What A Trip!

I’m in San Francisco this week with my family, attending a pair of conferences. My husband and daughter are going to visit museums and zoos while I attend my meetings and get my continuing medical education credits. I love San Francisco. So I was really excited to come here, but wow it was a lot of work getting here. We had planned to take a 9:30 am flight directly from the airport near our home to the airport in San Francisco. It would have been a 6 hour flight and we would have arrived around 12:30 pm local time. The original idea was that we would arrive, grab a few groceries, and put our daughter down for a nap. Then I would attend my first conference event that evening. It was a great plan, but unfortunately the airlines had something to say about it.

In the words of my daughter “we got on the plane. Someone said no, no, no. we got off the plane. We waited. They didn’t fix it. We waited some more.” That’s a pretty accurate summation of events. We had just boarded the 9:30 am flight and gotten our daughter settled in her car seat when the captain announced that we had to deplane because there was a mechanical problem. They promised an update at 11:40 AM. So we got off and waited. The clever people went ahead and booked themselves on the next direct flight. The rest of us waited and were told at 11:40 that the flight was cancelled because they couldn’t fix it. Then of course there was a massive scramble for the customer service desk. My husband called the airline instead and managed to get us out on a 12:45 pm flight connecting through Chicago and eventually arriving at 8:00 pm local time in San Francisco. Which beat the option most of our fellow travelers found of getting out on a 5:45pm flight that connected through Chicago.

After that hiccup, though, the trip went very well. Our rebooked seats were three middle seats in separate rows but our fellow passengers were kind (or just self-interested) and were willing to swap so one of us could sit next to our daughter. We serendipitously found a great place to have a late lunch/early dinner in Chicago: Tortas Frontera by Rick Bayliss. The restaurant offers spicy, savory Mexican inspired sandwiches on grilled flatbread, guacamole that is smoothly dippable without being homogenized, crisp salty tortilla chips, and extraordinarily strong margaritas. My husband and I ended up pouring off the margarita we had bought to share into double the volume of mango-lime juice and it was still a little too strong for our taste. Although, obviously, we are light-weights when it comes to alcohol. The meal was something that I would have happily sought out for an evening out in our hometown if the restaurant only existed there. As it is, I will now look forward to connections through O’Hare a little bit more.

One advantage my husband and I have is that our daughter is an outstanding and experienced traveler for her age (she’s taken 38 separate flights on 12 different trips in her lifetime so far) and takes the vagaries of travel with a certain amount of joy and fun that I just can’t match as an adult. She told me on the flight from Chicago to San Francisco “I love people. They make me happy.” Which is a pretty accurate bit of self observation from a child who is 2 years and 8 months old. She happily strikes up conversations with passersby and generally seems to think a trip on a crowded airplane is a chance to make new friends. My husband and I are also pretty experienced as travelling parents at this point, so we’ve got the routine and the equipment down. The secrets to happy travel with a child, for us at least, are a foldable trolley for her car seat that converts it to a stroller, good snacks, and a kindle with plenty of Elmo and Sesame Street downloaded for viewing.

When we finally arrived in San Francisco we found our luggage had beaten us there by several hours. We grabbed our two suitcases, grabbed a taxi, and headed off to our lodgings. We are staying in a comfortable lower floor apartment of a converted firehouse in the Mission district of San Francisco. It’s not near the conferences but it is right on the BART (San Francisco’s subway system) and so getting to the conference site is a breeze. One of our travel lessons has been that trips away from home with a small child are more fun if we have a kitchen and separate sleeping spaces. We’ve also learned that we can often beat the price of a downtown hotel room if we do some searching on the internet and are willing to use public transit. My husband found this place on vacation rental by owner (http://www.vrbo.com) and the owner kindly met us when we arrived, showed us around, and brought us some milk since it was too late for the grocery shopping we had planed. 

I will say major travel delays are a good chance to practice mindfulness. I definitely spent a lot of time taking deep breaths and practicing radical acceptance. After all, getting mad and upset wouldn't have changed the situation. It would only make me unhappy and less effective in coping. It would have made my husband and daughter unhappy too, since that kind of distress seems to be pretty contagious. And really, in the big scheme of things, an 8 hour delay is just not a big deal. We arrived in San Francisco safely (and with all our luggage) over 3000 miles from our home in less than 15 hours. I have done a lot of traveling in my life, but I still think that's pretty amazing.

