quilting for the love of strangers

Sadly, sometimes it's easier to be selfless and kind to strangers than to the people we know and love. It's this simple, pure, isolated little act, with little or no context, with no baggage or history. It just is what it is. Sometimes it's a random act of kindness, and sometimes it's not so random.

This is a very deliberate act. This is a very small thing I can do for a family experiencing something enormous. No one should have to watch their child die, certainly not a 2 year old child. I don't know them, I can't be a shoulder to cry on, I can't bring them a casserole to spare them the need to even think about what to make for dinner. But I can make one little quilt block that, combined with many more blocks, will give them something to wrap themselves in to remember her for the rest of their lives.

This is for Layla Grace, and for her family, and I wish it could be more. But it's something.

Read more about the project here.

soft around the edges

I've never been a consistent blogger, and I've certainly never been a particularly good writer, but I do miss this space. Even more than wanting it for myself, I feel this obligation to capture moments for posterity, for my children. We didn't do baby books. We started one for Delma but it fizzled out very quickly. With Mimi we didn't even kid ourselves. I still haven't even put together my wedding album. Ugh. Growing up, my family didn't tend to sit around the dinner table reminiscing. My children will have that, but I also want them to have some sort of record, no matter how fragmented, to look back on and fill in some blanks.

But I owe my kids more than a collection of Facebook status updates and tweets about how they drive me crazy, and whose puke/pee/leaky poop greeted me when I awoke this morning. They do more than make me do laundry every damn day (and oh, how I do long for one glorious day without laundry) and send me screaming to the welcomed, controlled chaos of my job. They're also little slices of heaven, and if I could, I'd put caramel sauce on them and eat them up with a spoon. I feel to my core the truth of the famous exclamation "We'll eat you up, we love you so!"

It's not very edgy or amusing to gush about how beautiful and amazing your children are. But I'm going to try to do that more.