Tiny Needle Tuesday

Good morning everyone! It’s Tiny Needle Tuesday again and I have more progress to show you on the baby sampler. And more good news is that the baby has arrived and everyone is healthy, happy and home. I can’t give you any details to protect their privacy, except that she is a beautiful little girl with lots of dark hair and we are in love already. Grandma can’t wait to get her in my arms soon. I just FaceTimed with them and was able to see our little one sound asleep in her daddy’s arms. Aren’t grandbabies the best?💜

The cross-stitch sampler is almost finished. Just the border and a few details to add in the middle before I frame it. I especially like the monkey, but I think all of the animals are cute. As always, the outlining seems to have taken forever.

We found out last week that our oldest granddaughter who will be 17 in just a few weeks, was Prom Princess. She is a junior this year and that is the highest grade in their high school. The school was just built and her class was the first freshman class for the school. So they are always the oldest kids in the school! So it sort of made her prom queen didn’t it? 😂 She was absolutely gorgeous.

Her little brother chose to take part in a freestyle snowboarding event that weekend instead of going to prom. He took fourth place! We are very proud of him too. He’s just one year younger. They prefer to keep their privacy, so I rarely post photos of them online. They are our Montana grandkids and it’s hard to believe that she will graduate next year and that they are both driving already! I’m very grateful for the fact that they both have cell phones and are able to text grandpa and I often. thank goodness for technology when most of your children and grandchildren live so far away.

These socks have been my take a long project to Bible study and church for the past month or so. I was holding my breath to make sure I didn’t run out of yarn. It was so close I couldn’t even make them matchey-matchey. I think they’re close enough though, that the recipient won’t care. I do believe that Paton’s is definitely cutting their skeins a little short. I should have weighed the yarn first. I didn’t make the legs quite as long as normal and I barely had enough yarn left to kitchener the toes. One skein had about 3 inches of yarn left over and the other one had about six. That’s too close for comfort! I do like the pattern that the yarn made though, don’t you? These will go into the gift box for Christmas.

I hung up my spring garland in hopes that spring will arrive someday! You can see Zoey‘s playpen there in front. Both she and Lizzie love that thing. We never close the door, but they run in and out of it and it’s like a hamster wheel for them. They tumble over and over and around the room. I’ve been trying to catch a video of it for you but they’re just too fast. It’s like having a toddler in the house. There are always toys strewn around the floor in the family room. I love it! She makes us smile multiple times a day.

Dennis is officially retired as of yesterday. We spent the day busy picking up lawn fertilizer for mom, us and Mandy and Brad. Then Dennis had to get his phone switched over, but before anything, we went out to breakfast. That was the one thing he wanted to do to celebrate.

Mandy and Brad had us over on Saturday night for dinner to celebrate!. We had raclette. I have no idea if that is spelled right. It’s an electric contraption with granite on the top and eight trays, about 3“ x 4”, with handles that slide underneath the granite onto a heated grill surface. You can have whatever toppings you like. We had polish sausage cubes, summer sausage, corn, pineapple, bacon, onions, potato cubes, and three different cheeses. You put whatever you want in your little tray and then slide it in to heat up. When the cheese melts, you know it’s done. It is so delicious. I think it’s originally from Switzerland but it could be Germany. I’m not sure. I should have taken a photo for you. Next time we have it I will try to remember.

As always I’m remembering the people of the Ukraine in my prayers. Also my sweet blog friend Vicki and her husband have been very, very sick for a while. Please keep them in your prayers too. She has the blog “Stitchy McFloss” over on my side bar. There have also been several of you having surgery in the past few weeks. Please know that I’m praying for each of you too. Some are grieving losses of people who meant the world to them. Life throws a lot at us sometimes doesn’t it? I’m so glad to know that the Lord is always there, willing to listen to our hearts and the concern we have for others.

I’m wishing you all a wonderful Tuesday and I’ll see you all again soon.

Blessings and hugs,

Betsy 

Tiny Needle Tuesday

I actually have something to share for tiny needle Tuesday. I’m working, working away on the baby sampler. Our baby’s due date has come and passed. She was due on March 20. Every time my phone dings, I expect to be getting a message saying that we’re having a baby! I have until we fly away on April 26 to get this project finished and framed. 

Mr. Monkey is taking shape now.  Then ALL I have left is some small details like birds and eyes, all of the outlining, which is a lot the border around the entire piece, and the center square where the name, birthdate and weight will go. So I guess I have quite a bit left to do.😍 I have been enjoying it though. Sorry about the darkness of the picture. It’s been raining like crazy here for the last day and a half and it’s very dark everywhere.

Piper and Lizzie spent the weekend with us. It’s been a while since Piper has been able to spend the night on Friday nights because she has tennis lessons on Saturday morning. This Saturday Papa got to take her and watch her play tennis. He says she’s pretty good! It was such a beautiful weekend. We took the puppies on a long walk around the cemetery as you can see. Piper loves to walk there too. It was very windy though. Just look at Piper‘s hair blowing.