Mindfulness Project: Chapters 2 and 3 in The Mindful Therapist

Back at the beginning of March I decided I would have a “mindfulness month” in which I would read five books about the topic of mindfulness and perhaps begin practicing. About a week later I realized that I was only about one chapter into the first book I wanted to read and that I should probably revise the project to a mindfulness year and give periodic updates. I’m pleased that I finished my first book today (two and a half months after starting, which puts me on track for finishing five books in a year, I think). I am starting on the second book and have begun experimenting with some simple mindfulness practices, mostly breath awareness and body scans. I am also working on teaching my toddler to use deep breathing when she is upset so that she can learn healthy ways to self soothe.

The book I just finished is “The Mindful Therapist” by Dr. Daniel Siegel. This was definitely a challenging book for me; I found myself taking extensive notes on each chapter as I went along because there was so much novel information. Over the next few weeks I plan to reflect on those notes and do some writing about what I learned in order to further consolidate my understanding. I have already talked about the first chapter in the book, which was about presence, a necessary quality for a therapist. The second chapter is devoted to attunement. Attunement is the process of focusing on another person and bringing their experience into our own inner world. Presence is required for attunement, but it is not the same thing. The idea of attunement in the second chapter then links to the idea of resonance in the third chapter. Resonance is the process of linking two people into a whole, so that a person recognizes that another person is attuned to him.

The most fascinating part of this chapter for me was Dr. Siegel’s description of the theory of how, biologically, attunement takes place. The reason the neurobiology is so fascinating for me is that it unites the two halves of psychiatry. When I was in training I found it very frustrating to have a lecture one hour on neurons and neurotransmitters and then the next hour on defense mechanisms and empathic listening. I couldn’t find a way to make those two worlds, the biological and the psychological, relate to each other. Yet they both seemed to have validity. Finally the work of Dr. Eric Kandel (a Nobel prize winning psychiatrist and neuroscientist) opened my eyes to how experiential learning can actually shape our physical brains. Since then I have been hooked whenever I find someone writing or talking about ways to base our psychology in our biology.

According to Dr. Siegel’s book, the biological process of attunement is likely to start in mirror neurons. These neurons have been shown to operate in preparing us to imitate the observed behavior of another person – for example, if I see you reach for an apple, the mirror neurons in my brain will fire as if I had reached for the apple myself. Mirror neurons also are likely to operate with emotional behavior as well, so that if I observe someone crying I myself will probably experience sadness. What I found even interesting is that mirror neurons relay to other neurons down into the body through the autonomic nervous system, so that I will literally “feel” what I observe in someone else, without my conscious awareness. Those internal bodily sensations are then carried back up through the spinal cord and finally relay back into the cortex of the brain in a particular area called the anterior insula, which is the point at which we develop conscious awareness of our internal feelings. This attunement can then be sensed by the other person, which creates resonance.

Interestingly, just the experience of attunement and resonance between two people can actually modify each person’s internal mental and emotional experience towards the direction of health. Hence the importance of the therapist maintaining his or her capacity to be present, to attune and to resonate when seeing a patient. One of the comments Dr. Siegel made in both of these chapter that I strongly agreed with is that attunement and resonance in the clinical encounter are hard, much harder than simply asking a patient questions designed to establish a diagnosis. You have to be humble and willing to let the patient lead, and you have to be willing to acknowledge that you don’t know. Being attuned and resonating also means keeping open your own “window of tolerance,” another metaphor Dr. Siegel introduced, for that emotional experience. You have to be able to tolerate feelings of fear, sadness, rage, etc… while remaining flexible and functional.

Dr. Siegel offers many exercises in these chapters designed to help therapists widen and stabilize their windows of tolerance. One exercise which I found very informative and also calming is a body scan exercise. In his book Dr. Siegel “talks” you through a slow scan of all of the different parts of the body. This exercise reminded me strongly of the Yoga Nidra exercise by Robin Carnes that a colleague recommended to me for sleep. It is very peaceful but it is also an exercise that builds your skill in attuning to yourself, so that you can have increased skill in attuning to others. Dr. Siegel also suggests ways to evaluate your own experiences with attunement and resonance (or the lack thereof) and how those experiences might be affecting your own capacities for presence, resonance and attunement today.

