My Sweet Mary

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Isn't she lovely? Mary is my little sis-in-law, AKA, our first baby! (This is where the Mary in Miss Mary came from!) She was just two when Ben and I got engaged and she was our little doll. We hated not having a baby to play with (and we still do!). On our honey moon we were walking on the beach, the same beach we had been at just months earlier with the whole family, and we both decided that it was no fun without kids. We talked about how much fun it would have been if we could have brought Mary, David, and Zachary, and we laughed about how cute she was the summer before when she would run after the birds on the beach and say "Look at the wabbits!" We went back to our room and rented some movies and didn't go out to the beach another time! LOL! As soon as we got back into town the first place we went was to see the kids. She is twelve now, and quite grown up, but she is still my baby. I like that. I like that she still likes to be our baby.

When I was expecting Molly, only Mary and I thought that she would be a girl! I think that there were so many boys in the family that everyone just assumed that I would have a boy, but she didn't fool us! Mary and I still feel like we knew Molly better than anyone because we knew all along what she would be. Boy were they all surprised the day I had her! Molly and Mary are great friends now, and we often tell her how we knew about her first!

I made Mary a Miss Mary dress last week to test out the bigger size ranges and she really liked it! And I really do think that it looks wonderfully modest and feminine on the older girls without being too "babyish" to them.

Isn't that the cutest picture? It just sums up the word "girlhood" beautifully doesn't it? I try to keep that word in mind as I design every pattern. Girlhood is so sacred and scarce now. I recently found this verse "Do not conform any longer to the pattern of the world..."Romans 12:2, and one of these days I'm going to embroider it, put it in a frame, and hang it above my drafting table.

Oh these girls melt me! They are so beautiful inside and out and I am so blessed to have them in my life! We had a "girls day out" yesterday and I won't soon forget all of the fun we had. We went to our favorite restaurant (eating out is a treat in itself!) and when we went to pay, the man told us that our ticket had been taken care of! An old friend had stopped by our table and said hello a few moments earlier and he had payed for our meal without us knowing! Can you believe that? I can't even tell you how blessed I felt leaving that restaurant. I mean it's hard to beat lunch with these two angels and then an unexpected blessing like that! God is so good!