Lovelihood

The inaugural quilting line, this one hemming in the robot. Hand quilting a full-sized quilt is likely an activity best suited for days not 80° and muggy.

Back at the the great tooth loss event of 2011, we (and the tooth fairy) decided to institute a work for pay (you might know it as allowance) system for The Boy. And encouraged him to think up something grand to save up for. Like an iPad of his own. No small task at $5 a week minus smaller expenditures. He'd all but given up hope for amassing enough paydays and/or tooth losses, when a teacher at his day camp forked over, as a sort of reward for being a generally good kid, one million cool ones. Surely enough to afford him his consumer electronic purchase of choice. The Mr. was the one to kill that thrill of having such wealth crumpled up in his pocket. And deliver the very real lesson of currency and devaluation. But I oohed and aahed over his bill this afternoon, and offered to take it off his hands for the real, serviceable dollar that I slipped into his fingers. "I don't need the dollar, Momma. We can share the million dollars." And that's how I'm choosing to remember him on a day when he was otherwise a majorly whiny butt.

Working on test-quilting some swatch sandwiches, some with the walking foot — which, on my basic little machine makes it resemble something Dr. Frankenstein stitched up his monster with — and some with a strand of perle embroidery floss run through a hand-sewing needle. The verdict? The swatches stitched up perfectly evenly and straight under the walking foot, but my poor machine and the little table it sits upon are no match for the weight and drag of a full-sized robot. And forcing the girth of embroidery floss through layers of fabric and batting and more fabric is no cakewalk, either. Looks like I'm going the tried and true route of hand-quilting with plain-old quilting thread. The devil I know.

Day one of The Boy's two week tenure at his new school's summer camp (also to be his after-school care provider) was a success so great he exclaimed it the Best Day Ever. He enthused over the friend he spent the day playing with, the plentiful outdoor time, the fort building (but not with the big pillows — the big kids were playing with those), and the extra special cheese I secreted into his lunch. On the menu for tomorrow: woodland creature sandwiches and some grapes with a cookie chaser.

Nearly nine months into this take-a-photo-every-day thing, The Boy has finally caught on that I'm constantly looking for pictures to take. He knows, for instance, that once the sugar scrub has all been mixed and jarred, I'll want to take a few moments for glamour shots. And once those Fritos get their sheen of chocolate on, he prompts me to go grab the camera. Sometimes, photographic inspiration isn't so obvious. Like today, after noodling around outside for a while, he came running in to get me to photograph the dried-out seed pods endemic to the corner of the backyard that he calls his garden. And I obliged because the only other shot I had from the day was a poorly-framed camera phone shot of him hanging upside down on some ladder rungs at the playground.

I am certain that every mom has handed her child a scrambled Rubik's Cube (or an off-brand stand-in) and waited for that flicker of genius that would our college savings plans unneccessary (you know, because we'd be assured full scholarships to our college of choice). And most of us are handed back a block as messy as before, with the imploration to please fix it. I also possess no such genius, nor the blind patience to just hack away at the thing. But I'm more than willing pry the pieces apart and snap them back into fresh-from-packaging perfection.

It's been months of Fridays and naptimes spent in labor over this guy (from this book), who I'm sure will one day be named, but for now just bears The Boy's initial. I finished the top the other day, rushed off the final seam and haphazardly folded it up on my table to get an already late dinner made. It wasn't until today that I laid it out in a proper sandwich and got a good look at the whole thing. And I'm pretty happy about it. What's more important, The Boy is excited about it. I've been told to send it off to be quilted, or to wait until Thanksgiving and toss it onto the Oma's long-arm. But I'm convinced that that phrase "labor of love" was coined by a quilter. And I'm resolved to do it myself. By hand, maybe, like the rest of them.