I'm a wee bit behind

I should've posted before now, I've just not been in a blogging mood. Just busy doing other things I guess. What's the best way to get out of that?? Just sit down and get to typing and hope that I get in the mood again. So here's a few things I've been doing since my last post.....

Last Friday we went to see my parents for the holiday weekend. Mike wanted to try a new way that he thought was faster. It may have been if we wouldn't have gotten stuck behind school buses for a half hour. That's the downside to driving through those little towns instead of getting on a bigger highway. You have those one laners and when ya get somebody slow in front of ya it can be a real pain. We ended up getting there about the same time as usual. He wanted to go the same way coming back and I protested but we did it anyway (only because we had a bet going and I was really hoping I'd win. That's why I didn't point it out when he took a wrong turn..LOL!) It turns out it is about 30 minutes quicker. You just have to hope you don't end up with someone in front of you that wants to go 10 miles under the speed limit. Anyway....

We had a really great time at my parents house. When we got there I hooked up my mom's Wii Fit for her. Did I mention I got one too? Yep! I stood in line outside of Best Buy last week when they were released. I tried 3 other places after I took the kids to school and they had already sold out. I knew Best Buy didn't open until 10 so if I had any hope of getting one I had to go wait. Got it and we love it! It's so much fun! I found some muscles I forgot I had. You wanna lose weight? Do some hula hooping. That'll do it. I highly recommend Wii Fit to anyone who has a Wii. I know it's expensive but it's worth it. We spent, or I guess I should say that I spent a lot of time on it that night. Mostly being laughed at by everyone else. It is loads of fun....even worth everyone laughing at you. On Saturday my mom and I drove up to Charleston. It's a little over an hour from where they live. It was a really pretty day and there were a couple of needlework shops I wanted to check out. Can you believe that there's only a total of 4 needlework shops in all of West Virginia? What is that?! There's definitely a lack of shopage up there. You want a review of the 2 that I did go to, you say? Ok....

The first shop we went to was a shop in South Charleston called Cranberry Needlecrafts. Honestly, we were in there for maybe 5 minutes. I wasn't impressed with the shop at all, nor was I impressed with the person who was working in the shops lack of desire to even acknowledge we were there. No worries here, we'll head on to the next shop. Hopefully they'll be semi friendly. The next shop we went to is called Village Sampler and is in a little town called St. Albans. It's a really nice shop and the owner was SO friendly. She had a lot of goodies. The shop was a lot bigger than it looked from the outside. I didn't buy much but I did find some treasures. You know why I wanted to make the journey to these shops? Because I've found in my experiences that it's the little out of the way shops, the ones in small towns that have of print Prairie Schooler charts. I made a good choice when my mom asked me what I wanted to do that day. I ended up finding 2 OOP charts and 2 others that I wanted to add to my collection. I got book # 42 Angels, #43 Father Christmas, # 62 Kris Kringle, and #78 Kitchen Table. We had a nice time browsing. I wish that shop was closer to me. She offers a lot of classes. The shops around here don't offer any. I wish they would.

So check this out. On the way to Charleston we saw a lot of bill boards for an Amish Farm, right? We were super excited because neither of us had ever been to one before but have always wanted to. Our plan was to go to the needlework shops and then go to this Amish Farm on the way back. I wrote down all of the info I'd seen on the billboards so we'd know which exit to take, ect. We follow the directions and end up at a stinkin store called Amish Farms. Can ya believe that? We got jipped. Those billboards were very misleading. Humph.

On Sunday Mike and my brother had reservations to go whitewater rafting in the lower New River. My parents had bought the trip for Mike for his birthday. It was an all day thing. At the end of their trip we all went down to the bottom to watch the rafts come through hoping we'd see them. I thought we did but it didn't end up being them. I really wanted to get some pictures of them. Turns out they have a photographer rafting along in a kayak taking pictures. They were pricey but so worth it. I never would've gotten pictures like this.

Mike's on the left, my brother's

on the right.

Love, love, love, these pictures. They had a really great time and had lots of stories to tell. I think they might be going again this summer. I want to take the kids on one of the family rafting trips that are calmer. They have one for ages 6 and up. That might have to wait until next summer though. I know they have this rule where if someone falls out you can't jump in after them, the guide will help them. I think it would take a pack of wild horses x 10 to hold me back if a kid fell in the water. I know I'd abandon ship.