I promise I won’t constantly post photos of gravestones, but look at how old some of these are.



And then, something we found interesting were these next two that are from the same time period. But these headstones are obviously much, much newer. Our guess is that family replaced older stones with these newer ones recently.



We spent a lot of time on Saturday and after church on Sunday playing cornhole in the backyard. It was pretty even on who came out as the ultimate winner. Piper is pretty good at playing it! We watched some movies together and went shopping with great-grandma. Mom isn’t able to walk very far, but we were able to get a few things that she had been looking for.

It sounds like Mandy and Brad had a good weekend together which was great. It sounds like it was a win/win for all of us since we had a wonderful time with our girls. We’re hoping to get them to do that once a month or so because then we could have our girls more often!

Not much else exciting is happening here. Dennis has 3 1/2 days left to work. This Friday is his last day before retirement. We had planned so many things for this year, but like everyone else we’re waiting to see what happens with fuel prices.

My heart is constantly breaking for the people in the Ukraine and what is happening to their beautiful country. It’s hard to believe what has been done to those people and their cities in just a few weeks. Someone has got to do something. I honestly don’t understand. I am very, very disappointed in our government for not doing more to help these people who are being mass murdered. This could very easily be us or anyone else in the world.

I know many of you have severe illnesses and other tragedies happening in your lives right now too. I am praying for each one of you. Our God is a wonderful God and I know that He cares. 

May God be with each one of you in the coming days.

Blessings and love,

Betsy

Camping!?!

Are you ready for a post about camping? No, we haven’t gone camping, but lots of our friends have either gone or are getting prepared to go.

First of all though, let me show you the progress on the baby sampler. It’s not going quickly but it is coming along. I’m working on that blob of yellow in the corner right now. If you can’t guess, it is the sun. The empty square on the right will have a monkey in it. In the middle will be the baby’s name and birthdate. My fingers are itching, itching to feel some yarn running through them though and I have patterns running through my mind all of the time.

The baby should be arriving any day now. We are getting very excited to see pictures of her and find out her name. Great Grandma and I did a little shopping yesterday and we picked up three outfits. Little girl clothes are the sweetest. We will be taking them to London with us when we go next month.

You have all heard about our friends Paul and Lori in Spokane. Their puppy Izzy is the one that gave me puppy fever after our visit and led us to getting our Zoey. Paul and Izzy went on a motorcycle camping trip together last weekend in Washington. Here is a little Izzy with her helmet on in her motorcycle carrier. She looks like she’s all bundled up against the cold weather.

And they’re ready to go! Paul pulls a little trailer behind the motorcycle, that pops up into a nice size camping trailer. I had a picture of it, but in blogger it just shows up as a completely black photo. I’ll try to figure out what’s wrong with that and post it later. Apparently the trip went wonderfully. Izzy loved it! You can just see her little head there behind Paul‘s back.

Then yesterday, we went and picked up a trailer for Dennis’s cousin Curt and his wife Barb. If you’ll recall our ancient history, we went on our first date with Curt and Barb back when I was 15 years old! We have always been good friends and that relationship has been rekindled since we moved back to Omaha. They have bought a pick-up truck but won’t take delivery of it until Friday, so we went to the dealer with our truck and picked up their new camper. This is an A-frame camper. Two sides come up and it forms an “A”.  It has no canvas on it, just hard sides. They want to do more camping in the national forests, and a lot of places you can’t take pop-up tent trailers with canvas because of bear. Curt retired at the end of December. We’re hoping to be able to take a lot of camping trips with them in the future.  Wouldn’t you love to see that Montana fifth wheel behind the truck? They are like houses on wheels!

A little bit closer view so you can see the size. The trailer is 21 feet long.

And here we are with our truck hooked up and almost ready to go. Dennis sure loves driving his truck and pulling trailers! He jumped at the chance to go pick this up for them.

Here are the guys on the roof of our trailer. We took theirs to the same storage facility.  Dennis was explaining the solar power on our roof to Curt when they spotted a herd of deer and wild turkey. The storage facility is located in a very beautiful area. Pretty good looking guys aren’t they, for two men that are pushing 70!😏💜

On Sunday Dennis and I took Zoey for a long walk around the cemetery by our house. We love walking over there. This is one of the several war memorials around the cemetery. There are a lot of soldiers buried at Forest Lawn.










Dennis’s grandparents are buried very close to this particular memorial. Just two rows down.

Levi and Mary are his grandmother Alice’s parents and they are buried right next to Grandma and Grandpa Queen. There are four generations of his family that we know of that currently buried at Forest Lawn. Our headstone is already in place as it has been for the last 40 years!