As I read these chapters I am struck by how well what he states matches my own experiences, not just as a therapist but as a spouse, parent and friend. When I am within my window of tolerance I am able to be present with others, open to my current experience and the information they are giving me so that I can attune and resonate. However when I am outside my own windows of tolerance: too uncomfortable, too stressed, too sad, etc… I can’t maintain that state. I shut down and try to shut the other person down too. I’m not listening, I’m not present, and I’m not mindful. I can see how the exercises Dr. Siegel suggests can be helpful in broadening the emotional and mental space in which I can be present and I can see how that is important for strong relationships in both professional and personal aspects of my life.

My Favorite Yarn

Cozy up on your couch under a hand-knit afghan and let’s talk about one of my favorite topics: yarn. My personal favorite yarn these days is Knit Picks’ Comfy Worsted yarn. This is the yarn I used to create my daughter’s baby blanket and which I continue to use for gifts for my friends. Baby knits need to be super soft, washable and durable. Comfy Worsted answers all of the requirements. This is not the scratchy acrylic yarn your great grandmother used to crochet granny square bedspreads. Comfy Worsted is a super soft blend of 75% pima cotton and 25% acrylic. The cotton base offers softness and lightness to the feel of the yarn, while the small amount of acrylic adds elasticity and durability. The 4-ply yarn is a pleasure to work with, sliding smoothly across your fingers without snagging or splitting as you knit. The worsted weight yarn looks great knit on size 9 or 10 needles, if you are interested in making a looser, large project in a hurry, or on size 5 or 6 needles, if you want a tighter fabric. Knit Picks does offer a sport weight yarn in the same blend if you are looking for something lighter, but the I have found the worsted weight to be the perfect texture for a soft, light yet warm blanket.

Comfy Worsted is a yarn that can be machine-washed and dried and creates a blanket capable of handling a toddler’s love. This is important, as you want the time invested in a handmade baby blanket to pay off in years of fun, not ruined with the first spit-up. My daughter’s blanket has stood up to almost three years of hard use, including her potty training period, and has only become softer. The colors remain bright and attractive and the shape of the blanket has held despite frequent use as a superhero’s cape. The blankets I’ve made for friends’ children seem to have held up similarly well when I’ve seen their children playing with them.

Besides the critical qualities of soft, washable and durable, this yarn is beautiful. Knit Picks offers Comfy Worsted in 30 different colors, including multiple variations on blues and pinks. There are also  shades of green, purple and neutrals such as brown and grey. Sadly, the warmer tones are somewhat lacking. There is no true shade of red in the collection and orange and yellow are limited to a single, rather pastel shade each. This is a disappointment, limiting blanket creation to the cooler and quieter tones instead of the vivid popping reds and oranges I’d like to use at times. However with 30 colors available there is plenty of creative scope to match blanket color choice to the particular friend or family for whom it is intended.

Knit Picks products are available only online at www.knitpicks.com. Comfy Worsted is sold for the bargain price of $2.99 for a 50-gram wound, center pull skein, which represents 109 yards of yarn. Baby blankets typically will use about 800 yards of yarn, so depending on your choices in size, design and knitting needles anywhere between seven and nine skeins will be enough for a blanket. The more intricate the design and the more color changes you make the more yarn you will require, but the prices at Knit Picks keep it easy on your pocketbook to pick up that extra skein for insurance (because one of the worst feelings as a knitter is realizing that you have run out of yarn about 2 rows before you were done with your project). The delivery has been reliable and fairly quick, which makes obtaining the yarn I want hassle free. I suspect Comfy is going to continue to be my favorite yarn for a long time to come.

Three Mothers

I remember asking my mother once when you began to feel like a grown-up. I was in my late 20’s at the time, so this was about a decade ago. I was already a doctor although still in residency training, and I was a homeowner, and by anyone’s measure a responsible adult. But I didn’t feel very adult, so I asked my mom about it. She said that having kids helped her feel more like a grown-up. Which I have also found to be true. I feel like more of an adult now than I did three years ago. Although I still feel like a big kid myself sometimes, more capable and knowledgable of course, but overall just a bigger child trying to help this smaller child get things done and figure things out. So I’m not really sure when you settle into steadily feeling like an adult. Maybe you don’t, really.

As a child, I am fortunate to have three mothers in my life, each of them different and each of them teaching me something different. My first mother is my mom, the woman who gave birth to me and raised me. She taught me to be caring and nurturing. We were talking this weekend and she is still the office “mom” at her job; she is the person who brings chocolates and keeps a sewing kit in her desk. She taught me to work hard and keep my promises. My mom is the type of person who will get the job done, no matter what. She goes above and beyond but doesn’t see it as anything special. My mom taught me to love G-D, and to trust his love for me and other people. When I get confused about theology I remember what my mom taught me. G-D made us, he loves us, each of us, the way we are. My mom loves G-D and she shows it by treating other people with compassion and kindness.