Aren't these pictures fantastic? Love the one up there that looks like my brother and Mike are fixing to fall out LOL!

And for your viewing pleasure, here's a pic I took at the bottom of the New River. This is the river they were rafting on. That bridge is the New River Gorge Bridge. I had to cross the bridge and then drive around a mountain to get to the bottom. That's not even half of the bridge. It's really long. They have a bridge day in Oct. and they close down one side of the bridge. they have a big festival and you can even jump off of it if you want to. There's a better picture of the bridge and info about Bridge Day here. I think we might try to go.

Thanks Seth!

One thing that I've noticed since moving up here is that the the clinics/Dr.'s offices don't do their own billing they have someone else do it. Some third party that doesn't know what the heck they're talking about and don't seem to have much desire to do their job. They'd much rather me do it for them. This is the second time this has happened. It goes a little something like this:

1. I take kid to doctor

2. Receptionist asks if our insurance info is the same as last visit. Yep.

3. Get a bill from the third party billing company for said Dr.'s office saying I've provided incorrect insurance info and to please call them.

4. Call them and they tell me our insurance is bogus and won't pay claims.

5. I tell them they're wrong, go over info to make sure they have it right because I never had a problem in Texas.

6. They tell me they sent in the claims twice and won't do it again so I need to figure it out myself because they're not wasting anymore time.

Come again? This bill here says that I owe $380.00 before the insurance pays and I'm not paying a dime until you file it right because you're obviously doing something wrong. By this point I've put on my angry eyes. She told me they're not dealing with it anymore and I need to call my insurance company. After I got her name and extension I did just that. I spoke with a nice man named Seth who informed me (again! same story as last month) that they've not received any claims from them. I told him what she told me and then he got a brilliant idea that we'd call her back on a conference call. This amused me to no end because I caught her in a couple of lies which he was sure to point out. His first order of business was to go off on her because she was having me do her job. He also pointed out that she should have been calling him, not vice versa. She told me that they mailed the claims to the insurance twice. She told him they filed it electronically. He chewed on her a wee bit more for not calling or following up with them to make sure they received the claim. He then asked her a few other things and come to find out, they were filing the claims using a code that isn't even valid so that's why it wasn't going through. So once again, they were screwing up but expecting me to fix it. I was really annoyed that I had to spend a half hour dealing with it because someone else didn't want to do their job or couldn't do it properly. Thanks Seth, for putting miss priss in her place and helping me out with that! If he wouldn't have been on the line we still wouldn't have it fixed. How would I ever know that they were filing using codes that aren't valid??? I would have no way of ever knowing that, nor do I know any of the codes. They should have been calling my insurance and figuring out what the problem is, not me. They really should try listening to the customer for once. We do know what we're talking about once in a while. Dummies.

I mailed 3 of my PIF packages out on Friday and got an email from Rachel earlier saying that she received hers. I was really excited because I made a super cool thing for her and couldn't wait to post a pic. Rachel really likes cats and I wanted to stitch a kitty piece for her. I pulled out a chart I have from The Trilogy called Eekology and stitched the kitty for her. I made it in to an ornament using organza ribbon for the hanger. I bought a long length of the same ribbon and ran it through the loop on the hanger and wrapped it around the top of one of those crafting mason jars and tied a bow in the front. How cute is that?! I found this jar at A.C. Moore. I really like this one because it's smooth all around unlike those canning jars that have fruit and things on them. It was only $1.49. If you decide to mail one of these, I don't recommend you send it overseas and I do recommend you use a flat rate box. Jar is cheap, shipping is not LOL :). It just turned out so darn cute though. I plan to make more of these for Halloween and for Christmas. Celeste has one up at the shop with a skeleton head ornie on it filled with candy corn. Too cute. You could fill one for Christmas with peppermints or other Christmas candies. They'd make really cute teacher's gifts. Rachel told me that she's going to fill hers with candy and put it on her desk at work :). She has a ribbon eating cat at home so that would be the best place for it...lol. I also sent her a really late birthday gift. I actually contemplated not sending it for a while because I wasn't all that please with my finishing on it. I had this little round cookie Christmas cookie tin that I had been saving for a while because I knew I'd want to mount a stitched piece on it at some point. I've never finished a tin before so put it off. I stitched the kitty for her from the Prairie Schooler's Barnyard Christmas chart. It was the perfect size for the tin so I decided to give it a go. It didn't turn out as well as I wanted it too but I think it still came out ok.

