Invasion of the Sock Monkeys

I played host to my niece Abby, 13, from Indiana Thursday through Sunday so she could go to a Blythe Meet with me and go to the Visionary Museum's Sock Monkey Saturday. We joined nearly 500 other folks who traveled to Baltimore to make sock monkeys. The free event provided patterns, instruction, needles, thread, yarn and stuffing as well as human helpers and a photobooth to capture our first moments with our sock friends.

Last year I attended but wandered in so late, I could only take the pattern home and make Gladys myself later. She's the bright blue one. This year Abby and I got there right when it started, and four hours later we were still stitching and stuffing away, having worked through lunch or even a stretch break. When we left at 3 p.m., Abby's Gary (the squid-like grey one), had only one arm and some other surgical needs. My Bob, in traditional sock monkey socks, needed some more work, too.

But we had more fun things to do, so we hurried through the museum and gift shop and back to Columbia, and then on to Triple A antiques to search for vintage vinyl. I was so proud of Abby's selections: The Carpenters, Carole King's Tapestry (a must-have, I told her), and The Doobie Brothers.

Besides all this, we made cupcakes and hosted nine guests for a doll collectors' meet, ate at a seafood buffet (Abby was not impressed), had cheeseburgers, onion rings and milkshakes from Cheeburger Cheeburger, watched movies Little Miss Sunshine and Scott Pilgrim vs. The World, some cute television, like a Lindsay Lohan movie and a Miranda Cosgrove television special, and Abby went with me to a business lunch where she said all of us healthcare sales people were "talking in a foreign language."

And to top it off, she flew home to a big snow and a two-hour school delay....which was perfect since she still had homework waiting in Indiana. Auntie G went straight to bed to rest and recover from the whirlwind of a weekend.