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Oliver's 7th birthday fast approaches and he felt very strongly (cause that's the way Ollie feels things!) that he wanted to research motorcycles on the Internet and draw a unique one for each of his friends in the form of his birthday party invitations.  Sometimes I feel just a bit stunned at this boy's artistic abilities and just wanted to take this opportunity to trumpet it around to all the land.  I've mentioned how cool this little kid is, right?
 
I always struggle with this so much.  I want to share my life with you but for me, a vast chunk of my life involves my children.  Unfortunately, I don't feel comfortable posting their pictures on the Internet.  And so these distant-second-type photos will have to suffice:
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We made miniature oven-baked clay sundaes.  As you can see, the girls did an amazing job.  They were careful and detail-oriented.  One would, it probably goes without saying, never attempt this at a boy birthday party.  For a whole variety of reasons.
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The food.  Minus the pizza.  Again, you'll want to avoid this kind of thing at a boy party.  They'd never notice or care and in a second and a half, the only evidence of all your hard work will be a smattering of crumbs.  Oliver has already requested a Dairy Queen ice cream cake and that's A-OK with me.  The girls eat all this up, though.  Both literally and otherwise.
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Lucy requested that each of her little friends bring along their favorite doll so as to provide her doll - Sophie - with the companionship she so richly deserves.  High times were had in abundance.  In both the human and non-human realms.  (Don't do as JoyBoy did over and over again to his delight and suggest to the little ladies that their dolls are made of PLASTIC, of all things.  He was  indignantly informed that these little dolls are REAL.  I can vouch for the fact that some of them have more elaborate wardrobes than I do, at any rate.)

Happy Birthday my beautiful brown Girl.  You have richened my life immeasurably.
 
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For My Beautiful Anabel
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My ever-so-old Jude
It's birthday time around here.  They're 13 and 11 respectively.  I can't believe it.
 
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Here are some sweet little girls (with their beautiful heads cut off!) for your viewing pleasure.  Now you have some sort of a very vague idea of what Lucy and Anabel look like!  They wear the scarves I recently knit for them, and which brought me so much joy.  These scarves are riddled with dropped stitches, but my soul felt ministered to as I knit them.  I only wish I'd jumped on to this Crafter's bandwagon long before.
 
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I used to - in the height of my imagined elegance and very real ignorance - look down disdainfully on Crafters.  I thought they were just the epitome of podunk-dom.  I wondered how it was that these people couldn't find better things to do with their time when there were starving children in Etheopia, for pete's sake.  Of course, as I contrasted my own young, naieve life which hadn't yet unfolded in any real way to theirs as I misjudged them, I felt stupendously superior.  Ah.  The fall from those dizzying heights of the arrogant early twenties. 

Now if geekiness is defined by one's involvement in 'the Crafts,' <insert English accent here> I'm one of the very biggest.  I make cakes for fun, I create cards and gift tags for joy, I scrapbook to document our fleeting lives together, I design bulletin boards at my children's schools for their teachers, I make somewhat unattractive chocolates, I'm a newbie knitter, and I'm very, very open to pursuing a whole lot more.  I plan to look into making jewelry and to pursuing felting.  I love being a geek; there's so much freedom there.
 
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I just learned to knit.  I love it so much.  And what's more, I don't even let JoyBoy's most recent derisive comment about the whole process faze me even a little.  That man had the gall to tell me that Sex Vixens don't knit.  What does he  know about sex vixens, I ask?  And so I knit.  And then I do it again and sometimes I even purl, just to keep things fresh.  As is my way, I need to have multiple knitting projects on the go to keep it interesting and so I'm working on two scarves for each of the respective daughters and two bad boy gigantic flower corsages just because they're different.  I called them funky orange bastards to my sisters via email and as I hoped, they responded with just the sort of accepting and whole-hearted laughter that feeds my soul.

I'll show you those big orange bastards soon.  They're really cool.