As you can see from the above mosaic, there are many things from our Omaha trip that I have yet to blog about. Only problem is, there are things that have happened in the week since we got back (like meeting Jill & her husband! and dragging Brenda and Bug up to Pasadena to have dinner with Erin, who’s doing an internship there this summer!) that I also have yet to blog about. And I want to write about it all, and tell all the stories, but…in case I don’t get around to it I’ll start by pointing you to my Flickr where you can find the above photos and many more in the photoset Omaha June 2009.

“We think success means being so good or so great that no one can do without us, yet a successful scholar is one whose work continues in his students long after he retires, and a successful entrepreneur is one whose company chugs merrily along while he’s taking a holiday on the beach. A successful parent is one who, eventually, doesn’t have to be there.

“Success is a movement into invisibility. Success is decreasing so that others may increase. Success is a seed dying in the ground and bearing fruit upwards. Success is becoming dispensable. The successful man is the one who will not be missed.”

—Peter J. Leithart, in the June 2009 Touchstone Magazine

I’ve been a crocheting machine lately. That’s partly because I had quite a few blankets in the queue for babies who were all due early this summer, and partly because I discovered Chuck. It’s much easier for me to justify watching hours and hours of TV when I’m doing something productive at the same time.

So…I finished another custom flower scarf! This one is for Maura, who recently moved from North Carolina to Vermont. Next winter she’ll be able to keep her neck warm in style. The scarf is in my shop waiting for you will be shipped out to you soon, Maura!

Annalie acted as my model for some photos. She picked the pink dress she’s wearing specially, so it would match the scarf. She did that last time with the other pink, orange, and red flower scarf I crocheted.

She posed nicely for a few photos, and then she got silly. As you might discern from the tilty camera angle, I was getting a bit silly myself.

I am so thankful that as different as Annalie is from me in so many ways, I genuinely like her and have fun with her. Before you say, “Of course you do, she’s your kid!” think about how many people you know who can barely talk to their parents at all, let alone have fun together or laugh at the same jokes. I expect that part of our relationship will take a beating during adolescence, but I also think that is what will help us weather the teenage years relatively unscathed. My brother and I both have always had that kind of relationship with our mom and each other, and even though there were definitely some rocky years during our teens, we could always laugh together. Even now, the best times I have with my brother and mom we’re usually cracking each other up over some silly thing.

Anyway! Wanna see some other odds and ends that I’ve crossed off the queue lately?

Here is a blanket I made for my cousin Amanda’s second baby girl, Makenzie Rose, recently born about two months premature. She’s doing pretty well in the NICU and should go home in a few weeks.

I made this little blanket for Makenzie’s big sister Madison (pictured here, with Annalie). It can be a doll blanket or a lap blanket or maybe Makenzie will even use it while she’s tiny. I thought it was important that I make a blanket for Madison too, because the one I made her when she was born never got to her. I crocheted it, packaged it up, and then…mailed it to the wrong address. Doh! Amanda and her husband had moved, and I accidentally sent it to the old address. I guess because it was a package it didn’t automatically get forwarded? Whoever received it must have liked it because we never saw that blanket again. Part of me thinks, How twisted do you have to be to steal a BABY BLANKET!? Another part of me, though, likes to think that maybe someone who needed the blanket got it.

This blanket is for my friends Deborah & Christian’s baby boy, Caleb. (Annalie’s playgroup friends Christian and Anna are Caleb’s big brother and sister.) I crochet mainly with bright colors—what I think of as Crayola colors—so this one is a bit of a departure from the norm for me. When I was dreaming up color schemes for Caleb before he was born, it just popped into my head that I should use outdoorsy colors. I originally wanted to use darker greens and browns, but I fell in love with these neutral shades, and the yarn was so soft (and is actually made partially from recycled plastic bottles, which is pretty freakin’ cool). I also played around a LOT with the pattern, trying and discarding at least five or six different patterns and motifs before making this one (squares crocheted on the diagonal). I think the end result is one of my favorite blankets I’ve made. Now I just need to get it to Caleb, who is already a month old!

I made this cool blue and green variation on a nine-patch for my blog friend Loralee and her Little Sweetpea, baby Aaron. A couple of months ago I was sorting through my stash of yarn left over from past projects, and this super-soft turquoise blue and lime green yarn just jumped out at me, at the same time that Loralee immediately came to mind. I took that as a sign and made Aaron a blanket. I really like this color combo and how the squares all fit together. I hope Aaron likes it too!

Last blanket! I made this whole blanket in Omaha, while Troy and I were, um, watching all the episodes of Chuck online. Yes, I know! I know I’m a hopeless addict! But Troy felt left out that I’d gotten hooked on it while he was gone, and wanted to find out what the fuss was all about. In the evenings after we had put Annalie to bed, we hooked my laptop up to my parents’ TV using a mini-display port cable attached to a DVI-to-HDMI cable, which caused the TV to act as a second monitor so I could just drag the browser window over and we could watch the video on the 42-inch TV instead of huddling around my 15-inch monitor.* At the end of our visit, I’d finished the blanket and Troy had stopped rolling his eyes at me every time I mentioned Chuck. I’d even go so far as to call him a Chuck fan now. All the girl-on-girl fights had nothing to do with that, I’m sure.

This ice-cream-cone box that Annalie painted wasn’t on my queue. She painted it waaaay back in May at Rapunzel’s birthday party and I just never blogged it. It’s cute, though, isn’t it? Lately she’s been getting better and better about actually painting the pottery instead of just flinging paint on a few spots here and there before losing interest completely. She painted a really cute cat the other day too. Hmm, did I take any photos of that?…Nope. I guess not yet.

Wow, there are quite a few pottery photos in my Flickr stream that I haven’t blogged. Like this plate! I painted it green and used the same flower stencil that we used for the freezer-paper stencil t-shirts to trace a flower on the front. Then on the back…

I had everyone at Annalie’s party sign it with a Crayola marker or regular old pencil. I took it back to the studio and painted over the signatures. Neat, eh?

This beach girl plate was a collaboration. Brenda had sketched this in her sketchbook one day at the beach. She re-sketched it onto a plate and I painted it. Lindsey liked it and asked if we could do a beach boy plate. It’s in the works, Lindsey!

Another funky dotty dish, this one a custom order for Jillian. I added green to this one, just to mix it up, and I really like it. I like it so much I might have to paint myself another one! After I paint that orange hearts tree mug and the orange dotty funky dish for Carole…and I have a couple of pay-it-forward gifts I still need to make…and some vanilla to ship out…

Hm. I keep crossing things off, but I guess my crafting queue won’t really be getting shorter anytime soon. Thank goodness!

*I have to admit, I was very impressed with how easy it was to use the TV as a second monitor for my MacBook Pro. This is one area where Macs really outshine PCs! It was literally as simple as connecting the cables, plugging one end into the TV and the other into my Mac, and *poof!* It was ready. It took longer to wrangle the cables out of their packaging than it did to set everything up. I’ve watched Troy set something like that up on a PC before and it took MUCH longer and involved a lot more fiddling with the properties settings and testing and re-checking and fiddling some more and cursing and sweating. Apple really does have out-of-the-box experience down pat!

Also, at the risk of destroying my geek cred, Troy totally told me what all those cables were called. I would have called it “the white TV cable thingy.”