My second mother is my step-mother. She came into my life when I was about 14 or 15. Our relationship wasn’t easy in the beginning. Not that I ever fought with her or disliked her, or that she disliked me. It was more that I didn’t understand her or know how to connect. My sister connected with her right away but it took more time for me to find common ground. My step-mother is a very honest person, to the point of being blunt, which was shocking for me at first but I find refreshing now. She is athletic and creative; she goes on yoga retreats and walks three miles a day and makes her own pottery. She grows her own orchids and has about 50 of them, all in good health and blooming. She is confident and knows her own style and she never seems to be afraid of anything. She is a business owner and, like my own mother, was a single parent. My step-mother has helped me to loosen up, to take more chances. She also taught me the value of patience and persistence. She never gave up on me even when I was distant and quiet. She kept reaching out to me and finding ways to connect.

My third mother is my mother-in-law. I met her when I was 19 and first started dating her son. She welcomed me so lovingly, which is a big deal as my husband is Jewish and I am Christian. She could have been rejecting or even just cool towards me, but instead she has always made her home my own. My mother-in-law is a fabulous, stylish, sophisticated woman. She travels all over the world, including to places like Myanmar and Turkey and Morocco that many people don’t ever reach. Her home is a beautiful space filled with incredible art. She also knits and has a ball shopping at Costco and Big Lots. My mother-in-law has taught me to knit, which has become my favorite craft. She models a life engaged with the world around her, travelling and attending cultural events and working for charitable organizations. She taught me about value; that some things are worth spending money on but that it is also okay to find good deals.

Perhaps it is easy, then, to still feel like a child, when you have three incredible mothers. Three very different women who love you, encourage you, and accept you for who you are. Not that they make me a child or don’t accept me as an adult, but rather that I see so much that I still want to live up to. I know I am blessed by the presence of each of them in my life. I know my daughter is blessed by her three grandmothers. I hope I live in such a way that she will be blessed by me. 

Superpowers and Wishful Thinking

What superpower would you most like to have? I’ve always been fascinated by the idea of superpowers and psychic powers. Some of my favorite books, even as a child, featured characters that had psychic abilities. Not that it’s a real possibility, but sometimes I wonder what I would pick if I were suddenly given a choice.

Tonight I would like to be able to levitate. I am at my mother’s house and she has this one cat who is really, really insane. He hisses and snarls and swipes at people for no reason at all. He bit my mom about 20 minutes ago, just out of nowhere. He’s pretty scary, to be honest, and so I was wishing I could levitate so I could get around the house without having to walk past him. I could just levitate over, you see. Although my mom pointed out that he’d probably be even crazier and jump up and try to bite me. So perhaps that's not a great idea.

When I’m stuck in traffic on the way to work, I wish I could teleport. I especially wish this on days I am running a little late. Just concentrate hard and pop! I dematerialize and rematerialize somewhere else. If I could just teleport myself into my office the daily commute would be so much easier. If it worked over long distances or I could carry other people with me that would be even better. Just think, no more waiting around in airports in order to be crammed into an airplane for multiple hours desperately trying to amuse a toddler.

I sometimes wish I could be telepathic with specific people. You know, send my husband a telepathic message when I don’t want someone else to hear something. Around our daughter we spell but that gets tedious after a while and also I’m not sure it will work well for more than a few more years. As a general rule though I’m not sure I really want to know what most people are thinking. I am a firm believer in the idea that what counts is the words you actually say and the actions you actually perform. I’d rather not have anyone else know what I wrestle with beforehand and I’d rather not know about other people either. I think in general being telepathic would be a pretty awful experience. It’s just better not to know some things.

When my ankle was first broken I wished pretty strongly to be able to move things with my mind (telekinesis). It was very frustrating to have to constantly ask my husband to get me this or bring me that. He was very sweet about it but I think it was a little wearing for him too. I also wanted to be able to help pick up my daughter’s toys, which I couldn’t do well on crutches or from the scooter. So the idea of zipping things around the room with my mind was really appealing.

