Bronchiolitis

Here's the latest. My darling grandbaby disappointed me by not being able to come to Georgetown for Thanksgiving. As David said later, thank God her parents had enough sense to take her home from Corbin on Thanksgiving Day. At the doctor's office on Friday morning, they learned that Cora was just as sick as they thought she was, and were sent to Children's Hospital in Chattanooga, where she spent the night.

At first the medical folks thought she might have RSV, which is a serious respiratory virus that infects premies and newborns. Thank God again it wasn't that, but rather turned out to be bronchiolitis. At the hospital, in addition to finding out what she didn't have, they gave her breathing treatments which helped to break up her cough quite a bit and got her oxygen level back where it needed to be. Her mom and dad said she was a pretty good trooper about the whole thing, and that even when she was at her maddest, the nurses still talked about how sweet and beautiful she is.

Here at the house, she is mostly sleeping, nursing some, taking bottles of formula not very eagerly, and slurping down the apple-juice/water bottles. She coughs a good bit, until it's like she is coughing rather than breathing. BUT, and big deal here, she IS getting better. She can wail like a banshee when they suction out her nose or take her temperature or give her a breathing treatment. We spend a lot of time holding her--she breathes better upright--and "beating" on her back when she's coughing. I don't think we've bruised her yet. She has a beautiful Christmas tree in the living room, and being a child who is fascinated by light, I can usually quiet her down a bit by sitting with her in there.

I think I need to go be Nurse Granny. Everyone take care, and pray for our little Cora. Love you, and God bless.

We Are Still Married

Before anyone gets upset, that is just the title of a Garrison Keiller book. I have no clue what the book is about, but I do know that David and I are still married, with no plans to change that status.

I have finished a couple of projects that I've been working on for quite a while. One was filling and taking to church six Christmas boxes for Samaritan's Purse, Franklin Graham's operation. The boxes will go to three little girls and three little boys somewhere in the world, who otherwise probably would not have much of a Christmas. I did this in honor of my three boys and three girls. We sent crayons, color books, slinkies, puppets, hotwheels, dolls, stuffed animals, lots of pencils, erasers, markers, paper to "write" or draw on, stuff like that. It was a lot of fun for me to get the boxes together.

The other project involved some detective work which was more lengthy than I had thought. When you google something and get the reply, sorry, "-----" has no matches, then you know you have a long search ahead. However, with help from someon named Truman Price and Everett, it got done, and the gift has been ordered. That was a lot of fun, too.

My next project is to go grocery shopping and get cooking for Thanksgiving. I have scalloped oysters in mind, as well as hashbrown casserole and Jello salad. We're all going to my sister-in-law's, Caroline's, for the big feed. That's because she has the most room. Caroline truly has the gift of hospitality. When we go down there, we feel free to invite anybody we can think of, since she has always made all our friends feel at home. This year, we invited Sam, Ting, and Alex, as well as Kumar, and then Sunday when Joann asked where we were going for Thanksgiving, we invited her, too. I don't think she took us too seriously, but she did listen carefully to the directions and came back to talk to us a couple of times about our plans. I may email Sam and tell him to invite Tsing Tsing and Ding Ding, too.

Which reminds me--I can seldom remember Tsing Tsing's son's name. He and Sam are roommates at EKU. Yesterday I was asking about him and called him Dong Dong. Tsing Tsing just giggled. They told me his name was Ding Ding. Tsing Tsing went back to the kitchen and brought him out, so that I could talk to him. Joann came over and said, "On Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, his name is Ding Ding. On Tuesday and Thursday, it is Dong Dong." We had quite a laugh over that. We also told Tsing that she could name her next child Dong Dong, and if she had a third child, she could name that one Ding Dong! Silly, I know, but fun. I like to see the folks smile.

I guess I'm through for now. Maybe I'll post again sometime in the future--just keep checking. Love to all, and God bless.

Monkey Mama had a dream

Awright, we all have dreams. So what was different about this one?

Several things--for one, I remember a bunch of it. That doesn't happen a lot. For another, it was a G or PG dream, so I figured it would be OK for Lydia to read it.

Here goes: I was in a house very similar to the one we live in now, five-room plain little house, empty house (that's different from ours!), that maybe we were getting read to sell. On an inspection of the house, we found some animals living there. They seemed to be about the size of squirrels or chipmunks and didn't seem fearful (in that they didn't run and hide when they smelled humans.) What was unusual about them was their coloration. Some of them were brown with white spots--sort of irregular spotting, not anything symmetrical or possibly related to camouflage. There weren't a lot of them, probably no more than 3 or 4 to a room.

Once we had kind of adjusted to these spotty chipmunks, we started to see black ones, with blue glow-in-the-dark stripes and spots. That was really weird. As I said to someone who was in the house with me, "I know birds and fish can be blue, but I don't believe I've ever seen a mammal with glow-in-the dark blue spots!"

There were a few other loose ends that made this dream interesting. My kids will recognize this reference: The Lone Ranger's horse and Tonto's horse were there, not real horses, but plastic figurines about 6" tall. I didn't see the "men" who rode the horses. I thought the figurines might possibly be at my house, so I was going to look for them. Just in case the figurines were there at that house and might show up, I left a note for them on a piece of paper, telling them where I was going. Then I wanted a way for them to acknowledge the note, so I asked if anyone had a golf pencil, since sometimes the two of them could work together and write with a golf pencil. Fortunately one of the men who was there had several in his pocket, so we left one with the note.

And another loose end that has me puzzled: There was a woman there in a gorilla suit, a black suit, and a blue plastic hula skirt that pretty much hung from her shoulders. She wasn't a gorilla, just someone dressed up as one. I have no idea why she was there, but she was helping me look for the chipmunks.

Now if anyone can figure out this dream for me or at least tie in some of those loose ends, I'd appreciate it. Thanks, love to all, and God bless.