Berry Pickin & Tadpole Collecting

Mike got home from his week in Nashville yesterday so we decided to head out to do a few things today. One stop was at a place called Belvedere Plantation. I've been looking for a place to take the kids to pick strawberries that was fairly close to home. Most of the places I had found were farther than I wanted to go. I knew this place existed but didn't know they grew strawberries there until last week. It's less than 10 miles from our house so off we went to go strawberry picking today. It was a really nice day since it finally decided to stop raining. It's rained so much over the past week. When we got there we got to go on a hayride out to the strawberry field.

Joshua thought that was pretty cool. They gave us each a picking tray, although we gave 3 back. Each tray could hold up to 10 pounds of berries and we certainly don't have a use for 40 pounds! They had several fields and there were PLENTY of berries for everyone. We didn't fill up our tray. We ended up picking about 5 pounds which was plenty for us. I mostly took them for the fun of picking since they've never done it before.

After we finished picking we took another hayride back to the market to pay for what we picked (minus what was eaten in the field). We noticed a pen that had a mama goat and some brand new babies in it. Aren't they cute? This little white one was very social. He wanted to be pet like a little doggie. What a cutie.

We'll have to make sure we go strawberry picking there every season. What fun! We had a really great time. Except for that swarm of bees. Not so much fun. I missed it when I went to pay for our berries, but apparently they passed Mike and Cassie while they were looking at the goats and headed in to the moon bounce where Joshua was jumping. Luckily they left quickly. I'm kinda sorry I missed it. I've never seen a swarm of bees before.

I went with Joshua on his field trip Thursday. All of the kindergarten classes went to a large park that has a big creek out in the woods where they were to go dip netting for creatures. They had a really good time. Joshua's little friend Mason was assigned to stay with Joshua and I for the day. When it was their classes turn to go to the creek they handed me a jar and 2 nets. I knew they were catching stuff but I didn't know they were keeping it. They got a lot of things, mostly tadpoles and a few things with legs. Guess who got to sift through the junk in the nets and scoop out the creatures and put them in the jar. Uh huh. That would be me. So gross! Ick! And yes, that bite I got on my hand from whatever creature is feeling better....geez. Standing in a creek and fishing for gooey things, not my cup of tea. I acted like I was having a ton of fun though. Mostly cause a lot of the other moms didn't..lol. The boys thought I was pretty cool and that's good enough for me. I was muddy and really smelly when I got back but I'm really glad I went. He thought I was just the coolest mom ever and has suggested that I go buy some nets so we can go do it again. They caught a lot of things and were really excited when they got to dump what they caught in the container that was going back to school.

I don't break for squirrels

I used to break for the hairy little rats. I haven't always thought they were bad. There was a time when I sorta liked them. Things do change you know. I'm not a hunting woman. In fact, I'd be one of the least likely people in the world to hunt. I'm not opposed to hunting, I just like to keep far away from it and have no desire to ever see something that I might be eating. While I know where it comes from, in my happy little world it comes from the grocery store and that's it. I'm funny that way. If I'm fixing to eat chicken and think about it actually being a chicken, I can't eat it. I'd be a very happy vegetarian you see. If I told you right now that I didn't have a burning desire to grab a gun and take out every squirrel in this forest I'd be lying. I love animals, not rodents. They're annoying and destructive. Go ahead and play chicken when I'm driving next time. I hope you're not too shocked when you realize you're walking through the gates of squirrely hell. Why my sudden hatred of squirrels? Well since you asked......I've never really liked them. I just like them a whole lot less now.

The kids know that I love birds and that I like watching them. One of the things they got me for Mother's Day was a large bird feeder. Mike hung it in a tree on a very narrow branch away from all the others. He put it there because he didn't think the squirrels could get to it and because I could see it out of my kitchen window. They also got me a huge bag of seeds for it. The seeds they got were meant to attract cardinals and it did. I watched a bunch of cardinals, sparrows, and robins eating out of it. I noticed some squirrels on the tree and saw them trying to get to the branch but it was too skinny. They couldn't seem to get a hold of it. I think it was really ticking them off too because on the second day after he put it up, it looked like a squirrel was hissing at the birds. I looked out the window a little while later and instead of seeing cardinals you know what I saw? One of the ugly little rats was hanging upside down by his feet from the branch, with his thieving little hands in the seed knocking them all out on to the ground. This is a large bird feeder and he kicked out over half the seed. I was so mad! He was kicking it out for all of his friends! There must've been 15 squirrels down there eating while he was kicking them out. If I would've had a grenade there would have been mass squirrel casualties. I obviously had to take the bird feeder down for now. Mike's been in Nashville all week so I'll have him figure out another place to put it when he gets home. Unless we put it back and he gets me squirrel ammo.

