Let's pretend it's still Friday, shall we?

Another week of just feeling as though I cannot get ahead. I need to work on figuring out why that is, because it is not how I usually function.

• K. got his braces removed on Friday and now has a retainer. Once again, we get to listen to garbled speech as he figures out how to talk with the thing in his mouth. He is quite glad to be rid of the braces for a while. 
• Of course, this means that I have driven into Chicago for two orthodontist appointments this month. This could be playing into me feeling as though I can't catch up.
• It is snowing in Arizona. Now, this is not unusual at all for the northern part of the state, though they are getting a lot. But my mom keeps sending me pictures of snow in Scottsdale and in the Superstition Mountains... places that don't really ever get snow. I'm glad I visited last weekend and not this weekend.
• For our craft for Russia, we tried making our own version of Faberge eggs. 

Here are the finished results:

This is TM's

and this is H.'s. I thought she did a pretty darn good job.

• I would be remiss, though, if I neglected to show you the aftermath, lest you think crafts are mess-free around here. The florist's foam that was used to help hold the egg while they decorated it turned out to be far more interesting to most of the masses than the actual craft.

• We celebrated Y.'s 12th birthday this week as well.

• I finished my quilt top this morning. I'm very happy with it and am anxiously awaiting taking another one when my schedule allows.

• Now I need to decide how I'm going to finish it. Will I send it to a long arm quilter? While I know it will look terrific, I'm not sure I want to spend the money. But, I like this quilt top so much that I don't think I want to use it to figure out how to quilt it myself. Decisions, decisions.
• Currently P. is en route to Bermuda, having spent several days in Cuba. When she has an internet connection, we get short emails from her. It sounds as though she is having a great time. I have to admit that there was a small part of me that did have to do a moment of deep breathing when we got the parents' update and were told that the ship was currently sailing in the Bermuda Triangle. 
• Midnight, P.'s cat, is surviving. He is back to sleeping upstairs where he usually sleeps and not on my head, which is a great improvement in my book. He is also starting to roam the house a bit more. One of his favorite things to do is to ride around on P.'s shoulders. I have noticed that he is training other children to be his personal conveyance.
• J. took many people to the library today. He was the nice and fun dad and helped the younger group get their own library cards. As he was linking them to my email address, the librarian noticed that it has the number '12' in it. She asked if there were twelve people in our family, so J. had to say that the twelve referred to number of children. She then exclaimed that we should bring them in sometime. Um, I have been bringing large numbers of children to that same library for nearly two years now. I guess no one really noticed and thus my sense of feeling a little anonymous was more than justified. It felt odd since so many people knew me and my children at our former (and significantly larger) library. I guess it takes a while to really break in a new library.

I will leave you here, since it is late, I am tired, and I still need to head out to the stable and make sure Emmy is set for the night.