NewFOs - March Update

Barbara had a great idea when she came up with the NewFO challenge. We're supposed to start a new project each month.

March's NewFo is a scrappy Irish Chain, using the same instructions I used for the brown one. Except I didn't save the instructions, so I've had to measure my finished quilt and do some guessing. All of the two inch squares are cut and half of the blocks are pieced. I really didn't expect it to go together this quickly. There are ten or twelve more blocks here than I had done when I showed this project earlier this week.



I'm still making happy progress on the drab postage stamps I started for February. Almost half of the blocks for that one are pieced. I did have enough squares cut, but I keep stealing them for the Quilt Square Quilt Along, so I should cut some more while there's still time to get them randomly distributed in the blocks.

The Log Cabin Spiral hasn't changed at all since the last time I showed it back in January.

What am I starting in April? I'm thinking the Garden Club Quilt, but I've got some other stuff I need to get finished up first. And I need to buy yards and yards of fusible web and start digging out good garden fabrics...

finish it up Friday -- pastel hearts

I love these weekly linky parties because they help keep me productive. Even though I need two girly baby quilts for the friends of an aquaintance, I've been dragging my feet. But give me the chance to share them with my online quilting friends, and that'll get me to the sewing machine!

I started quilting this little baby over a week ago and had it finished except for the last corner...then someone said "Mom" and I stopped paying enough attention to what I was doing and the edge of the backing got flipped under and quilted to the quilt.

The soft pink and white checked flannel I found to back it with is perfect for a baby quilt, but it's a pain to rip stitches out of. I did what I could in the few minutes I had left before it was time to get dinner ready that night, then I put the quilt aside and it sat until I realized that it was Thursday afternoon and I didn't have a project to post today. So I unwrapped my brand new seam ripper and got to work. And now I've got something cute to share in the linky parties this week.

This post is linked to finish it up Friday at Crazy Mom Quilts.

goodies!

My husband had to work all day and we'd gone out to dinner with my grandparents a couple of days earlier, so I spent my birthday at home with the kids. My plan was to play with fabric, but I don't think I ever made it to the sewing machine. And then my birthday was over and I forgot about it.

I didn't know I had presents coming...



Mom gave me a treadle drawer full of fat quarters and a bunch of patterns. Including the spiky butterflies!

A few years back, a friend and I were shop hopping and I saw a quilt with spiky appliqued butterflies. They stuck in my head and a couple of days later I called the shop where I'd seen them to see if I could order the pattern. They had no clue what I was talking about, and even after googling and asking on some of the quilting lists I play on I never did find out what the pattern was and had given up hope of finding it.

She also got me the patterns for Hocuspocusville and Calendula Patterdrip's Cottage, two patterns that I've been drooling over for ages. Now I've got to find the perfect fabric to stitch them on...anyone tried Connecting Threads' Mirage?

I didn't realize I'd get so spoiled just for getting old!

don't get the quilt muddy!

Yesterday afternoon I was taking pictures of the first quilt I still can't show you. It seems like a quilt made with a fabric line called "A Walk in the Woods" should have pictures taken in the woods, doesn't it? We wound up using the trees in the back yard, but the big Douglas Fir has probably been here since this area was woods, so it counts!

The whole time we were outside, we were trying to keep the edges of the quilt out of the dirt. And we did manage it. (I wish I could say the same for the train of my wedding dress twenty years ago. I'm still afraid to take it out of the special magic wedding dress box to see how bad the damage is/was.)

Does everyone who takes pictures of quilts outside worry about getting them dirty?



All of those posts that everyone keeps writing about no-reply bloggers must be working -- this time the first winner I chose for my St. Patrick's Day giveaway had contact information!

The winner is Jill, who wrote:

I need to make a baby quilt and this would be perfect! Thanks for the chance.

Congratulations, Jill! And thanks to everyone who took time to enter.

I need to applique a rake

As soon as I showed her my copy of Back to Charm School, my mom went out and bought a copy of Country Threads Goes to Charm School. To be honest, if she hadn't done it, I would have.

We also checked her bookshelves to see if she had anything else by Mary Etherington. Now I'm drooling over Quilts from Aunt Amy all over again. Somewhere up in the sewing room are some 21st Century Bullseye blocks I started in early 2008 and haven't seen since. This time, it's Flying Bats and the Drunkard's Path quilts that are tempting me.

