Santa's Pets . . . again

I picked this up again. I'm going to try to shoot to get it done by Christmas, but not holding my breath. I still have more than half left to do. 

I have been messing around trying to figure out how I want to handle the lower sections, since they're maybe four blocks high. Stair-step still seems to work the best for me. I can't explain exactly why it works so well, but, considering I did all that progress in December that way, I'm sticking to it, and I'm going to start using it for any of my large projects I intend to work on.

I got notified that Gigi shipped today. Woo hoo!  I'm nervous to see her on the linen I chose. If that doesn't work, I'm not sure what I'd choose in its place, but we'll have to see. 

And I broke my money diet, but not badly. I've seen a lot of stitchers on Youtube stitching selections from The Frosted Pumpkin Stitchery  and they're kind of growing on me. I bought "The Mysterious Halloween Town", which, if you're going to fall off the wagon, isn't bad for $11. I will wait a while to get the specialty threads, it was pretty easy to work with them. They email the charts to you, which is a bummer because I don't have a printer, but the library does, and I can print there.  Plus, I'm not buying other stuff, so it's OK. But just this once.

We had a nice birthday. We ended up at the beach at Breezy Point Beach, in Calvert County, near Annapolis, and it was a lovely day to be down there. Someone Small was over the moon, except she said the sand was "too hot."  But not too hot to put in her hair--I am still combing it out. Left-brain found some sea glass, which was awesome because we never find sea glass at that beach. Some people do, but they must go early in the day, and I don't know how much they find because it's really only common on specific types of beaches, and Breezy Point is not the right beach, but I'm happy he found it for me.  We are going to make this a tradition, it's just a nice way to spend the day as a family, without having to worry about other pressure.