Daddy Snugglies.

We are very lucky that Rusty doens't often have to be gone overnight for work. However, on occasion the kids and I find ourselves alone at night. The girls always cry for their Daddy. One time they asked for Rusty's shirts to sleep with and I put some of his aftershave on it so the shirt even smelled like Daddy. Thus was born the "Daddy shirts." Before long they wanted one every night. A few months ago Rusty was going through his shirts cleaning out the ones that were ready for the junk pile. This was a big deal in our house. Rusty is still wearing shirts from early high school. He recycles them from his "manager" work shirts to his "I'm cutting a hole in a wall today but still need to look nice"shirts, to "pouring concrete today" shirts. Since he hasn't poured concrete at work in a couple of years and he has atleast 3x as many shirts as me, it was time to clear a few out of the closet. He still has a hard time throwing any of them away. On this particular day he cleared about 20 shirts from his closet. We had the great idea to cut them up into squares and do a patchwork daddy snuggly for each kid. The girls got to choose their fabric for the backing and we got some cute monkey fabric for Ridge. I cut all the squares and tied and sewed Ridge and Katelyn's snugglies. Kyleigh sewed all of the patchwork together and tied the blanket herself. She handled the sewing machine so well. She put together the squares and was sewing while I was doing other things around the house. The only thing I sewed on her blanket was the edges. We also added in a stitched thing she had done with Holly to the center of her snuggly. This project was a slow process. Ridge did not like being left out so we had to wait for nap time. Katelyn chose the order of the squares and sat on my lap to help sew a lot of her snuggly. She pushed the reverse button and helped guide the fabric. Kyleigh loves sewing but we discovered she doesn't love tying quilts. She did just a few ties every day. In the end it was worth it. They have been sleeping with their daddy snugglies every night.