And while Mom was heading to Joann's to look for the first Charm School Book, I had to head to the library to check out Garden Club Quilts for the umpteenth time.



I am so in love with this quilt! It's got an appliqued rake.... And a chair... And gourd birdhouses... And a beehive! And some other stuff I'm not quite as head over heels for. I may make a couple of adjustments to my own quilt and add some more birds or flower pots or something.

The book has gone out of print since the last time I drooled over it, but I was able to order a used copy from Amazon. And while I was at it, I ordered a copy of Hobo Quilts. The odds of finishing my quilt might be better if I have my own copy and don't have to check it out from the library every time I think I'm going to get back to work on it.

I bought both books with the gift cards I earned through swag bucks, a search engine that rewards searches with points that can be used towards Amazon gift cards, which I've been using to build my collection of AccuQuilt dies and quilting books. Just looking up quilting stuff and answers to the boys' questions, I earn enough points for a $5 gift card every three weeks or so. Enter the code MARCHSWAG if you sign up before April 2nd, and they'll give you an extra 70 points.

Now I've got to get a bunch of things done before I can start digging for the perfect fabric for an applique chair and chicken and rake.

I know where it's going!

If I'm going to keep making bigger quilts, I'm going to have to find a better place to lay the blocks out for progress pictures. What I need is a big design wall, but there's no place in this house to put a permanent one. We've got all of these pesky doors and windows and pieces of furniture. I think I can eventually manage a portable one in the sewing room, but it'll block the door when I'm using it...

Before I do something stupid, someone please agree with me that it would be wrong to put a design wall in the teenage girl's room and just plain stupid to put one in the room shared by my boys!

I'm still loving this scrappy Irish Chain, which is going together a lot faster than I thought it would.



I think I mentioned that this was supposed to be my quilt until the first time I laid out the blocks. Then I got a strong feeling that it wasn't mine...but I wasn't sure quite whose it was. After talking to a friend two days ago, I know exactly where this quilt is going, and now I can't wait to get it done.

To see more projects, head over to Design Wall Monday at Patchwork Times.

why I didn't get much quilting done this week

See that stream on the other side of the driveway, out past the seven inches of snow? As of Wednesday morning, that was our only running water.



Early Wednesday morning, the fan in the bedroom stopped and woke me up. Then I realized that the light we leave on in the kitchen was flickering and got up to check things out. That's when the transformer out across the highway blew... that'll wake you up fast! A couple of minutes after that, a branch came down across the feeder line to the house and the transformer at that corner went and then all of the big drama was over for the moment.

Then we moved on to the little drama of trying to keep kids happy in a cold dark house while explaining to them that they can't go out to play in the only real snow there's been all year because of the live power line hanging across the yard. And the fun of hauling water from the stream to flush the toilet with and making sure that no one opened the fridge.

I don't think the boys ever felt the cold. They definitely didn't sit still long enough for it to seep in.

Last week, Judy wrote about why she doesn't store gas or think generators are such a great idea. I do agree about not storing gas for long periods are in large amounts, but I love our brand new generator.

It won't run the whole house, but a few hours at a time of heat and running water would give us a change to wash some dishes and take showers and refill the water jugs. If we'd had it when this adventure started, we could have moved all of the groceries I bought Monday from the fridge to the freezer and left the generator running until they'd frozen.

On the way back from picking up the generator, I stopped at the grocery store to get dry ice and asked if there were special instructions for using it to keep a refridgerator cold. I know we did it a few years ago during an extended power outage, but I couldn't remember if there was some special trick to it. Everyone I could find to ask told me absolutely not to put it in my fridge. The USDA says I can. Wish I'd had access to that information when I needed it! Now I get to sort through my fridge and decide what's safe.

Weekly Stash Report

Fabric Used this Week: 1.25 yard
Fabric Used year to Date: 25.75 yards
Added this Week: 0 yards
Added Year to Date: 57.75 yards
Net Added for 2012: 32 yards

This post is linked to Patchwork Times.

finish it up Friday -- I'm late!

Purple Sue was actually finished up on Tuesday, but things happened. I'll explain in tomorrow's post -- today I want to gush about little Purple Sue.

Isn't she cute?




This was my first experiment with the AccuQuilt Sunbonnet Sue die that I bought from Jo. I'd never made a Sunbonnet Sue block before, or really planned to, but I thought she'd be cute for the baby quilts.



