Happy Birthday Shayna Shanna!

4 years old at preschool

2 weeks old having first bath

9 years old with brother. People often asked if they were twins despite the size and sex difference

11 years old . I know she hates the short hair but I like this picture as you can see her beautiful eyes and lips

High school graduate

Young adult catching the bouquet. Yep she got married next

Getting married

With her own little babies in Boston



It's hard to believe that my first baby is so old! I think of myself as being in my thirties but no, I can't be as I have a 31 year old now. I was so looking forward to meeting her. I wanted a baby girl so badly. No sneak previews in those days. My labor was the opposite of Naomi's; a whole lot of pain and no dilation to show for it. I was between 1 and 3 cm forever with nurses feeling my contractions saying they were 'nothing' and that I haven't felt anything yet, just wait until they get real! Well eventually Shanna dropped and the contractions got real but manageable and she soon was born. With her chubby cheeks, I thought I saw a mini-me but as time went on, she became more like Steve's mini-me.

But in many ways we are quite alike even though we don't look alike. We have similar tastes in books and movies. She is a scientist currently as a full time mother. She is very devoted to her two little boys and has reserves of patience that continues to surprise me. She is much more reserved than I. I wish she lived closer to me. She is the daughter that everybody dreams of and I wish her all the happiness in the world. Happy Birthday!

Maya

Twelve days old. Her eyes are almost open here. Note Naomi's new set of talons.

Naomi's insurance is still a mess. Steve went down with her in an attempt to straighten it out. Who knows when that will be settled. WIC weighed both Maya and Naomi. Maya weighed 8.5 lbs (a gain of 5 oz in a day or they have a strange scale) and Naomi weighed what she did when she was 16 weeks pregnant..not much.

Vicarious European adventure

The main platz near the Dom full of musicians, mimes, biergartens, cafes in Koln

Paris fountain

Josh's Paris breakfast

The Kolner Dom at night

Josh doing the limbo in a bar. Big glass of Koelsch nearby

Eiffel Tower

The Dom during the day. Second tallest cathedral in Europe

A Beer Bike. Not sure if you are to peddle while drinking

Josh and his 2 co-workers at night



Not sure yet if I will get my own European adventure this year so I have to live vicariously through my son. I was hoping since his companions were at least 10 years older, they would know Europe more but it turns out that Josh was the Paris expert based on my notes to him and his French class.

Maya had her big weigh-in yesterday: 8#3oz A whopping gain of 11 oz in a week and 9 oz since she was at the doctors' last Tuesday. Seems a little yellow to me and a lot sleepier than what I remember newborns as but noone seemed concerned. Naomi spent some time straightening out her school stuff and I gardened avoiding things that I should be doing. I didn't run as I am just tired. I can ignore the poison ivy during the day and it is getting better, but at night after the Benedryl wears off, it becomes hard. Still new spots keep popping up too.

How does your garden grow?

This is not a marigold but an orange cosmos. Very small. One of the few plants I grew from seed successfully

One of my morning glories. The color didn't turn out right here. It's a deep purple blue as opposed to the bright blue of conventional morning glories which have bigger blossoms but haven't bloomed yet despite the many vines I have

Pink cosmos with some of the tickweed (coreopsis) in the background

My own cleome

Tuberous begonias. I have many colors. I have been saving the tubers over winter but I didn't plant them until late so only one is now in bloom

So my camera is back. It isn't as fancy as Steve's and it is hard to take good close-ups but it is easy to use and I can find it when I want to.

Each year is good for certain flowers and not good for others. My hits and misses:

Gerber daisies. The flowers are pretty but the leaf/flower ratio is too much. Right now I have lots of healthy leaves but no flowers!

Dahlias aka slug food. I don't know why I buy these but the flowers are so pretty. I have a few blossoms still but the leaves are almost gone.

Lobelias: I love the deep blue ones especially but I mostly have the light blue ones. I had a bag in which the ten plants or so looked good for a week and then started to die. I tried to save a few planting them elsewhere.only 2 still alive. I since formed another bag of impatiens so I have 3 bags along the fence just full of blooms. The lobelias in my baskets still are blooming though.

Petunias: Love them but last year all of them got some strange disease in which they would die from the roots out. Not unique to me as I saw others' baskets full of diseased petunias. I can't put these in the ground as the slugs find them. As it is, in my containers, the slugs find them but they seem safe in hanging baskets.

