What I did over my Christmas vacation...

On the left you'll see the most important thing I did during my vacation. That stack of lovely blue and gold paperwork is our entire dossier, notarized, certified, apostilled, and delivered to Bethany. As soon as we can get Bethany the money this week our dossier will be winging its way to Russia to be translated and submitted. Hopefully we'll hear from Russia in February if all goes well.

The second thing I did was buy the fabric and sew the curtains for the kids room. This is only a big deal to me since I have tried to learn how to sew about a million times. As a little girl I watched my grandma and my mom spend hours sewing dresses, quilts, and anything else. As a teenagers I tried unsuccessfully to learn to sew and this time something just clicked. I told my mom that sewing must be a "mom" thing. The curtains were fairly easy I just need to make curtain ties.

And here is the project that consumed the rest of my vacation. My mom and I picked out fabric for quilts for both S and E in late October and my mom assembled the top for E's quilt a few weeks ago and then progress had stalled. Since I had her sewing machine and all the materials I started piecing it together Tuesday night. I then did nothing but work on it until Friday when I got the front and the back quilted together. Don't let the picture fool you, it's not complete, I didn't have enough material for the binding and they don't have anymore of the fabric at Joann's. It's nowhere near perfect but it looks really cute on his little bed and hopefully he can treasure it for a long time.

There is a list a mile long of things I didn't do on my vacation including studying for the Praxis next week, working on my Russian, cleaning the house, doubling my workout and about a hundred other things. But overall it was relaxing and I still came out of it with a sense of accomplishment. Tomorrow it's back to the grind for both of us, but we go back with a sense of optimism that 2010 will be much more exciting than 2009.

Happy New Year everyone!