Speaking of Mike being in Nashville, this is one business trip I'm not jealous of. I hope he's having a great time down in country music land....ick. I hope his next trip is somewhere interesting because if it is and the timing's ok I might go with him. I wish I could've gone to California with him one of the last times. At one point he mentioned Hawaii. If he ever goes to Hawaii, I'll definitely be on that plane. I don't care if the timing's not right...lol. I do feel bad though...he's been sick most of the time he's been gone. I've not been feeling like myself today either...my head hurts and my throat's all scratchy. I hope I feel better tomorrow because I'm chaperoning Joshua's field trip. We're dip netting for dragonflies and other things on the bank of a lake. I wasn't comfortable at all with letting him go to a lake without me.

We took Cassie downtown on Saturday for that ice cream eating contest. You shoulda seen how much ice cream they brought them! I never would have thought...wow. They each had a bucket filled with scoops of vanilla ice cream, with chocolate syrup, brownies, and whip cream. She didn't win but she sure did have fun trying. I especially liked watching her and the bald guy race each other...lol. He came in second.

Spidey and that darn fairy

She's done! Woo hoo! I finally finished that "never ending" piece I was working on. Really, it didn't take THAT much time out of my life. 19 days but who's counting?? I really don't think the project would have bothered me so much if I wasn't having thread issues. Let me start from the beginning.....




I was in the shop looking for a small-medium sized fairy or angel piece to stitch for a gift. Not one of those L&L or Mirabilia monsters but something smaller and doable within a couple of weeks at the most. I did see a new release from Mirabilia that I really liked and the stitch count wasn't bad at all. It's Poppy from the Pixie Coutoure collection. Such a pretty little Pixie and I know the recipient would love her but I wondered if I'd have enough time to get her done. Someone overheard me talking and offered to let me borrow a chart she had called Fairy Stitcher from Passione Ricamo. It's a free chart but can't be copied or reproduced in any way so she lent it to me. I was really excited because the cahrt didn't look big and it was all in one color. All I'd need is a single color of thread and a cut of fabric. I headed over to the rack of Sampler Threads and picked out a skein of Briar Rose. I then picked up a second skein of it because the chart didn't say how much thread I'd need and I didn't want to come up short. That left one skein of it on the rack. I headed over to the fabric and settled on a really pretty piece of 28 ct. Vintage Cashel linen in Pink Whisper. I wasn't paying any attention when she cut the fabric. When I took it out when I got home I thought surely the piece of fabric was so big because she wanted me to have tons of room for framing. Nope. I didn't even pay attention to the stitch count when she handed me the chart. After all, the chart looked way smaller than Poppy. After I started stitching the first part of that wing I realized quickly that this wasn't the case. Oh well...I liked her fine and bought the stuff for her so plugging along we go. Oh my, look how quickly we ran out of that first skein of thread...hmmmm. Ok, on to the next skein......this one seems to be going just as fast. I'd better hurry and run back to the shop and get that last skein before somebody else does. That would stink something fierce if I ran out and had to get it somewhere else, don't ya know? Being how's the thread is hand dyed and all, the likelihood of getting the same dye lot from another shop, not good. Ok, get to the shop, grab last skein. Come back, on we go. Ya know....it's looking like this #%$&*&^&*#@ fairy is gonna need more than 3 skeins! Not good! I bought the only 3 the shop had. Hmmmm...I could drive to my fav shop in Alexandria. Nah.....gas is too much.....it would cost me at least $25 just to get there and back for some thread. Ok, I'll call and hope for the best. I asked if they had any of the stinkin Briar Rose and they come back just as sweet as pie to tell me they have a whole handful of it. Great, I need to order a couple of skeins (because we know if I only order the one I'll need 2!). Sure they said. I explained to them my dilemma with said fairy and she got quiet for a minute. She then asked me if my skeins were more purple, pink, or red. No..no, no, no, no, no! Cause she had several different shades of Briar Rose. So what do ya do??? Ya order ever darn one of them and hope for the best :(. So they come and I carefully open the envelope to discover none of them are just like the ones I had used. There were bits and pieces in some. So what do ya do now? Ya dissect the thread. Ya pull out all the little bits that will work and realize after you've finished the whole project that a smidge of it is a wee bit brighter than the rest and hope nobody can tell. So can you tell? Look at her. Lie to me if ya can. I really need you to lie to me and tell me you can't tell. Cause if you don't you might wanna throw me a life jacket so I don't drown in my tears. What lesson have I learned? Next time I do a project in one color, find a place that has 10-50 skeins and buy it all. I can't believe I thought 2 would be enough...then 3...then...well I can't tell you how many since I had to butcher the other skeins. I honestly thought I could finish it in a week and it took nearly 3. Turns out I probably could have stitched Poppy after all. Perhaps for Christmas. I need to get her framed. If the frame shop can't finish her by the 23rd I'll probably just have to do it myself. Which wouldn't be the worse thing in the world since I've had some interesting framing experiences with shops before. Alas, she's done and now I can get on with my life. Whew.



