2020 Reappearance

A month later, I reappear!

Wonderful Husband and I took the boys to England for nearly four weeks over the holidays.  We spent the bulk of that time with his family in Southampton, but also hied up to Cambridge for a week over New Year's to visit our very dear friends Sergei and Morag and see/stay in the new third story of their house.  While we missed one of our traditional Christmas visit activities (riding on the Eastleigh miniature train), we did keep up with others (a post New Year's pantomime in Cambridge, this year Cinderella) and take a stab at making new ones (ten-pin bowling the day before leaving; I am horrible at bowling, and Wonderful Husband is awesome at it; nonetheless, a good time was had by all).  And I had the luxury of getting to see two movies in the theater while we were there: The Rise of Skywalker with Wonderful Husband and his father, and Frozen II with Squiddle and my mother-in-law.  Squiddle's first cinema experience!  I overall liked both films, but also have certain issues with each of them. *shrug*

And while we were in England, I got to give the Scrap Stars quilt to its intended recipients!  Despite my best efforts at obfuscation here on this blog, Sergei and Morag had guessed (or at least hoped) that it was for them, and it was!  Here's the finished object, with its matching pillowcases, displayed on my and Wonderful Husband's queen bed pre-departure (see the suitcase in the background):

And for the sake of the query: do you see dark circles first, or light stars?  Almost everyone's answer has been the circles, but I see the stars.  (And, huh, funnily enough to me now, one of the fifty-two dark fabrics in the quilt was from the first Frozen movie.  Sergei, Morag, a Where's Wally challenge for you: find the one square with a perfectly framed Elsa!)

Our return flight back out of Heathrow was delayed by two hours, but fortunately the airport has a children's play area, and equally fortunately my sister picked us up from the airport and drove us home.  It was raining relatively hard, and it had been a very long day.  Twenty-two hours, by the time we all tucked into bed!  And yet despite that, Jazzy woke at 4am this morning, so so did I, Squiddle wasn't abed much later, and Wonderful Husband got up around 5am.  I'm hoping we can beat the jetlag by Monday, since it's a school day!

Our lovely neighbor Marianne and her daughter Grace came over to feed our cat Sushi each day while we were gone, so he's healthy and wasn't too lonely, but unfortunately she's not as good at plants.  I think I can return all of them to health, but we'll see.  Good thing I gave them all a deep watering right before we left!