April goals

I know it's a few days early but I thought that I would get my April goals down whilst I think about them.

1. Sunday Cricket - get this 3/4 finished.
2. Nottingham Forest - unpick, restitch, finish and frame.
3. Friendship - frame.
4. Bent Creek Snappers - finish one of the remaining designs (don't mind which!)
5. Sweetpea coaster - complete border.

I will post an update to these throughout the month.

Sunday Sunday

Rachael had a sleepover at her friend's house last night which turned into a bit of a disaster. Her blood sugars were 6.8 at 8pm - brilliant! They were still in the 6's at 10.30 which is not so good. At the moment Rachael needs to be going to bed at least 10.0mmols to get through the night and even then we would test at 3am to make sure she hadn't dropped too low. Another phone call at midnight to say that she has had 2 slices of toast and 2 custard creams and was now finally creeping up towards the low 9's. Hurray!! A phone call this morning to discuss breakfast carb ratios found Rachael with a reading of 2.3. Yikes!

Rachael has been very subdued since she came back from the sleepover. I hope it is purely due to lack of sleep and not her blood sugar readings upsetting her.

Luke had a good evening last night. We decided as a treat we would have a buffet type tea meal with lots of sweet things that are normally rationed a bit as it isn't fair that Luke can have them when Rachael is restricted by what she can have, or rather how much she can have. He also stayed up until 9.30 pm.............really late for him.

Luke's behaviour today has been awful, is it due to the late night or sugar overload?

Cross stitch wise I am a little cheesed off. I am stitching a design for Rachael's teacher when she leaves his class in July and have just realised that I am one row off for about half of what I have done...........grrrrrrr.

I have decided to leave that for a few days whilst I cool down about it before starting the frogging. Instead I am concentrating on Sunday Cricket for a few days. I am about half way through this now. There is only about 200 stitches in the top half left now.

Swimming update

Luke got his 100m badge and certificate yesterday. He was dead chuffed.........so was I! He has always struggled with breaststroke but since he has seen his sister breathing every stroke, he has started doing that too which seems to have made it easier for him. He did it really easily.

More swimming - today Rachael had Section B of her silver to complete.........an 800m swim doing 400m on her back and 400m on her front. She astounded me with this! She went off really quickly and I thought she would never be able to keep the pace up. She did though. When she finished she was over a length ahead of the 2nd person and 6 lengths ahead of the slowest person. One of the boys in the group didn't turn up today so I imagine he must have failed the first part. Rachael has got her name down for doing the gold in the next holidays so we will see how she feels about doing that nearer the time. Although I am really proud of her for getting her silver, I don't want to push her into gold unless she really wants to do it.

Moving on to cross stitching! I had a lovely stashy post day today. I got 4 Stitching Shed charts (which have no colour key so I need to email them), a bleu de chine chart, 2 Barbara Ana charts and 6 Calico Crossroads charts. These are all from a gift certificate that I received for Christmas. I am going to be really good and put them away until I finish a few of my WIP's/UFO's.

Rachael's swimming challenge

Rachael is doing her Silver challenge award in swimming this week. Today was Section A. For this she had to do a 100m swim in under 3 minutes, tread water for 2 minutes with hands behind her back, feet first and head first surface dive to retrieve a brick and head first/feet first sculling for about 10 metres. SHE DID IT!!! Rachael's worry was that she wouldn't be able to do the swim using front crawl (her worst stroke) but she did one length front crawl and the rest breast stroke and finished well within the time allowed. Tomorrow is 800m using 2 strokes one on front and the other on her back. As she already has her 1500m badge this should be easy for her!! I am so proud of her. By the way Rachael is only 8 and is about 2 years younger than all the others in the group who are also doing their silver.

We will be back at the pool this afternoon to watch Luke do his 100m. Update to follow on that one!

Back to important things like cross stitching!! I had a small finish last night of a kit that I bought about 3 years ago to do for my best friend. It has be a WIP, well more of a UFO, forever! So now it is back to a concerted effort on Sunday Cricket which I really want to get finished soon.

Blogging - I'm a blogger!!

Well where do I start? I suppose the first thing to do is to let everyone know who I am!

I am Sharon, 39, and married. I have 2 wonderful children - Rachael, 8, ( who also has Type 1 diabetes) and Luke, 6. We have 3 dopey cats - Sheba, Biskey and Smudge. We also have 4 goldfish but I don't have a clue what they are called these days as their names changed from day to day when we first got them 2 years ago.

I work as a teaching assistant in a primary school which I absolutely love. I get the best of both worlds - job satisfaction and loads of holidays. Contrary to public opinion we do not get paid these holidays, teachers do, we don't!! Currently I am in a Year 1 class (age 5 -6 years) but I have worked across just about all ages in the past.

My main hobby is cross stitching. If I live to 100 there is a vague chance that I could stitch all my stash but I doubt it. My favourite designs are Mirabilia, Amanda Loverseed's Cut Thru's and Lizzie Kate's for a quick stitch. I recently compiled a list of my WIP's and UFO's.........that was a scary job!!

I also enjoy stamp collecting, not philately - there is a difference! I collect stamps from Great Britain and butterflies from all over the world. I only started collecting again after Christmas 2007 but I am rapidly building my collection again!!

My daughter has Type 1 diabetes and has done since November 2005. This was a total bolt from the blue as there is no history of it in either family. She manages this fantastically, currently with 4 injections a day but we are currently having pump training. Soon she will be the proud owner of a pump - and she can't wait!! Rachael is under Dr Doughty at St Mary's in Manchester. Both him and Marie the diabetes nurse are fabulous and I can't recommend them enough. We only moved there in August 2007 after becoming disillusioned with our previous hospital.