Honestly, I've got mixed feelings about some of the applique dies. How many times do I have to cut the same shape to justify the purchase? I expect Sue and the birds and flowers and stars to earn their keep, but I'm trying to limit my applique dies to shapes that I know I'll use over and over again. (Which doesn't stop me from drooling over their new airplanes and trains and circus animals...I could put those on baby quilts, right?)



Sue was a good way to use up the 3" squares I had left over from the pastel heart quilt I did back in January. I used almost the last of the squares for a pieced back. The few that were left after that are probably going to wind up trimmed down into 2 1/2" squares.

This post is linked to finish it up Friday at Crazy Mom Quilts and Little Quilt Monday at Pieceful Life and to the Spring Fling at igottacreate.

wfmw -- grocery shopping with my kids

I grocery shop with all four of my kids, mostly because if I didn't grocery shop with them, there wouldn't be groceries. My husband works long hours and I'm not about to miss out on any family time to run to to the store by myself. (Although I totally admit that being in the grocery store all by myself is an amazing feeling.)

One of the benefits of shopping with my kids is that the older ones know what brands we buy, and why we buy those brands. Sometimes we buy store brands because they're just as good, and sometimes we buy specific brands because we like them better. They also know how to comparison shop.

I was going to buy two boxes of name brand crackers yesterday to put cheese on for a snack later and my oldest son handed me a store brand version in a larger box for a lower price. Of course, the little guys ate my crackers this morning and now I've got cheese but no crackers....but we were headed in the right direction!

These days, I can send my oldest into the store with cash and a list and she'll come out with what we need. My girl will even argue with the cashier and get a manager to straighten things out when two corn dogs from the deli ring up for thirty-seven dollars and fifty cents.

Having children who know how to grocery shop works for me -- by the time they're grown, they'll have all of the grocery shopping skills they need! This post is linked to Works for me Wednesday at We are THAT family.

drab postage stamps

Since I'm still catching my breath between bouts of coughing and didn't fell like working on anything that involved math or color placement or actually paying attention to much besides not sewing my finger, I pulled out my drab four patches and made them into sixteen patches.

Now that there's more of it than I had here, it's looking a lot better, more like the quilt I finished in October and the bigger version I had in my head.



There are twenty-five blocks here, out of the eighty-one I've got planned for this project. I had all of the squares cut, but then I cannibalized a bunch for my February Quilt Along Square, so I probably need to do more digging and cutting.

To see more projects, head over to Design Wall Monday at Patchwork Times. My St. Patrick's Day Giveaway is still running through the 23rd, so make sure to enter for a chance to win the green and white die cut Drunkard's Path pieces.

weekly stash report

Have you checked out the St. Patrick's Day Blog Hop yet? There are 126 bloggers participating, and some great prizes to be won. My own giveaway -- for the die cut pieces to make a 36" square Drunkard's Path quilt -- is on this post.

Weekly Stash Report

Fabric Used this Week: 0 yard
Fabric Used year to Date: 24.5 yards
Added this Week: 0 yards
Added Year to Date: 57.75 yards
Net Added for 2012: 33.25 yards

No fabric to report as used for this week, but I've got a couple of projects that are almost done. I think I needed to catch my breath for a couple of days after that last burst of quilty fun.

To see more weekly stash reports, click over to Patchwork Times.

my little experiment with hand piecing

When I started this little quilt, it was an experiment and I didn't know if I could manage the hand piecing portion or not. To my surprise, it didn't take long at all.



The pattern is Do Not Put Your Elbows on the Table, from Back to Charm School by Mary Etherington and Connie Tesene. You can read all about how much I adore the book in this post.

And my new success with hand stitching may have given me the confidence I need to try the Sprocket Quilt Along. Now I've got to decide whether to finish a few other things first, or just add a new project to my already daunting to do list. (We all know that I'm just going to add another project, right?)

This post is linked to Finish it up Friday over at Crazy Mom Quilts, Sew and Tell, and Can I get a Whoop-Whoop? at Confessions of a Fabric Addict and Little Quilt Monday

let's celebrate St. Patrick's Day with another blog hop and giveaways!

I got such a positive response to the die cut pumpkins last time that I decided to do die cuts again for this giveaway.

