Celeste arrives in Peru

I will update my own happenings and ramblings in another post. This one is to let you know that DD (darling daughter) arrived at 2 a.m. today in Lima, Peru. Here is a picture of her happy face when she got there. You can follow her work there at http://www.cmleone.blogspot.com/.

Today, I covet your prayers for her safety and for her knee. She will be hiking a lot and carrying a heavy backpack. I am praying that God will lift that backpack up on eagle's wings so her knees don't even feel its weight.

For all the weeks leading up to putting her on the plane yesterday, I put a smile on my face and a wall around my heart when people asked me how I felt about her going. The absolute truth is that I am thrilled and grateful that God has planted in her a desire to go and take His word to the nations. The other absolute truth is that I feel fear and loneliness. I am weeping today as I am finally letting myself give in to those emotions for just a bit so that I can let God give me comfort and joy to replace those emotions. I know that if I lean into Him, He will be sufficient for me.

I am, as always, so grateful to God that I get to be her mother. Forever and ever I will praise Him that He trusted me with the gift of this marvelous woman He created. Because He created her to be so lovable, I love her so much that having her go away where I cannot talk with her daily hurts. Today I am letting myself feel that hurt. And letting God do a work inside of me as I hang on and let go at the same time.

Finally--UFOs to FOs

UFOs are common in the knitting world--UnFinished Objects. These are projects started enthusiastically, knitted on furiously and laid aside for many reasons. The buttonband needs to be sewn on. The ends need tied in. A mistake discovered 10 rows back needs a bit of attention. It needs to be (gasp) "finished" (aka, blocked and sewn together.) Christmas is pressing in (well it was). The most common reason of all is that another, more alluring skein of yarn seduced the knitter into a new project. Having experienced all of these reasons in the past year, my DD (Darling Daughter) expressed shock, and maybe a tinge of disapproval, when she wangled a confession from me (shortly after another trip to the yarn store, I believe) that I had not one, not two, but 10 UFOs lurking as skeletons in my knitting closet. Here are pictures of the transformation of two UFOs (actually, counting DD's hat, I have finished three--see below or go to her blog: Just a Glimpse for a photo. )The little purple sweater is for my precious grandniece, Ruby Mae. The scarf is named Branching Out and is a gift to my beloved sister-in-law, Terese, who is expanding her horizons and is in the midst of her master's in social work.

Ice Storm 2009

Beautiful, terrible, dangerous. Freezing rain. I'd never experienced anything like it until I came to live in Kentucky. Liquid falling from the sky that instantly turns to ice when it lands; it encases everything in a sheet of ice which grows thicker and thicker. It started early Tuesday morning and by 7 a.m. everything was a glaze of slick, beautiful ice. As the trees became heavy from the load of ice, tree branches started breaking. All through the night on Tuesday, the popping sound of branches made January sound like the 4th of July. When the transformers around town began to blow as tree branches fell on power lines, the sky lit up and a booming noise accompanied. I slept little on Monday and Tuesday nights but I still had electricity. Wednesday a.m. about 9 my lights flickered and went out. The temperature inside plummeted. The next 48 hours were chilly to say the least. Tonight I am blessed to have electricity again and I am snug and warm. 9000 other residents in my county are not so fortunate and I pray for them as they are in shelters, staying with friends or trying to sleep in a cold house. It finally warmed up today and melted all the ice. I will return to work after being out since last Tuesday. We are expecting snow again before morning.

Fall 2008: Work, school, knitting, & vacation

Here it is, January 2009--how can six months go by so quickly? The title sums up what I did with those days...work and school consumed most of my time.

Knitting, for me, is so restorative. As my hands move in the repetitive motion and I feel the yarn slip between my fingers, a calmness and centeredness slowly creeps back in...my head clears and my thoughts organize. The past fall I reached for my knitting often: I knit in class, I knit in the car (while someone else drove :-)), on the plane and in bed before I fell asleep. I finished many projects and started several more. In the picture, my darling daughter is shown wearing my first attempt at Fair Isle knitting. The Boho hat pattern is a free download at ravelry.com.

Graduate school was intense this fall. Iregistered for 9 credits and fully completed 6 of them. Three credits are still on an incomplete because of a research apprenticeship that will continue into Spring 2009. One of the courses was Descriptive and Inferential Statistics...it forced me to resurrect 30+ year old algebra skills and to think very differently than I have so far in my doctoral studies. I survived and I learned enough to know that I must partner with a statistician for future research!

After more than three years without a real vacation, I took two this fall. Celeste and I went to Chicago over Thanksgiving. I love, love, love downtown Chicago! And, we saw Wicked. If you have not caught this Broadway show on tour (or in NYC), make 2009 the year that you do. It was FABULOUS!!

Christmas found me at home in Colorado with my family. We added six babies in 2008--five of the babies were at my brother Ken's on the 26th of December. It was a joyous, blessed family time. How privileged I am to be part of this amazing family. My brothers and sister grow more precious to me every year. My nieces and nephews, who always delighted me with their antics when they were little, now warm my heart to overflowing with their ability to parent this next generation. Their little ones are so darling...the picture above was taken at the end of the evening when most of the babies were a bit frazzled from noise and being held by strangers. It's priceless!

Back home again in Kentucky, life will now settle back into the rhythm of work, school and knitting but I am refreshed from my time away. Blessing to all of you!