Yesterday, my babies were sick again and both insisted that the only place they could be content was in Mommy's lap. Alone. It didn't work out well at all.

I'm sure it's nothing serious, just watery eyes and sniffly noses and feeling miserable, but we're not having any fun here. They got a little friskier later in the day, so I tried to wash and iron the fat quarters.

I want to know what the story behind this fabric is. A lot of pieces were still folded in neat little squares with the ends tucked in, exactly the way they left the quilt shop. Those gave me a sad feeling -- why didn't our mystery quilter do anything with them? Others were cut at the strangest angle, but had been folded back to the size of fat quarters. Those made me feel better, because I'm imagining the weird cut was for a specific project.

That was the stuff in the top half of the bag. At the bottom were scraps of solid colors and ugliest novelty prints ever. I'm positive that the stuff on the top and the stuff on the bottom came from two different sources and was put together at the thrift store. The ugly stuff is back in the bag, waiting for its fate to be determined.

The good fabric tried to whisper to me while I was ironing it, but Alex was hanging over my shoulder and making too much noise for me to hear exactly what it wants to be. I know what she thinks it should be, and which pieces she wants for herself, and I've got a blister on the side of my hand where I brushed it against the iron because I was too busy keeping everyone else away from it to watch out for myself.

Despite all of that, I found exactly the right colors to make a little wall quilt from one of the magazines. It's one of the rare days when we stay home and I should be able to get some stuff done, but I spent the entire night cuddling Leif in exactly the right position so he could sleep and the day's gotten off to a rotten start.