black feathers was all I could see in the rearview mirror. The bastard left a dent in the front of my truck and I couldn’t get the hood to open easily ever again.

I had always admired the grace with which turkey vultures soared, and assumed that the grace was just a trait of all individuals of that species. I know understood that it would be like saying that all humans must be fantastic runners because one observes the New York marathon.

The next afternoon, I passed the same location.

Two vultures were eating…the third.

Natural selection, baby.

My internet herd

I can feel completely alone in my house. Not alone alone (so turn around you stalker creepy perverts) but alone in the sense of girl time alone. I live in the middle of nowhere with neighbors who all have children closer to my age than they are. The lack of social interaction can be crippling for me.

But these days, the world is a teeny tiny place. If I'm feeling angsty, I can whisper a tweet to friends in Florida, Ohio, New York, or even England (for goodness sake) and I feel much less alone.  I've never met one of them face-to-face but someday we dream of getting together like long-lost pen pals.

I can't imagine being as alone I am in the world without this kind of interaction. How did my mom do it? My grandmothers? I'm sure that time was spent on the phone, but it's different on social media. It's not necessarily real-time. It's more voluntary.

I can chose to read a message or reply when I'm ready. And vice versa.  If I call, it interrupts. And it's continuous. I can run around the house in between tweets and get other stuff done. Or not.

I spend enough time with these people that I feel safe with them even though it is quite possible we'd pass one another at the mall without a second glance. I know I can spout something to them and get an honest, sharp, and likely witty response.

It's special to me to have a support network of people that I trust to tell me that it'll be ok or to stop whining if the situation begs.

Social media gets a bad rap. The gossip, the back-handedness, the deceit.  The idea that people on twitter announce everything that they're doing at a given second "I just brushed my teeth."

This IS the case sometimes, but social media has connected people who would be fantastic friends if they weren't separated by geography and circumstance. Inclusion in a group is an important thing.

From Ice Age...
Manny:  'That's what you do in a herd, you look out for each other.' 
Sid:  'I don't know about you guys but we are the weirdest herd I have ever seen.'