I'm pretty sleepy today. I stayed up late last night because we were under a tornado warning for about an hour. Who knew? I didn't even know they have tornadoes here. I think they followed us from Texas. It was thundering really loud all night and when I did go to bed it scared the poo outta me it was so loud. Nice lightening display too. Except for when I went potty and got a really good show while sitting under that skylight (see pic in a previous post). I didn't stay there long...lol.





So when I'm getting ready to leave to take the kids to school this morning, this was guarding the front door so instead of killing it I decided to catch it. I don't kill things once they get to be a certain size. He's so big I think he needs a name. Anyone know what kind of spider this is? He's sitting upstairs in a rubbermaid take-along waiting for Mike to get home to release him. Oh you wanna know why I'm not releasing him? Why, because he's a jumper of course and I figure if I let him go he's coming after me. I just couldn't have this little buggy walking around my house. Eww!


For all of my stitching friends, there's a really great contest here if you'd like to enter. The blog is called Stitch Pink and the contest is called the Pink Fiber Heaven contest. The hope of the site is to bring awareness of the importance of breast screening, and early detection of breast cancer. Really great site. Be sure to leave a comment so you'll be entered to win some of those pretty pink threads.

Keep your eyeballs open for my next post. I hope to take ya on a field trip in Historic Downtown Fredericksburg. Or at least start it. Cassie is participating in an ice cream eating contest at the Fudge Factory tomorrow so I should have lots of fun pics to share. What fun, I can't wait. She's really excited.

Duck, Duck, Duck, Goose!

I was SO bad today but it was SO good! I took the day off from my quest to drop a few pounds to celebrate Mother's Day a wee bit early. Mike is leaving on a business trip to Nashville on Mother's Day so since he had today off, we decided to go out today instead. I doubt very seriously we would've gone out on Mother's Day anyway. The restaurants are far too busy. It was much nicer going today. He and I went out to lunch. I LOVE Mexican food and we hadn't had any since we moved so we decided to try a place out today. It was SO yummy! I quickly discovered though that the Mexican food they have here isn't like the Tex Mex I'm used to eating at home. I SO miss El Chicos. Whenever we do manage to make it back home, that'll be my first stop. Yuuuuuuuummy. The restaurant we went to today was still really good. I had a chicken enchilada with a chile relleno. Yum yum. It was nice to go out without the kids today. I miss having someone to watch them so we can go out. The restaurant we went to was in Central Park. I did take my camera so we could start off our field trip there but when I took my first pic it said memory full on it. I knew that was bologna because I just bought a new SD card. I opened up the card compartment and realized I left my card at home. I can take a few pics that are just stored on my camera. It lets me take a whopping 4, give or take a couple..sheesh. I decided to postpone my blogging field trip when I found some other things I just had to take pics of.

If this isn't one of the prettiest little mamas in the

world I don't know what is. 9 babies! Could you imagine? I certainly couldn't. Happy early Mother's Day, ducky.

And while this mama is taking care of all of these babies by herself, I see these daddy's waiting right outside the restaurant doors having a siesta and waiting for scraps. And why oh why are you sitting back while she's taking care of all of these kids? Hmmmm??

