About twelve hours from now, as I am beginning this letter (4:30 p.m.), our new grandson will be one week old. Everyone is fine, although Bobby and Hannah have learnt that they did not heretofore know exactly what the definition of the word “tired” really was.
The day the baby was born, Esther was happily telling her sister Christine (my nephew David's wife) about Bobby and Hannah’s new baby. Sarah Kay, David and Christine’s little girl who’ll be 4 on June 28th, stood nearby, listening. She made a prim little face and stared hard at her Aunt Esther as the sisters talked and laughed.
Then Sarah Kay said, said she, “We should not laugh when people are in the hospital.”
We often look at our children.. and now this precious little grandchild... and we think how much we wish Lyle (Larry’s father), and also my own dear father, could be here to enjoy them with us. They loved us without reservation. Nevertheless, we believe, as the Bible says, they are in the “great cloud of witnesses,” and know more about us and our doings than we might suspect. We don’t understand all those things... but we do know that we will see them again in heaven someday. Oh, what a joyous reunion that will be, won’t it?
We took the baby a Suburban-load of baby clothes, and Caleb’s gift was a brightly colored stuffed train that chugs and whistles and toots (a real live recording) and flashes its lights when it is squeezed. It will doubtless scare the poor baby half out of his wits.
This dear baby has a round little face, and his cheeks are full and rosy already. He awoke while I was holding him (I pinched him), and looked right up into my face with bright eyes... I love him. I love him so very much.
My heart is full, and I am very thankful.
Tuesday was Joseph’s sixteenth birthday! We went to the courthouse Monday so he could take his test--but he flunked. According to the instructor, he didn’t come to a complete stop at three stop signs. Joseph was dismayed; he thought sure he’d stopped fine and dandy at every last one of those signs.
“Well, next time count to three before you take off again,” I told him. Then, thinking of the speed at which Joseph does things, including counting to three, I amended that: “No! Count to ten!”
Tuesday after school, back to the courthouse we went--and this time, he passed. He actually stopped at the stop signs, and he went around the pedestrians on the sidewalks nicely, without winging them with the rearview mirrors.
For once, I let him choose his own birthday gift. He chose a neat little Minolta camera with a zoom lens.
It was indeed a happy day! I used up some of my immense enthusiasm by giving Victoria a flying ride in her carriage behind my bike. Wheeeeeeeeee!!!!!!!
Victoria was playing Dorcas’ digital piano, and suddenly I realized what the tune was: it was the song “Madeline” from the video of the same name that she was watching earlier that day. She is starting to add chords to the melodies she plays.
Last Monday, I took Socks to our veterinarian, because his eye didn’t seem to be improving like I thought it should (you will remember, that nasty yellow neighbor cat scratched him). We didn’t get to see the man doctor; instead the woman doctor checked him out. Honestly! She should be allowed to work with nothing smaller than a horse! Or perhaps nothing tamer than a mountain lion. Good grief, she is so rough!
She took the poor cat down with a power drive, sat on him, and then applied a dye to his eye, using a high-powered syringe about the size of a stovepipe, after which she got him in a headlock and looked at his eye with a black light (after turning off the room lights), which made the dye glow in the dark. The dye ran down his nose and got all around his mouth.
Cat of the Baskervilles!
She got the infection from the scratch with sledgehammer and tongs, and then took a go-around with an air chisel, just to be on the safe side.
Now we are giving him liquid Amoxicillan--fortunately, he likes milk, so we mix it with a little bit of milk, and he actually drinks it, and we don’t have to stand on his tail and shoot the stuff down his throat when he shrieks. Since the third dose, he recognizes the sound of the spoon stirring milk in a saucer, and comes purring to get it.
One afternoon, he didn’t come. I sent Victoria downstairs to see if Socks was perhaps stuck in someone’s bedroom. She returned, Sockless. I asked her if the doors were shut.
“Yes,” she replied. “Most of them were open, but most of them were shut.”
Hmm.
I said, “Oh,” just for conversational purposes.
He finally showed up, yawning and stretching. He’d obviously been sound asleep somewhere; who knows where. Victoria was soon laughing at him as he played around the cushions of a low chair, biting at the zipper, pulling himself around it, sliding on his back on the floor. Kitty was laying on it, and her tail kept twitching--and Socks batted at it. He pretended to bite it. Kitty’s ears went back, and she switched her tail the harder.
