Nana: Live Update from California

Look at my mom! Doesn't she look great? In fact, if you just walked in and saw her sitting there, you would never guess that she was run over by a truck recently.


Mom's surgery went well but the recovery time is very long. I guess it takes a while for those bone cells to grow back, even when aided by several titanium rods. Right now she is in a nursing home type place where every other patient that I've seen is about 400 years older than her. It is a little depressing. But she is getting good care and doing both physical and occupational therapy there. She will not be allowed to put any weight on her legs for several months, so in the meantime she will be using a wheelchair to get around. So the rehab focuses on learning how to transfer herself from bed to chair, chair to toilet, get dressed, etc.

Hopefully within a week or two, when her strength is built up, she will be transfered to acute rehab. This is another facility in Loma Linda where she will get at least 3 hours a day of intense physical therapy. So before she can move there she has to be able to handle that sort of therapy. Which is asking a lot when you have recently been run over by a truck.

All that to say - depending on whom you ask, mom has between a few weeks and several months before she will be allowed home. She has between several months and a year before she will be walking again. It is hard to get a consistent answer from the various medical care. But she will see her orthopedic surgeon in a couple weeks and hopefully he will have a better idea at that time. Dad will be retrofitting the downstairs to turn the study into a bedroom and fix the bathroom to allow for a wheelchair. Yikes!

I have learned some things about my mom these last few days: she is strong, she is a fighter, she has a great attitude, and she has a LOT of people who love her. It is so encouraging to see her so well taken care of by my amazing dad as well as all of her friends down here. They really love her. It makes it a little bit easier to live so far away.

Meanwhile, Dan and Nory are doing well in Washington. However, I got this photo sent from him this evening. He promised me that they didn't go out in public with her hair like this!
 

Another Nana Update

Mom is doing well.  She hopes to move into a rehab unit at the hospital tomorrow.  The bummer news is that she will be in a wheel chair for several months - the doctors say she can't even begin putting any weight on her legs for at least 2 months.  She will need to learn how to do everything from a wheelchair and my dad is retrofitting the downstairs of the house to make it wheelchair friendly.  Even though it is a normal part of the recovery process for this sort of injury, it was still difficult to hear.

I can't wait to see her on Tuesday!

This also means, in our world, that nana will definitely not be around to meet K4 and help take care of Nory and me after he is born.  I didn't realize how much I had been counting on this until I knew for sure that it wouldn't happen.  There is nothing quite like mom when your body is piecing itself back together after childbirth.  But if she can survive getting run over by a truck, I'm sure I can survive giving birth and having a toddler to take care of at the same time!  Right?

We've Reached That Phase Of Toddlerhood...

...Where Nory's desire to communicate is much further along then her ability to pronounce things correctly.  So we get things like this:

I hungwy, mommy, caca peas mommy?  More caca?  More caca, peas?
(I'm hungry, mommy, cracker please mommy? More crackers?  More crackers, please?)

My wee-wee!  I wan wee-wee! My wee-wee!
(My kiwi!  I want kiwi!  My kiwi! (Nory sleeps with a stuffed Kiwi that she now likes to invite to storytime before bed)).

There are lots of these, but I think caca and wee-wee are my recent favorites!

A Knitting Comeback

I stopped knitting when I was pregnant with Nory and I haven't knit since then, until recently.  I am one of those people who finds pregnancy to be wildly uncomfortable, and when I was pregnant I couldn't ever find a position comfortable enough to knit in.  Plus, I am an anti-fair-weather knitter.  I only like to knit when it is cold out.  So basically never, when I lived in California.  My last excuse is that when I was living in a small, very crowded house, I just didn't feel like there was room for any superfluous items like yarn.

However, now that I am back in the Northwest, knitting has made a bit of a comeback.  The cold, windy, rainy weather beckons a cup of tea (I also stopped drinking tea in California) and some yarn.

The story behind this hat: I've been feeling really overwhelmed by how little I am doing for K4 compared to K3 - no name, no clothes, no furniture, no presents, no birth or baby classes, no prenatal yoga classes, no swimming, no nothing.  I really want the little guy to know that we really do love him and we are excited to have him join our family!  (Yes it is possible this is just the over-sensitive-second-child syndrome combined with the you-never-know-what-might-happen pregnancy hormones speaking). Taking the photos with Nory and the belly the other weekend really helped me, but I also decided to make him this little hat.  It felt so nice to be doing something special that was just uniquely for him, even if it is just a little hat.

I enjoyed knitting it so much that I decided to knit a hat for my friend Rina's second baby.  She is due a couple of weeks after me.  If the hat looks, well, confused, that is because they don't know whether they are having a boy or a girl.  If they have a boy, they can cut off the flowers, and if they have a girl, they can cut off the pom pom!

I look forward to even more knitting projects before K4 is born!

Nana update

Mom is doing much better.  She had surgery today to bolt her pelvis back into place and it went really well.  No word yet on her recovery time but a full recovery is absolutely expected!  Although metal detectors are definitely not in her future - the gigantic titanium screws are permanent.