The prize: Green and white die cut pieces to make 144 3 1/2" Drunkard's Path units, enough for a 36" square baby quilt or wall hanging. Or tote bag, or whatever other idea you can cook up. The pieces are cut from new, pre-washed, 100% cotton fabric. I'm including a few extras, just because things sometimes go wrong and it's stressful to have just exactly enough to finish the project, and 1/3 yard of the green fabric to use for binding your project.



The smaller Drunkard's Path die is my absolute favorite of my AccuQuilt dies. It's the one I used to cut the pieces for Cabbage Roses. Curved piecing is a bit of a challenge, but with die cut pieces and notches to match up, it's not that hard. Starting with the die cuts has given me enough practice that I'm gearing up to try some curved patterns that I'm going to have to cut myself.



To enter, just leave a comment on this post before 11:59 pm March 23. I'd love it if you wanted to follow my blog, but with the recent changes to Google Friend Connect (not for my blog, but I don't know how that will affect my readers), I know lots of you are changing what you follow and how you do it. I'll use the random number generator and choose a winner. And yes, I will ship internationally.

an interesting hunk of lava

Any idea what this is?

It's not a tea pot, because it doesn't have a spout. The inside is too tiny to hold anything. About all that we do know is that it's made of lava. We found it at a thrift shop, and we're guessing it's not new.

I've Googled, but all I find are lava lamps and lava cakes and lava for landscaping... no little things that look sort of like tea pots but aren't. So what it is, as far as we're concerned, is an neat hunk of lava to go on the fireplace mantel.

This post is linked to Time Travel Thursday, Ivy & Elephants & Vintage Thingie Thursday.

pieced batting

I'm cheap when it comes to quilting -- I think I've probably mentioned that a time or two. Sure, I've got a few expensive toys and a large fabric stash, but I try to get the most mileage I can out of my quilting supplies, whether that means chain piecing to conserve thread, or piecing bits of leftover batting into usable sizes.

If I've got two largish pieces and a big project to quilt, I'll zig zag them together on the sewing machine. But if I'm working on a baby quilt, I usually just lay the pieces out like a jigsaw puzzle and use extra pins when I baste that section. I quilt so densely that the batting's not going anywhere once the quilt's done.



A friend sent me a roll of Heat Press Batting Together, a flexible fusible tape that joins pieces of batting into usable sizes. This stuff is neat!

I had a hunk of batting left over from the big project that was just barely too narrow for baby quilts. With a couple of lengths of this and another narrow strip of batting, I put together two hunks that were exactly the size I needed.

The instructions say that it works on polyester batting. I'll have to try that next, although I'm a little nervous about getting my iron too close to something that might melt.

Purple Sue looks even cuter now that she's quilted, doesn't she?

wfmw - cooking as a family

We eat better on my husband's days home from work. He's a much better cook than I am and whips up stuff that I'd never even aspire to. When I cook, I'm trying not to burn anything or set the kitchen on fire. When he cooks, he's inventing a recipie based on three different things he saw on the food channel and two or three recipies he glanced at online.

When we cook together, I mostly hand him things and dig things out of the cabinets and keep up with the dishes. It's a good system.

A couple of weeks ago we made tamales, something we do a few times a year. It's a big project, but it's nice to putter around the house while we wait for the pork to cook, then to wrap the tamales together, then putter some more while they cook.

While the roast was simmering, the kids and I watched Fantasia. Leif hadn't seen it yet and was completely scandalized by the naked babies who weren't even wearing any underwear (those would be the cupids in the Pastoral Symphony.) Quinn wanted to watch something with "lots of death" in it -- the dinosaurs in the Rite of Spring didn't fit his criteria. Not that we could see, because Leif kept holding up plastic dinosaurs to the screen and adding his own dramatic touches.

And then there were the dancing ostriches and elephants...I wound up searching "do girl elephants have tusks?" It turns out the African ones do and the Asian ones don't. Sometimes it's a good idea to look it up even though I'm sure I should probably know the answer.

Cooking together as a family and hanging around the house all day works for me! This post is linked to Works for me Wednesday at We are THAT family.

momentum is a wonderful thing

Sunday, I was going to piece ten blocks on my NewFo and then move on to something else. I go the blocks done, and got started on the baby quilt I had planned...and before I knew it, the baby quilt was done and I was back to the NewFo blocks.

