Thank You for Giraffes

These are quick photos of a book I wrote and illustrated with quilts. I have some better pictures without the glare, but can't find them on my computer right now. This is the text of the book:

My daughter Cara loves giraffes. When she was two years old, she always included giraffes in her prayers. One evening her usually long list of blessings ran a little short. Her prayer went something like this: "Thank You for my home. Thank You for my family. Thank You for our food. Thank You for giraffes. . . . . . and more giraffes." After she heard me tell this story to several people, that phrase became part of every night's prayer.

My prayer is that all children, to whomever they pray, have much for which to be thankful.

thank you for giraffes, and more giraffes

thank you for food

thank you for water, and otters

thank you for wild

thank you for calm

thank you for sunsets

thank you for dawn

thank you for home

and places far

thank you for the moon and stars

thank you for animals big

and small

but most of all,

thank you for love.

The book will be for sale soon on Amazon.com. Please check back!!

The Softest Bed in the World

Mark is out of town, as is often the case, and I decided to do a "While you were out" makeover in the living room. I bought a new rug, painted the walls (a golden yellowy color like in the center of the quilt), and started this quilt for a wallhanging, picking up on the diamond pattern in the rug. At this moment, it's further along, but not quite ready for another picture.

Have you ever noticed that cats think the softest bed in the world is an unfinished quilt? Particularly if it's in many, many pieces on a design board. (I have given up on putting my design board on the wall, it inevitably gets knocked down....) The thing about cats, though, is that they can lie on it and just coat it with hair, keeping it intact. Radar, our rat terrier, can't understand why Jack and Jill the cats can lie on the quilt puzzle but he can't.

A Little Romance

This is a quilt I made after my "first" date
with my husband. Well, my first date with him this century. Mark was my first love, when I was 13 and he was 16. He liked me too and was about to finally ask me on a date (by then I was 16), and my family moved to another state. We kept in touch by letters (whoa, that dates us, doesn't it?) and saw eachother occasionally, and then dated for a year when I was in my residency. For reasons unclear to me, I broke up with him, and we were out of touch for 18 years. Then he "googled" me, we wrote, talked, and he came for a visit. We went out to dinner, then went to Minnehaha Falls, a beautiful waterfall in Minneapolis. We kissed under a full moon. So, back to the quilt. I named it "Full moon, waterfall, kiss." Later, I told Mark that I was making a quilt for him, and that it was about our first date. He said, then it must be about a full moon, and a waterfall, and a kiss." I know it's unbelievable, but he really did! I think that's when I decided to marry him. How many men would have said that? I gave him the quilt, and he loved it. Then I married him and got it back!

Happily Ever After, Finally

Earth Day 2007

I remember exactly where I was 17 years ago today. I was in the hospital with preterm labor, had been there for 3 weeks. (At the time I didn't know that my total stay would be 2 and 1/2 months.) I was watching Earth Day programs on TV. I was about to have my first baby, and I felt hopeful about the world she was going to inherit. There were many problems, but people were looking for solutions, and everyone was enthusiastic and passionate.


I made this quilt in November 2004, a few days after George Bush was "re-elected," feeling despondent. Our beautiful home was being sold to the highest bidder to do with as they pleased. Global warming was "just a theory." Scientists who said otherwise were being told to shut up.

In this picture the quilt looks pretty crooked. I think it reflects how depressed I was!


2007, the tide is beginning to turn. It took being caught in how many lies, who can even try to count, to convince America that Bush is not protecting us, on any level.

The quilt is called "On Thin Ice." I guess that's self explanatory. If something is not done about global warming, polar bears might be extinct by 2050.

Today is Earth Day, every day is Earth Day. Let's all think of what we can do to save our lovely planet. Small things like recycling, taking shorter showers, walking instead of driving when we can. Bigger things like electing leaders who have a plan for the environment. We're smart, we can turn this around. If you want lots more ideas, go the the Environmental Defense website. www.environmentaldefense.org. They have a wealth of information and many ways to get involved.


By the way, my baby who was so anxious to be born turned out healthy and wonderful. She is a beautiful young woman with energy and ideas to make this world a better place. Things are looking up.

Radar smiles.

