Frost, bloody nose

Alexa still really likes her new "radio". I really like this outfit from her nana in AZ.
This morning when we woke up it was very foggy and icy. David's car had a really neat iced spider web on it. His battery was low and the car wouldn't start, but we recently purchased a battery charger, and that did the trick.
And in other news this morning, Alexa had a bloody nose at some point during the night, and woke up with blood on her face and on her sheet. I turned on the humidifier to see if that would help. We live in a very strange place, it is very rainy and wet outside, and apparently very dry inside our house.

My Grandma

For those of you who know her, I talked to my Grandma tonight since it was her 88th birthday yesterday and I forgot to call yesterday. I heard from Robert and Sue that she was taken to the hospital on Christmas Eve, but no details. I called and talked to Jerry and Carol tonight and they told me that she had been in the hospital for a couple of days and was now in the rest home in rehab. This was her idea since she needs to get her strength back. Apparently while she was in Denver staying with Bonnie and Ronnie she choked on some water, and after that for a couple of weeks she was nauseated. Sherry took care of her until Ronnie thought she had better get back home (closer to her docs probably) so she flew home. On Christmas Eve she was feeling terribly sick and had a fever. They took her to the hospital and did a bunch of tests and found no major problem, they just thought she was weakened from the stomach problems, so now she is at the rest home so they can help her exercise and build up her strength. She seems to be in good spirits and says the food is better than last time so maybe there is a new cook.

Definitions of cozen, footle, foment, impecunious, liminal, limpid, saturnine

cozen: trick or deceive

footle: engage in fruitless activity, mess about

foment: instigate or incite

impecunious: having little or no money

liminal:
1. of or relating to a transitional or initial stage of a process
2. occupying a position at or on both sides or a boundary or threshold
This was used in a book to describle the light at dusk as liminal light.

limpid: unclouded or clear (similar to pellucid)

saturnine: slow or gloomy, dark in coloring and moody or mysterious

Definition of pellucid

pellucid:
1. translucently clear (like a mountain lake perhaps)
2. lucid in style or meaning, easily understood
3. with regard to music or sound, clear and pure in tone.

Definition of ascetic

ascetic: characterized by or suggesting the practice of severe self-discipline and abstention from all forms of indulgence, typically for religious reasons
Note to readers: I hope these don't get in your way, but I want to keep some record of the words I look up so that I remember them and can look back to check if I forget. I also thought they might interest some of you. If you would rather I didn't put them in here, feel free to comment..I will try to label them clearly so that you can ignore them if you prefer.

We visit Robert and Sue and the whole crew.

Here is Ben and Natalie's Taylor, also know as Princess Tater-tots. And here we have Caleb, Natalie, Ben and Taylor.
And my fuzzy picture of Kim and Aidan.
And my other fuzzy picture of Sue and Robert.
We drove down to Bandon from Florence on the 27th, it is about a 75 mile drive, but on the 101 that is about 1 hour 20 minutes. Robert and Sue have a beautiful little house overlooking what I think is a bay. It is very windy and wet there, but beautiful. They fed us lunch and the kids played together. It was so good to see everyone. The last time we saw Nat and Kim was right at the time we adopted Alexa. Then we drove home via Florence and Eugene, 2 1/2 hours to Eugene, another 45 minutes or so to Corvallis. A lot of driving, a lot of fun, good to be home in my own bed and Alexa in her own bed. She has been kicking the stuffing out of me the past couple of nights at the hotel.

Alexa and Daddy go swimming.

The hotel in Florence had a swimming pool so Alexa and Daddy went swimming, she had so much fun. She loves water.

Florence with the Family

On Christmas Day we went to Florence to a neat hotel on the beach. Here are Carolyn and Penny. And here is the whole family except Chris who is taking the picture, Penny, Carolyn, Dang, Christopher, me, Alexa and David.
Any here is the view from our room. Penny told us that the foam in the waves is from dead plankton rather than some sort of pollution.
And here is Dang, Chris and Christopher.
When Chris decided to do push-ups, Christopher jumped on his back, and Alexa laughed at him.
We had a nice time with everyone and it was really beautiful, although cold and wet.

Presents!!!

After we allowed Alexa to open the present from Sophia, she realized that there were gifts inside those prettty packages, and while I was in the other room, she opened two more. Fortunately they were her presents. She got a pretty, poufy dress from Nana which she thinks is neat. She also got a "radio" that plays alphabet and number songs..she played it constantly for about an hour after I took it out of the box.
Daddy got pajamas-he says he likes them.
Now Christmas morning.. we got the huge present from Penny out of the back of the van which has been the only place big enough to hide it. Alexa thinks he is pretty neat.
She pets him very vigorously.
Here she is slowly and reluctantly opening some more presents, what happened to that zeal for unwrapping from yesterday?

