Summer In My Heart

As we sit here in the cold, I can't help remembering our wonderful trip to the Cape this summer.  I had a few minutes yesterday and scrapped this page.  The photo was taken at dead low tide on the Brewster flats.  It was an extremely overcast morning, so there was very little color to the sky, and what there was was an iron gray.  So I ran the photo through a few filters in Adobe Lightroom and got this fabulous look.

The quote, by Rachel Carson, reads:  To stand at the edge of the sea, to sense the ebb and flow of the tides, to feel the breath of a mist moving over a great salt marsh, to watch the flight of shore birds that have swept up and down the surf lines of the continents for untold thousands of year, to see the running of the old eels and the young shad to the sea, is to have knowledge of things that are as nearly eternal as any earthly life can be.

Cape Cod, the Book

Well, the soon-to-be book. I have begun making layouts from the pictures from the Cape. I'm beginning to think of a bound book of them, that I can give to my mom, sister, and brother as a memoir of the trip. (All pictures can be clicked on to pull up a large version.)

This one is of Ryan (the hubby) showing Jeremy (ds#2) a hermit crab; I love the sandy hand!

Credits can be found here.

You've seen this picture before, of the kids watching the sun set. It's one of my favorite pics of the trip, and this layout may just become one of my favorite layouts of the trip.

Credits can be found here.

And last, but not least... Really not least, because I envision this becoming the cover of the book! A few pictures that I think captured the trip. My favorite is the one of my mom - you can just see how happy she was to have all her kids and grandkids together. It was taken the first night were were at the Cape.

Credits can be found here.

Tidal Pool Critters

While at the Cape, we stayed in Brewster, MA. The Brewster Flats are pretty amazing. According to Wikipedia, "The Brewster Flats are tidal flats on on Cape Cod Bay in Massachusetts, particularly near the town of Brewster, and are a unique environment. They are the widest expanse of tidal flats in North America, rivaled in the western hemisphere only by a similar expanse in Brazil."

At low tide, you could walk straight out from the beach for at least a mile. There were all sorts of critters out there for the boys to find. Some critters were alive, and some of the critters were dead. The dead ones contributed a nice little stink during low tide, though that attracted all sorts of sea birds. Easy meal, I guess.

It was a nice walk out. Some bare sand, some shallow (mid-calf at it's deepest) water, and a few sandbars with little tidal rivers beside them. The boys loved seeing and learning about the sea life. Here are a few of the animals we saw:

Green crab

Hermit crab

Sand dollar (I'd never seen a living one before!)

Jellyfish (picture courtesy of my friend Babs who joined us for a day)We also saw huge horseshoe crabs, sea snails, small shrimp, small fish who got trapped in the tidal pools (and then chased by the boys), clams, sea gulls (of course), sandpipers, and a variety of other shore birds. There were tons of shells, but mostly oysters, mussels, clams, and razor clams.

This is July?

Greetings from Massachusetts! That would be cold, wet, damp, chilly, rainy Massachusetts. Someone check their calendar - this is July, right? It might be in the low 60s out there right now, misty/drizzly, and due to begin pouring sometime late tonight. Apparently the rain will continue most of tomorrow. Thankfully, it's supposed to clear up and be a beautiful weekend.

We had a great flight up, and at 5 and 6 1/2, the boys love to fly and can carry their own backpacks and booster seats. They looked so grown up, sitting on their own on one side of the aisle, reading their books. We got to my mom's and they immediately began climbing the huge pine tree in the front yard, which is perfectly arranged for climbing. (Pix will be posted eventually.) Matthew has decided he's got 4 "rooms" in the tree, and Jeremy has two "rooms" and a science lab. They've also adopted a neighborhood cat, whom they've named Stinky. I figured it would be a mangy looking critter, but I saw it this afternoon and it's a big tom (at least 18 pounds), black and grey, sleek, and well cared for. Guess the name is just more evidence of testosterone poisoning.

Mom and I will get everything packed up for our trip to the Cape tomorrow, make a list of groceries we'll need to get down there, and visit with a few relatives that will be dropping by. We'll be leaving shortly after noon on Saturday. I'll get to visit with a college friend and a grad school friend during the week, as well as various other relatives who'll be popping down here and there. I'm looking forward to relaxing - and hopefully some warmer weather!

Capes, Cards, and Band-aids

The boys and I are off to the Cape for a few weeks today. I haven't been to Cape Cod in at least 20 years, and my memories of it are largely those of a child. So it will be interesting to see the changes there. The boys are excited to see their cousins and get to spend lots of time with them. I don't have a beach-themed quilt (yet), but the trip just might inspire one!

I was inspired by a greeting card to make this quilt, which I call Ode to Joy. I received the card nearly 15 years ago and had always kept it on my bulletin board because I found it to be bright and cheerful. And I decided it needed to be bigger so I could enjoy it from across the room. So I used the card as a template and created a pattern. The pieces were fused in place, then heavily machine embroidered to complete the top. The quilting added additional thread work and dimension to the piece. And I took a technique from my good friend Michelle and finished the edge with a few layers of zigzag stitching, then couched on a bright and fuzzy fiber to top it all off.


As we head off on vacation, I have to wonder if my boys have managed to sneak emergency band-aids into their backpacks. What, you've never heard of one? I'll leave you today with this layout of one of their recent adventures, in which Jeremy starred.


The journaling reads: Once upon a time, two brothers were riding their scooters down the sidewalk to the front door of their house. Their mother told them to try to fall in the grass, and not on the sidewalk, because it would hurt less. But the younger brother fell on the sidewalk. He got all scraped up above his knee, and it bled and hurt a lot. The older brother, concerned, asked him if he needed a band-aid. The younger brother said “yes” through his tears. Then the older brother asked him where he stored his emergency band-aid. (The mother had never heard of such a thing!) The younger brother let him know it was under his pillow, and the older brother ran right off and got it for him. The mother got his scrape cleaned up and put on the emergency band-aid, gave him a hug, and helped him back up to the house. And that is the story of The Emergency Band-aid.