I wanted to try the spiral baby quilt with rounded corners, but I had a bit of trouble keeping track of the rows on the first one and wasn't quite ready to throw half square triangles into the mix.

So I tried it with rings:



A piece of purple checked fabric has been sitting on the table next to my recliner and whispering that it wanted to be Sunbonnet Sue's bonnet. Its friend, a flowered puple print, wanted to be her dress...and I had some 3" squares left over from the first two baby quilts I made this year...

So Monday afternoon I got out my Go! and the Sunbonnet Sue die I just bought from Jo, and that fabric became a hat and dress...



I kept changing plans as I went along. It's a miracle that everything fit together. Then she needed backing and I had some narrow lengths of the fabric I used for the dress, and some 3" squares left, so she got a pieced backing...



And while the cutter was out, I decided to try out the Hearts die...



And then I pieced another block for the scrappy Irish Chain. I've got a couple of different ideas where it might wind up once it's done. Maybe this one isn't supposed to be mine.

March NewFO

Last Monday, I had one single block of my NewFO to show you. It didn't look like much of anything. Since then, I've been making more blocks -- almost a third of what I'll need for the quilt.

How's this?



I can't decide if I love it or not. I like it, but it's not quite the quilt I had in my head when I decided to make something like the brown Irish Chain, but really scrappy, and with different color placement.

I am having a lot of fun piecing the blocks, so I'll keep plugging away and figure out what to do with the finished quilt once it's done.

To see more projects, head over to Design Wall Monday at Patchwork Times.

I need something sharper

A few months back, I read about Skinning a Quilt. This week, I got to try it for myself. More than once. I sure wish I'd had a scalpel -- or at least a sharper seam ripper -- to do it with. The quilt did get quilted after a couple of false stars, and I'm absolutely loving it, but I can't show it off quite yet.



What techniques have you read about and then unexpectedly found yourself using?

Weekly Stash Report

Fabric Used this Week: 9.5 yards
Fabric Used year to Date: 24.5 yards
Added this Week: 8 yards
Added Year to Date: 57.75 yards
Net Added for 2012: 33.25 yards

I bought some more white muslin because I didn't think I had enough for my March NewFO. I want to be sure the white blocks are all the same white. To see more weekly stash reports, click over to Patchwork Times.

wfmw - too much hassle?

For Christmas 2010, we bought an amaryllis centerpiece at Costco -- three bulbs planted in a black ceramic rectangle. One of the selling points was supposed to be that the bulbs would bloom year after year. The box promised "after care" instructions.

The flowers bloomed, they died, and I went online to figure out what to do with them so they'd bloom again next year. There were no instructions.

I asked at the nursery where we buy our garden stuff. They have flyers for everything, so I figured they'd know. I did get a flyer, along with advice that it would be a lot easier to just buy new bulbs every year.

I didn't want to buy new bulbs. I didn't even really want the flowers. What I wanted was to see if I could get the ones I already had to flower again.

Christmas 2011 came and went and my bulbs just sat there in their planter. I started to think about getting rid of it and finding something new for the window sill. Then, a couple of weeks ago, little green shoots started peeking up from the tops of the bulbs.

Before too long, we had a jungle of leaves in the kitchen window.



And now we've got a flower.



I'm glad I didn't buy new bulbs and that I gave it a shot.

This post is linked to Works for me Wednesday at We are THAT family and Waste not Wednesday at Jo's Country Junction.

one of the shiny things

New baby quilts were on my list of goals for the month, so this one isn't a total distraction from the to do list, but the urge to try it hit me late one night and wouldn't let go until I made the quilt a week or so later.



Remember the Spiral Log Cabin blocks I started for my January NewFO? I haven't made any more of them, but they're always on my mind in that rotating list of things I'd like work on as soon as I get a chance. And I'm always thinking of new ways to play with the baby quilts, especially now that I'm working on a batch of the 24" square ones to send to KaHolly.

Now that it's done, I've got the urge to try another one with half square triangles to round the cornersa bit. Because one scrappy little baby quilts leads to the next and the next one after that.

The original tutorial I followed for the spirals is over at Love Laugh Quilt. This post is linked to Finish it up Friday over at Crazy Mom Quilts

the shiny things are not my enemies

On one of the homeschooling discussion lists (at least I think that's where it was) a woman was talking about looking something up for her kids...or heading in the direction to look something up for her kids...and then she saw something shiny.