She is still euphoric about having permission to rip stuff, usually she gets time out for this!
Now we realize we should have saved the Olivia books for last. She refuses to open any more, she wants to read her books. When I try to give her a new present she brushes it aside and shoves the book in my face, so we stop and read the new Olivia helps with Christmas book.
Just to give you an idea how huge this dog really is. I love these, but I may have gotten them because I always loved them as a kid. Shani and Shelley had them in the original 70's colors and they were so fun.
Well, there were more presents, beautiful clothes from Nana, a felt Hungry Little Caterpillar board etc. THANK YOU NANA! We had a fun Christmas morning, now we are getting ready to drive to Florence to spend a couple of days with David's family.

Present from Sophia

We got a big box of presents from Arizona from Nana and they have been so tempting that Alexa had already started unwrapping two of them. Since today is Christmas Eve and to be honest I couldn't wait either, we let Alexa finish unwrapping the present from Sophia (her cousin who is the same age) I hate the red eye feature on my camera, but there seems to be no way to turn it off, and therefore most of my pictures of Alexa are with her eyes half closed. She doesn't look like this most of the time. (I am trying to justify buying a cool new camera that I saw at Target. I need to look at it more carefully to determine if it allows me more control than my current model though.) Alexa got a Curious George and this is by far her favorite thing in the box. Oddly enough an identical Curious George is sitting in her stocking. Apparently everyone knows that Alexa adores Curious George.

Also you may note that Alexa has a scrape across her forehead. She climbed into her toy basket this morning and then fell out onto the linoleum near the front door, bashed her forehead, cut her lip and gave herself a bloody nose. I think the moral of the story is that she should not get up and wake her parents at six in the morning. Maybe I should say parent, since David refused to get out of bed at that hour.

The next activity of the day was munching on her Tinkertoy box. I think it's a goner.

Alexa and Mommy all dressed up.

I wanted to try to get a good picture of Alexa and her mom, Unfortunately David turned on the light and this gave us some weierd shadows - so not really a success. We had a pretty calm day today. We went out to lunch at the mexican restaurant in Philomath with Tony, Martha and Josh, and Robin. We have been worried about Robin since we haven't seen her in a while, but learned that she has been traveling back and forth to the coast to care for her father who has a horrible form of bone cancer. We were glad to spend some time visiting with her.

Alexa fell asleep on the floor in her playroom after supper, and now she is trying to wake up - so I'd better go!

A little housework..

Finally Alexa is helping out around here! When we were young my siblings and I accused our parents of having kids for the purpose of cheap manual labor around the house. Now I know two things, we were in no way inexpensive, nor were we much of a help most of the time.
And here is my daily heart attack...Alexa is becoming quite a climber. I commented to DH, that now I have this blog I am like one of those war photographers, instead of helping I just document. (Of course if she hadn't been stable at this point I would have gotten her down right away instead of taking a picture.) The physical therapist at her school said that she should be encourage to climb as long as she is safe. I am still trying to decide if this counts.

Clarifications on previous two posts. On my review of the Outlander book I mentioned that a love story within a marriage was a new concept...I meant that it is rare to read about a loving marriage in a book, rather than it being unusual to be in love with your spouse. I love DH very much. Second, when writing about the fishwife expression I meant the second definition, that I was not trying to be a shrewish obnoxious woman rather than that I was resisting the urge to sell fish. You probably figured this out anyway.

Neat words.

I would like to share are some of my favorite words: Some of these I found in books, I love an author who uses interesting words. This one was in one of Diana Gabaldon's books.

ab·squat·u·late (ab-scwoch-e-late)
1. a. To depart in a hurry; abscond
b. to die
2. to argue

Another fun word
fishwife
1. a woman who sells fish
2. A woman regarded as coarse and shrewishly abusive.
I used this word to DH (dear husband) the other day as in "I am not trying to be a fishwifey here" He looked at me strangely. I would love to know the source of this expression but it is not in the online dictionary.

wen
1. A harmless cyst, especially on the scalp or face, containing the fatty secretion of a sebaceous gland
The word is neat, but it sounds sort of like a zit to me. DH and I have been playing a word game called Bananagrams lately. It is fun despite the fact that I have lost every game thus far. Short words like this one are very useful.

ken: I like the Scots definitions for this one
1. To know (a person or thing).
2. To recognize.
It also means to know or understand, or as a noun, knowledge or understanding.

Knitting, Cooking and Book updates.

What I have been up to lately in this delightful Oregon weather is reading, knitting and cooking. This may or may not interest you, if it doesn't, well, don't read it. I have decided a review is in order.

Knitting: I have almost finished a vest for my mom. Unfortunately, when I had a friend try it on(who I estimated to be the same size as my mom - more blessed in the chest area than myself) it emphasized those protruding frontal portions in an unflattering way. I think it is too small... guess who will be pulling it all out and reknitting it?