Dennis’s Dad and little sister are buried below this hill. His other set of grandparents are just a few rows behind them.  My parents are across the road and up a hill and there are lots and lots of aunts and uncles and cousins in the same area. 

Family. We have a lot of family history here. Although we have family in Spokane, they are just not legally family. However, they are blood family. We are all covered by the blood of Jesus.

That’s about it. Our day-to-day lives are fairly quiet at this point. We’re in between seasons. Yesterday was 75° and today the high is only supposed to be 45°. Dennis will be retiring at the end of March and a whole new world will open up to us. More adjustments, more learning what retirement means to us. We are taking each day as it comes and spending a lot of time in prayer for the people of Ukraine. May God bless each one of you and watch over you and your families.

Blessings and hugs,

Betsy

A Week!

My goodness! Over a week has gone by since I posted anything. It’s just been more of the same here. I’m working, working, working on the baby cross-stitch. I am making progress, slowly but surely.  That light green in the upper left took me hours and hours because of the counting and many interruptions.

We dodged a snow storm yet again. This entire winter has been one of no snow for us so far. I think the total snowfall for the season is around 9 inches.  We were supposed to get 7 inches of snow last night then it was downgraded to four and then by bedtime last night they were saying 1 inch. It all went just south of us. We woke up to barely a dusting and it’s already gone. You won’t hear me complaining! Although I do know we need the moisture so it could warm up a little bit and rain. That would make me happy.😍

Other things have taken time also.  Together, Dennis and I put new covers on the dining room chairs. Whoever came up with the idea of putting cream colored seats on chairs needs to have their head examined! We didn’t do the most professional job, but they look a lot better than they did.

The gray blends in with the rest of the furniture too. Thank you to Connie at “The Crafty Home Cottage” blog that you can find on my side bar. She gave me some hints on how to do this, although her upholstery work looks much more professional than ours does. 💜

Here is my snoopervisor who helps me with all of my projects. She’s always right by my side ready to add her two cents!

She isn’t the greatest housekeeper as her toys are always all over the family room floor. 🐕 

I’ve decorated just a bit for St. Patrick’s Day. Here are the crocheted shamrocks that I made several years ago and have always had hanging on the kitchen island. With no island in this house, this is the next best thing that I found. We spend most of our time down here anyway as it’s where all of my yarn is and also our comfy chairs.

We go to the grocery store at Walmart in Iowa. It’s only 10 minutes from our house and just over the Missouri River. We were driving back home Tuesday night and it was the most glorious sunset. Of course by the time I got my phone out and took this picture the colors were fading but it’s still pretty. Prairie sunsets are always so beautiful.

Here we are driving back over the Missouri River into Nebraska. This is the Mormon Bridge. The Mormon pioneers had their winter encampment just about a mile from our house. There is a beautiful visitor center and cemetery on the location. This is historically known as the spot where they crossed the Missouri on their trek westward.

Monday afternoon we had a lady, (Aimee),  come over to help us with options for health insurance. She has worked with my brother and sister-in-law for several years and they have been very happy with her. She just got my sister set up on Medicare and a supplement last month. Each year she gets together with you and goes over your options to see if there is another plan that will work better for you. She ended up staying at our house over 4 1/2 hours. She went over all of our options and also reviewed moms. We are pleased with the information she came up with for mom and for us and we got all of our applications and forms filled out. I do have to find a new primary care doctor, yet again, if I want to keep the same Cardiologist who I like a lot, even though I’ve only seen him once. I will need to keep all of my doctors in  the University of Nebraska Medical Center complex. They are known for being the best, so that doesn’t bother me at all. It’s just finding a new primary care for the third time in less than a year that is a pain. I go for yet another “meet and greet” on Monday afternoon.

It looks like we’re going to lose our health insurance one way or the other come April 1, so we had to get something else in the works. Dennis will either retire completely or go part time, either way we will lose our health insurance. For him, there were no questions. He will have Medicare and another plan to pick up what Medicare doesn’t. However, I’m still three years away from 65. I have to go on the open market and it’s a scary world out there! Especially when you are on medication’s and have a pacemaker. Aimee seems to have found some plans that will work and cost about the same as we have been paying while Dennis has been working. 

I think another reason I haven’t felt much like blogging is the Ukraine situation. My heart is breaking for the people there and what they are going through. I wish it could all just end. I don’t think it will stop at the Ukraine if Putin is allowed to continue on with this war. I am not normally very political and I understand the reasons why NATO is trying to stay out of things, but I believe there’s a good chance that we’re going to be sucked into it at some point anyway. Why not save as many people as we can? Especially as they are now purposely bombing civilian targets. Maternity hospitals? Who does that?

And that’s all I’m going to say about that today. But please, please pray for the innocent lives that are being killed there every day.

I’ll see you all again soon.