Christmas dinner

My plea for contact with my children came through yesterday and I got to talk to both of them. They were visiting Grandma at my brother's house and a party was in progress when I called. Takumi and Bianca (his girlfriend) and Leiya and her Ohio friend, Marcy's brother, a family of friends, and of course Grandma and my brother's family were just getting ready to eat a big Christmas dinner when I called.

"Pray! You're just in time to pray for us before dinner. You're on speaker phone! Say grace for us!"

So I did. Wow, we surrounded the Pacific in prayers by long distance telephone! Prayers of gratitude for family, for health, for technology. Prayers for peace and joy in the New Year. I am thankful that my kids are together and with their American family. I'm thankful that Marcy and Keion are generous to feed so many extra mouths at their table. I'm thankful too that the sadness of losing Marcy's mother this summer didn't seem to shadow the fun of being together. Too bad I didn't get any of the turkey and roast beef etc.!

On this side of the world Tetsu modeled the vest I made him. Ooh. Doesn't he look good! (I'm prejudiced.)

And I spent a somewhat guilt free day just sewing in my warm living room. Under the wire with this last A Tisket A Tasket block but it is the LAST block! Yeah! I love doing BOMs when the end result is a stack of blocks that look like they've magically appeared but I do grumble about my set deadlines as each end of the month approaches.

The Tisket A Tasket blocks are done and now they will sit until I figure out an arrangement to put them together in. I won't think about that until later (Scarlett O'hara).

*****

Okay, we enter a new phase of New Year's cards. By the time the 2006 Near Year's cards went out, Leiya had graduated from jr. high and gone to Ohio to start high school and live with the Dennis family whom we had met in Japan. Takumi was still living with my brother's family and he was trying different hair colors and styles. Can you find him with the blond hair? Tetsu and I had picked up a dog whom we named Choco. The four cats Lemi, Velvet, Cleo and Patora were learning to cope with the hyper dog.

And I needed to figure out how make our New Year's card! Mrs. Ochiai gave me some copy-resize-paste lessons on a photo application and this was my feeble attempt aｔ getting three families in three different parts of the world onto one small post card. I think I made two cards, one in Japanese and one in English but seem to have only saved the Japanese one.