Cooking: Lately I have been trying some recipes out of a cookbook I recently purchased called Great Food Fast. I have made the Pear Custard Tart featured in an earlier blog, the Curried Carrot Soup which was a big hit with my vegetable loving boobear, a homeade Pasta and Easy Italian Meat Sauce which was lovely, and Butternut Squash Soup with Ginger - to which I added apples and bonus ginger. I may not add so much ginger next time..very eye opening! For the brunch I made Double Chocolate Cheesecakes from the Epicurious site. If you want jaw-dropping amounts of chocolate I recommend it. 16 oz of semi-sweet chocolate into one cheesecake, plus a chocolate wafer crust.

Books:
Great Expectations (Charles Dickens of course): I was in the bookstore the other day, and realized I have only read A Tale of Two Cities by Dickens, and felt a bit guilty that I haven't read some of the major classics, so I got this one. I have to say I was pleasantly surprised. Dickens isn't as hard to read as I recall him being. The only time I had trouble was with some of the dialogue. When he is writing the speech of some of the uneducated country folk, he tries a bit too hard perhaps. I expected this book to be depressing, but it wasn't really. The copy I purchased printed both Dickens' original ending, which his editor claimed was too sad, and the one he rewrote more happily to please this editor. I didn't really feel that the endings were so different emotionally. Do I recommend this book? Hmmm - only if you feel some sense of responsibility to have read the classics. Otherwise I am fairly neutral on this one.

An Acceptable Time by Madeleine L'Engle: I know this is sort of a kid's book, but I love the whole Wrinkle in Time series by this author. Unfortunately this time I noticed that the "science" in it a bit muddled. My favorite example of this being the idea that Polly (the main character) has a grandmother with her own personal electron microscope sitting on a bench in her lab. Last time I checked these cost hundreds of thousands of dollars and were far to large to be sitting on anything. But, I digress-otherwise this is a fairly good book, but perhaps is more readily appreciated by kids.

Outlander by Diana Gabaldon: This is probably my sixth reading of the Outlander series, but I love these books, they have everything I love in them. Scotland, herbal doctoring, a love story between married people (new concept!), adventure, men in kilts...I could go on and on. These are my favorite books of all time.

Olivia books: I am sure you have all read the Olivia books, but I have to say, these are almost as good as Calvin and Hobbes at portraying children in all their lovable insufferability. My daughter loves them so much, in fact they have been read so often that we had to replace one of them because some of the pages were so taped up they were no longer readable. Her other favorites are Curious George and Dr. Seuss books.

Have a fun weekend y'all.

Brandy's ankle update

Here are Alexa and Daddy coloring last night.

And here she is in her raincoat after she came home from school today.

I know this blog is supposed to be for Alexa, but unfortunately this does affect her - I had an appointment with the orthopedic surgeon in Eugene today. He had another x-ray taken and I told him that a part of my foot/ankle was hurting a bit. He took a harder look at the x-rays and said that there is little to no new bone growth still, and the screws may be starting to wobble. This leaves two options, wear an AFO (ankle-foot-orthotic) and wait and hope that eventually it fuses, or go in and do the bone graft again this time using a growth hormone to promote new bone growth. This would require removing the screws and putting in a rod or a plate or something like that. I have to go have another CT scan done (Saturday) to determine that the x-rays are giving us an accurate picture. Apparently there is a small chance that there is more bone growth than is showing in the x-rays. I think this will also tell us if the screws are in fact wobbling. I go in for another visit January 8 to discuss these options at which time we should have the CT scan results. For those of you who didn't know my father, he wore those evil AFO's and they hurt all the time, and I would almost rather cut off my leg than wear one. I am slowly overcoming the panic that I feel when contemplating going through this surgery again, and especially figuring out how to take care of Alexa. My mom and my sister will help. I would just go to AZ to stay with Mom/Holly except Alexa has her early intervention preschool and speech therapy that are here in OR. I know that worrying isn't helping, but it is sure hard not to. Well, here are a couple of cute pictures just to cheer you up after all that depressing whining.

Winter Brunch

Tayler being shy - I wanted a picture of her stylish chocolate mustache!

Here you can see it a little better with grandma Margo's help.

Here are Carleen and Reese and I after the brunch - the pictures are a little out of sequence, but I don't want to re-do the whole blog entry - so you'll have to bear with me.

Denita and Margo indulging my photo - taking habit.

Reese thought this dolly was so fun.

Pumpin muffins and Denita, Sandra and Penny.

Reese and the doll again.

Here is Dana with Jake, Alice's grandson. Aren't they cute?

Here are the crustless quiches. Carleen got this recipe off the internet and made it in the Demarle round mold. They were really good.

Here is Penny and the mini Pumpkin Muffins with orange glaze which looked like meatballs, but were very tasty.
Sandra and Sally - two of our favorite guests (OK they are all our favorites) but these two keep coming even after the rubber egg incident!