My world is full of shiny things right now. The more daunting my to-do list gets, the more shiny, sparkly things pop up around me. And I've learned from experience that trying to ignore the distractions just makes me cranky.

Last night, it wasn't even a shiny thing that caught my attention. I was feeling yucky from the germs that Teenage Daughter shared and had a DVD from Netflix that no one but me was going to want to watch and since I wasn't going to be working on the big project I can't show you yet, the closest thing to grab was Do Not Put Your Elbows on the Table.

Between last night and this morning, I finished the hand piecing and got the border on. I did line up one of my rows wrong and cut off a couple of my honeycomb shapes instead of figuring out where I'd gone wrong and taking it apart and resewing it, but overall I'm still pretty proud of myself.

It's not bad!



And honestly, if I hadn't been in the mood to work on anything and everything that's not on my to do list, this could've sat there until the end of time waiting for me to pick it back up.

This one -- my March NewFO -- actually is on the list, there's just not much to show yet.



To see more projects, head over to Design Wall Monday at Patchwork Times.

weekly stash report

Teenage Girl has been skulking through the house with a cold all week and now she seems to have passed it on to me. I don't have time to be sick right now. Not that the germs seem to care.

For the past two months, I've been tossing trimmings of fabric that are too small for anything into the big metal waste basket in my sewing corner. This morning I emptied and weighed it.

Why weigh it? Because I knew there was a lot of fabric in there that didn't get count as used up in quilts, but should be counted somewhere because it was leaving the house.

Ten yards. I need to make a category for fabric that's not quite used or tossed. Because that's going to add up.




Weekly Stash Report

Fabric Used this Week: .5 yard
Fabric Used year to Date: 15 yards
Added this Week: 21.75 yards
Added Year to Date: 49.75 yards
Net Added for 2012: 34.75 yards


To see more weekly stash reports, click over to Patchwork Times.

Back to Charm School Giveaway Winner!

The winner of Back to Charm School is Gretchen, who wrote:

I loved the first charm school book and would love to win a copy of this one too. Thanks for the chance!

Gretchen's comment was actually the sixth picked by the Random Number Generator. The first five were all no-reply bloggers without any contact information at all.

Please, if you're entering giveaways for things you want to win, make sure that there's a way to contact you. SewCalGal has a couple of great articles -- Wanted - Quilters that never win in a Giveaway & Are you a No Reply Blogger/Leave no reply comments? that explain how to adjust your settings so that you can be notified if you win something.

quilted & bound & ready for the wall!

This one is a reminder that I really do like small and fiddly more than I like big and easy, but after putting together a hundred and twenty three pieces into a twelve by twelve inch square, I'm ready to go back to my 2 1/2" postage stamps for a couple of hours. Compared to the pieces in this little beauty, those are huge.

I'm glad Jo chose an easier block for March!

The winner of the Pumpkins is Coloradolady, who wrote:

I never plan ahead, maybe this would fix that problem! This is so cute!! Thanks for the chance and adorable giveaway.

There were so many nice comments, I wish I'd had enough pumpkins for everyone who entered. Today is the last day to enter the Back to Charm School Giveaway, so you've still got a chance to win something fun.

This post is linked to Finish it up Friday over at Crazy Mom Quilts, Sew and Tell, and Can I get a Whoop-Whoop? at Confessions of a Fabric Addict.... and I just added a link to Little Quilt Monday

Big Brother

On our drive to town yesterday, my teenage daughter and I were discussing the whole idea of Big Brother and how creepy it is that George Owell's idea has become a reality. About an hour later, we heard about Target's Pregnancy Predictor.

Creepy, isn't it? I'm not sure if I believe the pregnancy predictions are as accurate as they say they are. But I've noticed that the ads that pop up when my kiddos log off of Webkinz are all for Sizzix cutters these days. They seem to know that I want one. (Probably has something to do with the fact that the ads are from Overstock.com and I've been on their site looking at the cutters -- nothing eerie about that!)

But if Big Brother is watching me so closely, why am I suddenly getting free formula samples in the mail? You'd think that they'd know that even though I've got four kids, I've never purchased baby formula. And what logic makes them think "Hey, her fourth kid is six now -- she must be ready to pop with #5"?!

I'm guessing they don't know that much about me after all.