Dan fashioned his beard into a goatee our first day in Florida, and no one noticed. (I even made a comment like "you spent forever in there; what were you doing for so long?") He didn't get to test me on his next step, because he told me he was going to do it, but when he shaved his moustache, neither Mala nor the kids seemed to notice. Nana and Yeye didn't say anything about it, either.
But today, as Dan shepherded C to a birthday party, Karen's 8-year-old brother Hum Fay ran right up to him and said, "Hey, you shaved! It looks great!" Glad someone is paying attention to him-
Saturday, February 25, 2006
facial hair
Florida
It was sunny and warm, the kids got to play outside, and C had a blast feeding the horses/ goats/ peacocks/ ducks. A was afraid of the horses and peacocks (after a peacock bite), ambivalent toward the goats and ducks, and fascinated by the cats. One of them occasionally let her pet it, and A tried to hug her the whole time we were there. Needless to say, the cat tired of this quickly, but A kept on trying. She only got scatched once.
Everyone enjoyed the beach, the county fair, and Mala's workplace, along with swimming and boating and watching the birds and absorbing the sun. Coming home to the cold and indoors has been a rude awakening.
going to Florida
I had a vague recollection of hating the Philadelphia airport, but couldn't remember why until we were stuck there for two hours. To switch terminals, you need to take a bus (of course it's Philadelphia; they wouldn't have those bourgeois train-things like in Atlanta or Seattle) through a third-world country, and apparently vast numbers of lazy or disabled people frequent the airport, because golf carts threatened to run over A every 30 seconds.
Valentine's Day
C, being C, spent a week making funky personalized valentines for everyone in his class at school. We knew that no other kindergartener would have exerted that kind of energy, but we were sad to see that only one other kid in the class had made her own and most of the rest of them were REALLY hideous. In my day, storebought valentines were pretty lame, but they were actually cards with envelopes. Now they are generally 2 by 3 pieces of paper folded in half, and I suspect that it's virtually impossible to find them without licensed characters on them. I find it disturbing that 5-year-olds think Bratz are cool. We very glad, however, that the valentines weren't all the over-the-top gifts that C received in preschool, each with a goody bag of candy, pencils, games, etc. attached.
C's friend Karen, whose family owns the Chinese restaurant, did have a card with an envelope- a "thank you" card in fact, inside which she had (probably painstakenly) written "Happy Valentine's Day" and her full name. We're not sure whether her parents are opposed to the other valentines available, if that's just what they had on hand, or if they figured that was what this bizarro tradition called for.
Saturday, January 28, 2006
Updates- after several returns, I found two pairs of very expensive sandals that fit. I plan to never buy new ones again.
A has teeth numbers 5 and 6 coming in, to help excuse her completely sleepless nights. She's refusing to eat anything other than pancakes and Oatios, and she doesn't consume a lot of them, either.
I've been offered a temporary part-time paying job at the food co-op where I currently volunteer for a discount, filling in for someone going on maternity leave. It'll make a nice income supplement this spring/ summer.
I got the stomach thing just when I thought I was in the clear, on Wednesday night. Having two years' worth of practice in not-vomiting through pregnancy, I avoided that route, which meant it progressed to my lower intestinal track, which wasn't pretty either. Luckily it was indeed "only" a 24-hour thing, and Dan and I didn't get it simultaneously.
Tuesday, January 24, 2006
"happy"
A's newest and perhaps cutest word... to hear a brief audio file (requires Windows Media Player or some equivalent) download from this location: http://home.nycap.rr.com/rootsandshoots/happy.wav
Well, Paco's better-
Dan and the kids were up vomiting all night. I expect my turn will begin this evening. I'm hoping it's just a 24-hour thing rather than last winter's stomach virus, which knocked C and me out for over week-
But Paco's eye is mostly better, and he doesn't have to wear the plastic collar anymore! We have a fairly complicated schedule of drugs to continue for a few weeks, but he's much happier.
And fatter. The conehead was slimming, apparently. Now that it's off, he's looking pretty chunky. I don't know if the drugs caused weight gain, if the dozens of treats he gets at every vet's visit added up, or if he just hasn't been exercising as much, but he definitely needs to do some running!
Tuesday, January 17, 2006
Well, at today's vet visit, Paco's eye looked much better. Apparently the new-cell-formation is weak, so it's possible that one scrape could wipe out all the improvement and set him back to square one, but we're (obviously) hoping to avoid that. For meds, we're down to just three drops a day. Maybe we should send him to Marley's house to have them done.
Thursday, January 12, 2006
Paco update
The vet clinic's eye specialist finally returned today (why he thought his knee surgery was higher priority than my Paco, I'll never understand) and Dan took him in (again). Paco now has a fairly serious corneal abrasion, which wasn't there before; he must have managed to do it to himself since his last appointment (perhaps the night he managed to wrestle his way out of the conehead). So now they're treating the corneal abrasion and hoping that whatever the other problem was has resolved itself. The steroid drops we had been giving him have also apparently been preventing the abrasion from healing, so he now gets different drops, an ointment, and remains on the oral painkiller/ anti-inflammation drug (which thankfully he likes). Wrestling him down and prying his eye open several times a day is wearing thin on all of us.
We had to cut his conehead down because he couldn't function with it at all; he stood in the middle of the room crying the first night he had it until Dan finally gave up trying to sleep and reduced it to a more reasonable size. (Paco refused to lie down, eat, sniff, pee, do ANYTHING with it on.) We're glad we were able to help him a little bit, but wish we knew when we'll be able to finally take it off him.
Friday, January 06, 2006
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