Milestones

Last week I made it to a milestone that some women, including myself, look forward to with dread: I turned 40 year old. Ack!! How did I get to be 40 years old? I feel like I just had my kids and I was young when I had them. But then again, my oldest is going to turn 11 this year, so to say that I just had them is a bit of a stretch. I was 30 when my parents passed away, so that idea that I have been without them for 10 years is a little mind boggling. I'll be married for 13 years this year and you don't get to be married for that long unless the years fly by.

Ahh, well. 40 it is. For my birthday MJ and I took a quiet three days away and went to Williamsburg, VA. I have always wanted to go there and see the colonial restoration. We have been talking about going for years. I remember talking about it before we were even married, but for some reason we just never got there. So, when we started talking about taking a few days for my birthday I thought about going there. The good thing about going at this time of year is that it is the off season and there were not alot of people there. Alot of times we were the only people on the tours of the various houses. We could walk into all of exhibits and talk to the people about what they were doing for as long as we wanted. You can't spend a half an hour talking to the shoe maker in the middle of the summer when there are 20 people waiting to get in to see the shoe maker's shop. The bad part about going at this time of year is that it's the off season and everything closed very early and once the exhibits were closed there was nothing to do in the restoration area. Even the shops in Williamsburg closed by 6:00 pm. Even with all of that, we had a great time. We want to bring the kids down there at some point as M is really starting to love history (he takes after his mother, bless his little heart!) and when we described it to him he looked like he really wanted to go.

While we were there I took pictures of some of the exhibits. This room is in the Wythe house. Mr. Wythe was a tutor to one of our founding fathers, Thomas Jefferson. This was Mrs. Wythe's sitting room. Notice the needlework in the embroidery hoop? It's nice to know that some things never change!

This is the courthouse:

This is the Governor's Palace, which was the home of the royal governors of the Virginia colony.

While we were in Virginia, I got to meet my friend, Cynthia. I met her on the Sanman message board and while there we discovered that we are birthday twins. Our wonderful mothers gave birth on the exact same day, which means this was a milestone year for Cynthia, too! We met at Haus Tirol, a needlework shop in Williamsburg. I had bought this pattern that last time I was at Lazy Daisy, but forgot fabric. So, while I was at the shop in Virginia I bought this hand dyed thyme fabric to go with it.

I was sick last week (nothing like being sick for your birthday!) and I needed something simpler to work on. Those pandas are beautiful, but not when you are struggling through a nasty sinus infection and are having a hard time concentrating. So, I pulled this out of the stitching bag and started working on it before I left. This is Chocolate Box by LHN:

You can't go wrong with chocolate, now can you?

And of course, my pandas! I was hoping to have the next page totally done before I posted another picture of them, but since I was taking pictures I took one of them as well.

We are totally into blue sky area and I have about three more pages of blue to work on before I finish this row of pages! Yikes!! I like blue, but I can see this getting to be a bit tedious!

Hopefully, next time I post I will have pictures from the birthday party that MJ gave me last night. And wait until you see what my cake was!! Anyone want to take a guess?