Balance

All the Orphan Red girlettes look more or less alike, I suppose, but they don't feel alike to me.

You may remember, in September my first girlette, Red Hair Girl, left  (I left her on the bus/she left for Alaska...). I've never "felt" another like her, until the other day her face looked out at me from eBay. 
It wasn't RHG herself (her nose has a distinctive mark she got at the Grand Canyon), but I ordered this girlette, and now she's here!

Sure enough, she's a scamp, just like RHG, and, like a goat, she always wants to be up high. Her name is Tack (as in thumb-tack).

(This is the first morning it's been warm enough to sit at my tile café table on the enclosed front porch. The porch faces east, so even on a 45ºF morning outside, it's fairly warm. It's a jumble out here, but as long as I have a clean surface for my laptop, I'm okay.) 

The other girlette is Noodle (a temporary name for a "New-Doll", but I think this one might keep it.)

I made Noodle a dress from fabric Julia gave me--she'd bought it in Korea years ago. I'd had enough to make a few masks, and leftover for a dress.
Can you see it's little children playing?

I am not a good sewer. It took me all afternoon to make this dress. I've been resistant to backing-up and LEARNING to sew, so I jump in and end up doing awkward work-arounds.

I saw that there's a BBC show called the Great British Sewing Bee. Maybe that would inspire me to make it easier on myself.

Become Like a Little Child

Speaking of learning things, I've signed up for a six-week online class, "Mindfulness Fundamentals", starting in a couple weeks.
It's through the nonprofit Mindful Schools, which a friend who is a high-school counselor says is great.

Their courses are for teachers, educators, and parents.
I'm not any one of those, technically, but I'm a little bit of all of them in different ways--including selfward.

It's a bit spendy (compared to free): $125. But in this drifty time, I long for the structure a class provides, even an online one. I've been doing so much on my own; I want to learn from other people.

They have a bunch of free videos and other info too.
www.mindfulschools.org/category/video

The ones for kids are short and inviting, reassuring. It's not rocket science. 

I've studied and read about mindfulness & meditation, and I used to pray. But the point is to practice not study these things, and I want to do that more (. . . than my usual amount of "mostly not at all").