I suppose what I would want most of all would be the ability to heal. When I’m sitting with a patient I sometimes wish for this very strongly. Particularly when I am working with very sick people in the hospital, or some of the cancer patients I see. And also sometimes with patients who have really challenging psychiatric illnesses, people who are suffering terribly whom I just can’t help well enough. I do pray for them, quietly and unobtrusively, but it would be awesome to be able to take their sickness and pain away and give them back health. It can be really frustrating to be a doctor sometimes. Medicine is wonderful; don’t get me wrong. We’ve certainly come a long way in a short period of time, and more is learned every day. But medicine is also so limited. There is still so much more we don’t know and can’t do. A healing superpower would be really nice to have.

Magic Wands and Crafts with Toddlers

I absolutely love doing craft projects. My favorite craft is knitting and that’s where I invest most of my craft time and where I have developed the most skill. But I have dabbled in scrapbooking, small quilting projects, beaded jewelry and other crafts over the years. I’m the kind of person who happily walks the aisles of A.C. Moore or Michael’s or JoAnn’s looking at all the potential projects and dreaming of having infinite time and money to spend on crafts. There is just such a rush when I am able to create something beautiful, particularly if it is also useful. For me, one of the exciting aspects of having a child was the prospect of doing kid crafts again. I have been waiting, more or less patiently, since my daughter was born for her to be capable of doing craft projects with me. Tonight I took the plunge and we had our first mother daughter craft night.

There were several things that inspired me to move ahead with doing craft projects. Lately my daughter has been into painting with watercolors, which she does during the day with my husband. She’s having a blast with that, according to him, and I’ve been fairly jealous. Although some of the jealousy was soothed by being the recipient of a new masterpiece for my wall at work. Several friends have told me about projects with their kids that went well which was encouraging. Finally, my daughter lost her magic wand. As I have mentioned before, her favorite Sesame Street character is Abby, a young fairy godmother in training who uses a wand to “twinkle think.” My daughter had a pumpkin flashlight that she had designated as a wand and which she would put to her temple and announce “I need to twinkle think.” Sadly, pumpkin wand has gone missing sometime over the past week, apparently lost somewhere in the no mans land between the house the playground and daycare. It has been missed by my daughter several times, and although we’ve been able to distract her I wanted to obtain a replacement wand before we have the total meltdown.

My initial thought was that I would cut out a wand shape (stick with a star) from cardboard and cover it with aluminum foil for her. However, I realized I didn’t have any boxes around that I was willing to cut up. I also thought it would be more fun to make a wand with my daughter. So off to Michael’s we went. I found a package of popsicle sticks and another package of cut out wood shapes – stars and hearts and diamonds. I found glitter glue and gem stickers and foam stickers and we were in business. Tonight after dinner I put down the large plastic tablecloth we use for messy activities, brought out the art supplies, and we went at it for 45 minutes before bedtime. I think between us we decorated about 10 wands and most importantly we had fun.

As an adult, I’ve learned I need to hold myself in check when doing activities with my two and a half year old daughter. It’s hard sometimes because I have distinct ideas about how things should be done. I have to sit on and squelch the part of me that wants things done “right.” Yes, my toddler squeezes the glitter glue in big clumps all over the wands so that it won’t dry. Yes, she peels the stickers off and sticks them on until they lose their stickiness. Yes, we have to negotiate sharing the glitter glue and gem stickers. Yes, she has more fun sticking the stickers on her own hands (and mine) than on the wands. Yes, she makes a huge mess. And that’s all okay.

I remind myself of several things. Everything washes; kid, clothes, floor, tablecloth and Mommy. I’ve learned to only buy washable craft supplies. Messes can be fun sometimes if you aren’t tense about them. Sharing with Mommy is good practice for sharing with other people. It’s arts and crafts, so there really isn’t any such thing as “right” anyhow. It’s not necessary or even important to have a beautifully decorated magic wand. (Although, I confess, I did make a few wands that I thought looked nice because I played with the art supplies a little on my own last night. My reasoning was that I would pre-glue some shapes and also get a feel for how the glitter pens worked. Uh-huh. Yep. That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.)

The most important thing this evening is that we had great time together, so that this will be the first of many mother daughter craft nights. The most important thing is that we will have great memories of doing something really fun together. So this evening I sat back, played with glitter glue (the best part of the supplies in both of our opinions) and made art with my two and a half year old daughter. That's the real magic in my book.