Mothers' Hearts

It's been a long week and I feel more like showing than saying. I made this quilt a couple of years ago after I found some beautiful fabric with moms and babies from all over the world. Each mom and baby is framed by fabric that looks like it might have come from their part of the world. I did actually use some woven fabric that I bought in Guatemala when I was adopting my son Danny. You can kind of see the machine quilting, it's all hearts. I have this quilt hanging in my clinic. I see families from many parts of the world, and that's part of the reason I made it, but mostly it's to symbolize that mothers' hearts are all the same. There is so much suffering in the world today, and I think that many people numb themselves to it by telling themselves that those people are different. But I know, absolutely know, that mothers in refugee camps in Darfur, mothers in Afghanistan and Iraq, and Iran, mothers everywhere, love their children as fiercely as I love mine. Fathers too, but there weren't fathers in the fabric.

Some pictures to go with the quilt--three of my kids on a recent trip to St. Louis, a baby Emporer penguin who dwarfs his mother, at the St. Louis zoo, and my grandmother cuddling my baby Radar.

Pictures of the San Juan Islands

I can't see any rhyme or reason to how the pictures show up. Oh well, baby blog steps. The tree is called a pacific madrone. It is very beautiful. The bark sheds, and underneath it varies from mahogany color to green. I don't know what the flowers were, they looked kind of like small yellow poppies.

Work in Progress

This is a quilt I've been working on since last summer, when we returned from our "family-moon" in the San Juan Islands in Washington State. A family-moon is a honeymoon where you take the kids along. We had a wonderful time, roaming the beautiful island, going orca watching, visiting the lavender farm and alpaca farm. I decided to try my first landscape quilt with pictures I took there. This is about half of the quilt, you can't see the orcas or the sculpture garden, or the snow capped mountain. And it's not finished, but a fellow quilter on a quilting website wanted ideas about landscape quilts, so I got mine out, and now I can't wait to start working on it again! Here are some of the photos I've used to make the quilt:

Well, I can't get them to go onto the page in the order I want, so I'm going to post and come back. I'm a cyber-genius, if you haven't figured it out.

Play With Your Food

A few years ago a book came out called "Play With Your Food," and it looked like something I would have thought of, so I loved it. Tonight as I was fixing a salad, I noticed that the green pepper had a nose, mouth, cheeks and even a chin. So I gave him some googly eyes. Ummm, he was good.

Eat a Rainbow Every Day!

This is one of the quilts I have up in my exam rooms. I have tried to make the rooms cheerful and unthreatening, with subliminal messages. This one is all fruits and vegetables. I'm working on another one that is not too subliminal. There's a border of vegetable fabrics, and in the center it says, "French fries are NOT VEGETABLES!"

Everybody knows that there is an epidemic of obesity in the United States. So I do a lot of talking every day about what kids are eating. It sounds pretty easy--fruits and vegetables are delicious, beautiful, full of vitamins and fiber and all kinds of antioxidants. But kids are eating so much highly processed junk, devoid of nutrition, and full of white flour, white sugar, high fructose corn syrup, trans fats, artificial preservatives and flavor and color. Of course there's a mega-industry devoted to get kids to whine for things that aren't good for them. They actually do studies with kids and give products a rating on the "whine factor." As parents we're up against big money with all the marketing tricks ever developed. But our kids lives are at stake. You may have heard that teenagers are starting to get Type 2 diabetes, which was unheard of when I went to medical school. (Really, it wasn't that long ago!) Now I am seeing them in my practice.

I'll be ranting, I mean talking a lot about the fast food and junk food industries, about how TV pushes total crap to our youngest children. I like the advice I've read about "shop the perimeter of your grocery store," the fruits and veggies, the meat section, the dairy section. Sometimes bad things come in small packages. When you're buying food in a box, at least read the label!

Speaking of food....it's time to feed some hungry mouths around here. Take care!

Hey, I'm a blogger!

Soooo, as busy as I am, why blog? For one thing, it's a way to connect with other quilters, and I can do it without covering the dining room table with fabric. And I want to connect with other parents. As a mother and pediatrician, I know a lot of things about kids. There are some pieces of advice that I relate at work probably hundreds of times a month. I figure if it's worth saying over and over and over, maybe it's worth posting on the net. Things like nutrition, the importance of reading to children, sleep problems, constipation, temper tantrums...........

I read a quote about quilters once that I loved. It was something like, "What is it about quilters that we are compelled to take perfectly good fabric, cut it to pieces, and then sew it back together?" That's my life. I haven't done much the easy way. But it seems like it's all coming together finally, maybe it's time to start thinking about borders and batting.