After we got in to the car I wanted to drive across the street to a pond where we saw a lot of geese. I discovered when we pulled out we didn't need to go over there because there were geese right in front of us. This is the first time I've seen one of these as a baby. They're a lot bigger than the baby ducks. So cute...aren't they pretty? I wanted to get closer but when I was a teenager I had a friend who was chased by a goose and it wasn't pretty so I decided to keep my distance. I love birds.

After we picked the kids up from school we took them to the Coldstone Creamery. We hadn't been before and some coupons came in the Sunday paper. I'm not usually an ice cream eater but it was SO good! So you pick out which kind of ice cream you want. In my case..no our cause Mike picked the same thing as me cause I'm a good picker of things and stuff. I picked cake batter ice cream. You can pick one topping/mix in. Well, you can pick more than 1 but our coupon was for 1 and I didn't want to pay for any more. So I picked brownies. She took the ice cream and put it on a smooth surface. Then she took the brownie and sat it on top of the ice cream and just sort of mashed it all together. After she finished she put it in a chocolate dipped waffle bowl. That ice cream was SO good! I've definitely had my sugar/Mexican food fix for a while. Back to my regular schedule tomorrow. It was all pretty bad but it was a lot of fun :)

I'm happy to say I see a light at the end of the tunnel in regards to this never ending stitching project. I plan to stay up and finish it tonight. It's not that it's taken forever, it just caused a few issues and took a lot longer than I thought it would. Hopefully I'll have a pic to post in the next day or two. I've got to make a mad dash to the framers or it'll never be finished in time. It may not anyway because I need it by the 23rd *sigh*. My new Prairie Schooler charts have been screaming at me to stitch something from them. They're patiently waiting for me to finish "whats her face".

My favorite tree

I got to thinking when I was driving around running errands yesterday that I should have brought my camera with me. There are so many things around here that I want to show everyone. I want everyone to see some of the things I see and the places I go. I'm going to try to make it a point to keep my camera with me so I can take you all on a field trip of sorts. We're not venturing out today but I got to looking and there are plenty of things to show you around here. For today, we'll talk about my favorite tree, shall we? It's in our backyard. It's really really tall and really pretty. We have a lot of animals in the forest, tons of squirrels. I've yet to see one brave enough to meander up to the top of it. Did I mention a little while back that there were some deer back here? Yep. Cassie came in and told me but I didn't believe her. She took the April fool's thing a little too far this year so I thought she was messing with me. I went out there and sure enough, there were a couple just laying around enjoying the breeze. Back to the tree.....I tried to take a single pic for ya but not gonna happen because it's so tall so I took pictures in parts for ya. In all it's glory I bring you my favorite tree:

Isn't it great? All of that is one tree! And you know where else I can see said tree without going outside? In the bathroom. Here's your view if sitting on the potty. I can't tell you how many times I've sat there looking up when the wind was blowing really hard praying that one of those branches didn't decide to snap.

Seriously mom, have we not taken enough pics of trees already???

Speaking of trees, I got to thinking that we use way too many paper napkins. I kinda feel guilty when I think about how many we use. I'm thinking that I should invest in some cloth napkins and only use paper napkins to pack in lunch boxes.

Yesterday was the best mail day ever! Not only did I receive two Prairie Schooler charts that I ordered, but I also received an OOP (out of print) Prairie Schooler chart that I won on ebay. The OOP chart is book #10, A Prairie Christmas. The cover is a little worn because the chart is so old (23 years!) but it's perfectly readable and I'm thrilled to add it to my collection. The 2 charts that I ordered are books # 55 & 56, Garden Blooms and Garden Birds. I love the Garden Blooms chart and have plans for those flowers. The funny thing is, yesterday morning way before the mail ran I had to run several errands. One of which was stopping by the stitching shop to pick up a couple of things that someone wants me to finish for them. I knew my other charts would be coming in soon but I've been having some "getting a new Prairie Schooler chart" withdrawals so I bought Cranberry Christmas while I was there. Oops! He he! Yesterday was a great Prairie Schooler day and I plan to stitch some of these things up after I finish this never ending gift I'm stitching. Have some Prairie Schooler charts that you don't want that I don't have? I'd just be ever so thrilled to take them off your hands. It's an addiction I tell ya. In a perfect world they'd re release some of their retired charts :).