And I am going to go visit next week, hooray!  I know she is doing better and she is going to be fine, but I just can't wait to see her with my own eyes.  Dan and Nory will be on their own next week so it will be an adventure for everyone!

We Love you Nana!

Some of you might have heard by now that my mom, Nory's nana, was in a terrible motorcycle accident on Friday.  The good news is that she is alive, and on the (long, painful, slow) road to recovery.  But please light a candle and say a prayer for her continued recovery.  She has a broken pelvis and some other internal damage, but really if the truck tires which ran her over had been a few inches higher she would not be alive, so we are really, perversely, thankful for the broken pelvis.  She's being taken care of by very good doctors at Loma Linda.

It is a hard week to be living a thousand miles from my mom.  I really wish I could be there with her.  But I'm very... pregnant.  I might try to sneak down for a short visit soon anyway.

And don't drive motorcycles.  Please.  Take a lesson learned the hard way from my family.  It doesn't matter how safe of a driver you are.  My mom wasn't even moving when she got ran over by a truck that didn't see her.  This is as close as anyone in my family will ever get to motorcycles (please excuse the bed hair):

What possessed me to buy motorcycle pjs in the first place, you wonder?  This was my first attempt at buying co-ed clothing after finding out I was going to be having a boy next.

What are we doing with our 3000 square feet?

Well, thanks to the benevolence of grandparents, we have created a park right in our own home!  Which is nice, because it is often too rainy to go to a real park in comfort.  (However when the baby is born I'm moving the slide outside and setting up a tread mill in the bonus room instead!)

You aren't adopted!

So, I finally convinced Dan to drag his camera out of hibernation and take some pictures at the park last weekend.  Now we have proof that K4 is not adopted.  (Not that anything is wrong with adoption, mind you, I just want to reserve the right to use the "I suffered for 9 months and went through labor for you, the least you can do is put away your laundry!" line in future years.)  So here is mommy-to-be at 32 weeks and Nory at 22 months.

The pictures turned out pretty darn cute, if I do say so myself, and you can view the rest of them here.  Who says you need warm weather and beaches for good pictures anyway?  Plenty of cute ones in this amazingly darling raincoat and rain boots!

Blue

Despite my best efforts to douse her in pink since birth, to frequently point out that pink is mommy's favorite color, and to cheerfully and enthusiastically point out any pink we see in the world around us... the child prefers blue.  It's been this way for a couple of months and I'm starting to worry that the phase will not pass as quickly as I had imagined.  So, I finally caved and bought her this blue shirt at the Hanna Anderson store last week.  If it looks a little bulky it is because she refused to wait long enough to take off her existing shirt before putting on her new blue one!

Here are a few examples of her strong blue preference:

I've been noticing that her bedtime reading selecting has recently lost a lot of old favorites.  Nory doesn't even want to read the babies book anymore (gasp!).  In fact, there are only about 4 or 5 books out of her entire collection that she wants to read over and over and over.  Well, I finally noticed that all 5 of those books have blue covers.

If you drive in the car with Nory, she will often point out all of the blue signs, cars, bus stops, etc that you pass on the road.  "This is blue, mommy!!!"

Nory still sleeps with a pacifier.  Since she was about 4 months old she has refused any type of pacifier except pink Soothie brand.  But lately she found an old brand X blue pacifier and now she absolutely cannot sleep without it.  Although, not in her mouth - she just needs to hold it, like a favorite stuffed animal.

I would blame Dan, but his favorite color is orange!  I hope this is just a phase... and yes, I'm still going to dress her in pink, as long as I can get away with it!

Scrambled Eggs

Nory and I are on our own, Dan is in Boston this week.  Not for too much longer, thank goodness.  And the battery in the camera died and I have absolutely no idea where the charger is, so no pictures from this week!  Instead I thought I would share something that has revolutionized my mornings lately.  Nory eats scrambled eggs almost every morning, but I had never figured out how to cook them in a cast iron or stainless steel pan because they stick so badly.  And I hate cooking in non-stick because of all the chemicals that can leech into your food.  Sorry if I sound paranoid, but I know a LOT of people with cancer right now, and am trying to bring my family into a lifestyle that decreases our chances in any way we can.

Anyway, I found a website a couple weeks ago (which I can't find anymore) that gave me the trick.  Now we have stick free scrambled eggs every morning in our cast iron skillet!  So easy!

Here is the trick: heat your pan up really hot first.  DO NOT add butter or oil until the pan is nice and hot.  For me, this means turning my skillet on a little less than medium before I take the eggs out of the fridge or start defrosting Dan's morning bagel.  When you add the butter, it should start sizzling immediately.  Then, add your scrambled eggs.  Voila, no sticking!  I have no idea why adding butter to a hot pan would be any different than adding it to a cold pan and then heating it, but there you have it.

Maybe my new cookbook will explain it to me when it arrives.