New flower: Black eyed Susan vine. I don't think this flower is related to black-eyed Susans (of which I have plenty as they spread from the neighbor's bed to mine) but it has the same color.

Morning glories: I grew many plants from seed but Mr. Rabbit found the seedlings especially tasty so I have maybe one plant left from that. I bought a different variety as a plant and I now have a whole network of vines on strings all over the patio. Yesterday I had 8 blooms. Still waiting for the ones I grew from seed to bloom although some of the vines are 6 foot long. Don't even have buds yet.

Tickweed: I got several colors of this from my sister-in-law from mature plants she dug up. It looked like most were going to die after a week but most of the plants have since rallied and I have new blooms.

I love cosmos. One year I could only find the giant form which formed 8 foot trees crowding everything else out. I now have more manageable smaller varieties at 3 feet tops.

Geraniums: I have had the same salmon one for 5 years looking bad in the winter inside but coming to life in the spring. I trim the leggy plants down sticking the cuttings in dirt and have gotten lots of new plants this way in pots at least. Now I am trying to just put the bare cuttings in the ground in front. Not sure if this is going to work but for now I have blooms.

Snapdragons: Big ones and little ones. The little ones are particularly colorful.

Impatiens: I am not going to put these in the ground around the patio any more as they take over the world. They are fine in containers and bags. As long as they are watered, they are easy.

We had a family dinner last night in which Josh got to meet Ms. Maya. He bought her a Koln am Rhein shirt with a picture of the Dom on it. My phrase book was returned unused. He was not a fan of German food going to McDonald's instead which I think is a big shame. He like the corporate cafeteria with its homemade breads and little sandwiches. He did like the food in Paris but somehow found himself on that roundabout from hell going around the arc de triomphe-driving was scary off the freeways.He was surprised at the German work ethic: many breaks, people wearing wild clothes to work, lots of constant chatter. He thought it would be the opposite with Germans as some sort of efficient unsmiling robots. None of their behavior would fly where he works (same company). Everyone was very friendly to him. He had bought a German soccer jersey for a low price but one of his new friends met in a biergarten pointed out it was missing a star in its insignia.

It was a nice evening with lots of discussions and the new baby who still is very sleepy, which worries me somewhat. She sees the nurse today.

Hair repurposing

Ok, so I keep things too long. I rarely throw things away including drugs. I did throw that Prem-Pro away right away when I got the cancer diagnosis as I think even though I had estrogen negative BC, somehow it probably had something to do with it. I have a bottle of Decadron..a fluorocorticosteroid that I was supposed to take with the AC but didn't as I hated the side effects..bloating, restlessness. I couldn't avoid it as it was added to my iv before dosing and added in even larger doses with Taxol. I did try to talk her down to the smallest dose possible. Could I use this for this poison ivy? In the past, for huge reactions, I've received a shot of prednisone (less active than decadron) and my immune system stopped attacking me.
If I ignore it, I don't feel it especially during the day. We took Oliver to the woods the other night for a walk (ooooo..spooky!) and I noticed this stuff is now popping up in the middle of the path. Anyway, the rash has gone away in parts. Still the cause and the effect just don't match..I only grabbed that stem for a second.

Another strange item I had kept was my hair. On the fourth day of my second treatment of AC, my scalp was burning. The weight of my hair seemed oppressive...a strange feeling. I sit here with hair half as long as I had that day and I don't feel my hair at all. The hair would fall off in clumps. Finally I just started cutting leaving about an inch behind throwing my cuttings into a bag. I had thick hair so it was a big bag. Even an inch seemed to weigh down on my scalp and that hair started snarling . My silky chin length hair rarely formed snarls but now it was so off that went too. The stumble left from my cuttings fellout within a day or two leaving me totally bald. Not a good look...I never let anyone see me bald. I certainly didn't allow pictures. It is true that when it was growing out and I had a half inch of transparent hair, when I was out in the country running, I'd take off my hat as it was so hot and sweaty but I would put it back on once I returned to the neighborhood.

So I came across this bag a month or so ago. Why am I saving this hair? It was one big snarly mass. We still have Naomi's hair neatly plaited in 7 inch pieces to donate to Locks of Love some day but that is potentially useful. I have noticed that clumps of Spud's fur left outside are taken away by the birds to line their nests with pug fur. Would the birds want my hair? I ended up using it for mulch covering it with a layer of dirt. When we have big rains, some of my hair is exposed.