Fiber Weekend

It has been a very fiber oriented weekend. Months ago I signed up for a workshop at my local yarn store, Fibre Space (http://www.fibrespace.com/)  in Alexandria, Virginia with one of my favorite knitting designers, Susan B. Anderson (found on line at http://susanbanderson.blogspot.com/) who designs amazing reversible toys among many other things. I absolutely love knitting toys and reversible toys have become my favorite kind of toys to knit. There is just something that is so enchanting about a toy that turns inside out to become something else. It feels like a magic trick. In addition, reversible toys leave you feeling very clever and accomplished as a knitter. These workshop promised a brand new pattern, a reversible turtle and egg, which is not found in any of her books. It also offered me a chance to meet one of my knitting heroes.

It's an egg!

It's a turtle!

It's an inside out reversible toy! A turtle emerging from an egg!

I was a little nervous about signing up for a workshop after work, since I can’t always count on getting out on time. But with the support of my lovely colleagues I made it there. I was late, but due to delays in her flight and then terrible traffic, Ms. Anderson was even later so I was comparatively on time. The evening was just as much fun as I had hoped. I spent two and a half hours with a cheerful creative group of women, all there and determined to enjoy the event. Ms. Anderson was kind and gracious despite her dreadful day spent travelling and the prospect of another such day in front of her so she could be home in time for her daughter’s special event the next night. She showed us some great techniques not just on knitting the toys but on stuffing them and embroidering the faces which I really appreciated. Finishing toys is harder than knitting them sometimes, and really makes a difference to how the project looks in the end. She was even sweet enough to sign our books for us, since she had just published a new book all about reversible toys. I liked the project so much that I actually completed it in one weekend.

Then on Saturday I attended the Maryland Sheep and Wool Festival in West Friendship, MD. This is an annual festival that is held the first weekend in May at the Howard County Fairgrounds. This festival is a celebration of all things fiber. As you might expect from the name of the festival there are plenty of sheep that are shown in competition. There are also sheep shearing competitions, demonstrations of sheep herding with sheep dogs, and a sheep to shawl competition in which one shearer, three spinners and one weaver work to produce a shawl within hours. However, the actual sheep have become just a small part of the festival.

In the main exhbition hall and in most of the smaller barns there is a profusion of exhibitors selling anything you can think of that is remotely connected with fiber: handmade garments and blankets, angora rabbits, wool dusters, supplies for tending sheep, looms, spindles, garden plants, spinning wheels, books of techniques and patterns, knitting needles, special soaps for wool and fine garments, fleeces, needles and blocks for felting, portraits and landscapes made with tiny embroidered stitches, buttons, toys, alpacas, and, of course, yarn. Hundreds upon hundreds of skeins of yarn in every color and texture imaginable. Handspun, hand dyed yarn that is completely unique and not available anywhere else. Rows of commercially dyed and spun yarn that can work in any project. Chunky yarn and fine yarn and crazy yarn with elastic or tied threads or beads incorporated into the yarn itself. This year sparkly yarn seems to be in style, with most of the large exhibitors showing large swaths of yarn with strands of metallic color that glittered in the sunlight. The festival is absolutely a knitter’s dream landscape.

Every year that I am able I attend the festival with my mother-in-law, who taught me to knit. The sheep and wool festival is a crowded but friendly place. It’s the kind of place where people wear their own handmade garments and it’s perfectly acceptable to walk up to a stranger and let them know how much you like their sweater or shawl. In fact, twice when I did this the wearer gave me the name of the pattern and the name of the yarn she used to create her masterpiece. This year my two and a half year old daughter came with us to the festival for the first half of the day. We took her to see the demonstrations of dogs herding sheep, which I thought was impressive but which didn’t keep her interest. We fed her festival food, the kind of hot dogs, kettle corn, and boardwalk fries that you can find at any fair worth its name. We found a group of people spinning angora yarn directly off their rabbits and she was able to pet a real live bunny, which she later told me was her favorite part of the day. Then my husband took her back to my mother-in-law’s house and she and I continued on to see the rest of the exhibits.

Some of my favorites were the booth by “Going Gnome,” in which two sisters sold their handmade, needle felted wool sculptures of gnomes, birds and mushrooms and the booth by “Hunt Country Yarn” a Virginia store which features yarn made and sold by women owned businesses. Another booth featured alpaca yarn and had a large sign on its side offering two male alpacas for $800. They are beautiful animals but I wasn’t tempted; where would I put an alpaca? And what would I feed it? A third booth offered registration for a week long fiber arts retreat in New England, which is also impractical for me. It’s fun though, to imagine the different things I could do in another life. A life that involved less time spent at work and more time spent on interesting hand made crafts.