Taste Test and a Bike Ride

The university where I work has a Food Science program that is taste testing peaches and blueberries this summer using faculty, staff and students. Since today's location was the building next door, a coworker and I walked over to find out what it was all about.

We tasted four different peaches (with bites of cracker in between to clear the palate) and filled out survey forms for each rating appearance, taste, texture and juiciness.

Janice has been teaching Kyleigh her full name so when someone asks her name, she responds with Kyleigh Mansfield instead of just Kyleigh. Tonight, Janice asked Kyleigh "What's my name?" and Kyleigh responded with "Mama Mansfield". Too cute!

After dinner they decided to go for a bike ride and this photo just happened to pop up on my phone.

She received the bike and helmut for her second birthday, but she's still growing into the pedals. According to Janice, she can now keep her feet on the pedals if you push or pull her, but she has trouble operating them herself. She also loves trying to ride my stationary bike, but it's way to big for her.

Several of the ladies in the yahoo group, Fellowship Crossings are stitching the HAED design, Faery Tales. The chart for this is 40 pages, but since I love the design, I decided to join in. I'm stitching it on 18-count white Aida with one strand of floss. Here's my first progress pic. There's not much to see yet and I still need to do catch up with the other ladies, but I'm really enjoying it for now. (I'm sorry it's so blurry.)

I Cracked the Code and a new Preschool

I'm stitching the Dimensions kit, A Year of Events and the floss numbers don't correspond to DMC or Anchor. Or do they? A random sampling is 6096, 6955, 12290, 13046, 18511 and so forth. As I was stitching, I noticed that if you lopped off the first couple of digits you were left with an Anchor number that actually corresponded with the right color--18403 = 403 = black; 11001 = 001 = white.

On Saturday, I ran out of 6955 which doesn't correspond to any Anchor color, but does correspond to DMC 955 which I was able to pull out of my stash. Last night, I discovered that they had shorted me 18511. This one almost had me stumped since it's not an Anchor of DMC equivalent. So, I found an online conversion for JP Coates to DMC and yep, 8511 = DMC 168 = a light gray that worked perfectly.

Kyleigh's preschool is closing on September 30th and she'll start at the preschool attached to our church on Monday, August 30th. However, beginning today she's attending a "new to her" preschool. It's the same staff and kids, but in a new temporary location.

Janice called this evening to tell us that Kyleigh had figured out how to unlock the deadbolt on the front door. Fortunately, she has a child lock doorknob protector so she can't get out of the house. But tonight she had her backpack on, her lunchbox in her hand, unlocked the door and told mommy she was going to preschool--guess she enjoyed it today!

Happy 4th of July

Our day started with church where the theme was God and Country. We had a flag ceremony, said the Pledge of Allegiance, and sang several patriotic songs (The Star Spangled Banner, Battle Hym of the Republic, My Country Tis of Thee, America the Beautiful and God Bless America.)

Later Janice and I and her friend, DW, went to the Angels vs. Royals game. There was another flag ceremony and during the singing of the national anthem, a flag was unfurled on the field

and a large plane (I forget what it was) flew over as the "rockets red glare" fireworks went off.

The Angels won (11-0) and the game was followed by a fantastic fireworks show. And when we got home there were several families shooting off fireworks in the streets surrounding our house even though fireworks are illegal there.

Since Kyleigh wasn't with us, I took my stitching. I'd started this little guy in mid June and had stitched everything from his shirt down. I stitched his face, arms and the cupcakes this evening. It just worked out that he was wearing red, white and blue.

He is the first of twelve squares that I plan to stitch from the DMC Favorites - Teddy Bears magazine. If I manage to finish them all, they'll go to KKCQ for a quilt. If not, I'll send them to WOCS to be made into cards.