Shanna was having trouble finding a room last night so maybe she and the babies drove all the way back home to Boston. Hopefully they slept.

Josh has returned from Germany but didn't stop by (even though I have his car)much to my disappointemt but I imagine he is tired. We are having a family dinner tonight at his place so he can meet Maya, born during his absence.

And little Maya was here yesterday still very sleepy. She did open her eyes briefly to look around. They are blue and look very much like Naomi's but they will turn brown probably. Naomi very much enjoys her and can't imagine a day that they will ever be at odds.

Coming and going

The sisters hold each other's babies. Daniel is almost 11 months and Maya is 8 days old

So Shanna and her family are on their way to Boston and Josh is in the air now crossing the Atlantic to come home. The last 2 mornings, I sipped my coffee on my patio surrounded by my flowers, which are finally filling in nicely, holding my dumpling Daniel while he drinks his bottle. He is quite the charmer!

Later at night, we had a family dinner. I made panna cotta though Shanna would have probably preferred creme brulee. We had an evening with all 3 grandkids. Not sure when that will happen again but at least I have Maya to watch grow. She is now cordless.

Next to my house unfortunately is a rental house. Sometimes we get lucky and have reasonable neighbors; other times not so much. Usually they are college students or recent graduates. Last night I was awakened to yelling and splashing (there's a pool) at 4:30 am. Dudes! I got dressed and asked them to please keep it down. They said they would but of course they were too drunk to comply. I know the owner of the house but now she has an unlisted number. In the past when her illegal tenants ( can't have more than 3 unrelated people living together in our neighborhood and there are sometimes 5 in there) partied in the middle of the night I would call her. Oh did I wake you? Then I left messages at her place of business but I lost the satisfaction of waking her.

I thought this weekend was supposed to cooler. NOT! But I did get a run in.

A hard night

Me pushing Daniel along the paths

Daniel and Oliver in the bird's nest at the Botanical Gardens

The babies must be sick or their allergies are too annoying for them to sleep quietly. At least Oliver is. Every hour it seemed, one of them would be crying. Daniel even when healthy, gets up twice a night. Shanna deals with the grand majority of this. Her husband currently has a muscle pull in his back and can't pick up kids. I don't know how Shanna copes with this living on very little sleep. I don't know how Naomi will cope further down the road when Maya's newborn adorableness wears thin.  But so far, she's very patient and soft spoken as she should be to her sweet but demanding baby.
I didn't sleep much as the topical steroids aren't working their charms plus I heard the babies. I dreamt many disturbing dreams. In real life, I have a friend who has 10 children, most of whom are adopted. I have just found her again and know that her one child that is Shanna's age just had a baby. But in my dream, she was a celebrity coming to town. I know her! I kept telling anyone within hearing distance. There were press conferences with people criticizing her decision to have so many children. I kept trying to get her attention and remind her how we were friends. She recognized me in the crowd and asked for my phone number which she didn't write down. I found her husband who had turned into an old man with Alzheimers'. I was trying to make a connection with him but the disease had too far progressed.

There was finally a break in the heat wave and we had rain late in the day. While Steve was with Naomi and Maya dealing with many issues including the dog, I had Shanna and the kids. Her husband was in the ER trying to get help with his back but was too low in triage for them to see in any reasonable time frame. They will try again today. We took the babies to the Children's garden at the Botanical Gardens which I thought Oliver would enjoy. He did to a point but the heat was too oppressive. They have a tube slide built into a hill I knew he'd enjoy. But if kids try to take a short-cut instead of following the path back to the top, they will meet up with my friend Poison Ivy. I stopped one little boy from this route. Oliver enjoyed the gift shop with its wind-up bugs and snakes. Daniel liked the chirping bird stuffed animals. We enjoyed the air conditioning. It is fun seeing the boys learn new things and see how their minds work. Shanna was taking Oliver for a walk the other day and asked him if he thought it was time to turn around. He said Yes and he rotated his body around a few times and continued the path they had been taking.

We are keeping Maya away from the boys in case the runny noses aren't due to allergies. I didn't see her yesterday at all and missed her little sounds. I am hoping she'll become more alert. She is now 8 days old.