A bittersweet day

I moved to Nevada four weeks before Sophia was born, so I knew nobody when she arrived.  Imagine my surprise and pleasure when an older couple from Church handed me a gift bag that contained a soft flannel blanket for her.  Nearly every night of her life she has slept under that blanket.

However.

Because of that, the blanket has been in shreds for about a year.

See what I mean?

I had the idea of making a new cover for the old blanket, but when I laid the old blanket out on the new fabric, I realized the old blanket was made using really wide flannel, quite a bit wider than the fabric I could find in the stores.

I asked her if she would rather I cut the old blanket down a bit to make it fit the fabric she had chosen or just make her a new blanket all together.  She thought about it and said she'd rather have a whole new blanket.

Then I procrastinated making the blanket for months.  :-(  Today I woke up with only about two hours of early morning work and nothing planned and knew this was the day to get 'er done.

The ties turned out to be much closer together than I thought they were going to be, but I decided to tie every white polka dot and not skip rows.  It took about six hours to tie, but probably an hour and a half of that time was spent wasting time threading yarn into the biggest eye needle I could find.  It was a challenge!

While I was working on it I wondered what Sophia would do about her old blanket.  I thought she might refuse to part with it.

I put it on her bed about twenty minutes before she got home from school and waited . . . .

When she got  home I told her there was something in her bedroom for her and she dashed in there to see.  She came out of her room wrapped up in it.

After a bit I cautiously asked her what she wanted to do with the old one.  She promptly replied that she wanted to "eliminate it," i.e. get rid of it.  I asked her how.  She said she wanted to put it in the huge trash can in the alley.  I asked her if she wanted to put it in a plastic bag first and she said no.

We walked out to the alley and she opened the lid and just tossed it right in.  I guess Mommy had a lot more sentiment for it than Sophia did!

I hope this one lasts for another eight years.