“She’s trying to get mad!” exclaimed Victoria, attempting to get Socks interested in her pencil, rather than Kitty’s tail.
Socks preferred the tail.
There was an outraged shriek, a crash, a meewwww, and then. . . "Socks likes pencils better than tails," Victoria told me. "Now."
Bobby brought Hannah and baby Aaron home from the hospital Thursday morning. They stopped at Mama’s house first, and then went to the school to show everyone the new baby. Hannah told the littles she might come over to our house as soon as everyone was through
oohing and ahhing, but baby Aaron had other ideas, and let them be known in no uncertain terms. So she took him home to discuss them with him.
That afternoon, I took Victoria for the longest bike ride ever…on 45th Ave., almost out to the new hospital. We went riding through a section where there are many pretty new houses… and all of a sudden Victoria said, “I didn’t know they kept cows in these nice houses!” “Huh?” I said, which is what mothers everywhere should say when their intelligent child says something incomprehensible. “Cows? Where did you see cows?”
“Well, see--” she explained, pointing, “there’s a tree with hay on it, right back there!”
I looked back--and there was one of those Chinese trees, thick of trunk and quite short, with the top part of it consisting of very small squiggly branches, forming a flattened-out ‘haystack-on-a-post’ effect.
Lawrence and Norma came visiting Thursday night, bringing the pictures they’d just had developed--pictures of baby Aaron and the rest of us at the David City hospital. Both sets of grandparents and great-grandparents have done the unthinkable: we’ve had our film developed at one-hour film labs, in spite of the cost. Couldn’t wait, couldn’t wait.
Socks is bound and determined to get the bugs that are crawling on the screens, even if it means climbing the screens and curtains. I take exception, however…and he’s gotten himself in trouble a couple of times. So now he climbs atop the loveseat, then turns and looks at me--and if I’m looking, he lays down very nicely and pretends he’s sleeping, squinting his eyes all up so that he can hardly see me. If I turn away, his eyes open up very wide, and he whirls around and stares at the window. Funny little cat.
Saturday there was a picture in the Omaha World Herald of Senator Bob Kerry standing with his hands in his pockets, suit coat flapped out around them, smiling into the camera. Victoria studied the picture.
“The big Matthew (speaking of Bobby’s brother) smiles just like that,” she said.
And he does stand around with his hands in his pockets and his suit coat flapped out around them, which I imagine is where she saw a similarity. Wait till we tell Matthew that he’s the spitting image of Senator Bob Kerrey!
The Bushes (as in, the Georges) recently conducted a spoof of themselves, to the entertainment of their dinner guests and the media:
The elder Bush tries to get comedian Dana Carvey to update his famous impersonation of the former president’s tortured speaking style only to find that the actor is more interested in mocking his son.
“I’ve jumbled more than my share of sentences, too, maybe we could work that into the next routine?” the elder Bush asked the comedian.
“Well, I’ve got a subliminable feeling that Hispanically that might work,” Carvey replies, citing two of the current president’s most famous verbal snafus.
The president himself later got in to the act, giving a self-deprecating speech in which he spoofed his travails with the English language.
“Some people think my mom took up the cause of literacy out of a sense of guilt over my own upbringing,” Bush told the about 2,000 people gathered at the fund-raising event.
“I guess I could have paid a little closer attention when I was in English class but it all worked out okay,” Bush said to a roar of laughter.
He then went on to use some of his most famous malapropisms.
"The way I see it, I am a boon to the English language. I have coined new words, like 'misunderestimate' and 'Hispanically'," he said. "I've expanded the definition of words themselves, using vulcanized when I meant polarized, Grecian when I meant Greeks, inebriating when I meant exhilarating."
The Barbara Bush Foundation was created in 1989, the first year that the elder Bushes were in the White House, and was designed to promote family literacy programs. Since its creation, the foundation has given out nearly $9 million to 276 family literacy programs around the country.
I like President Bush. Did you know that he professes to have been born again when he was forty years old? His life underwent a major change at that time, and he never again behaved as he had previously done. It certainly looks like a true cases of salvation to me. I respect him, and I like his wife.
President Clinton’s brand of “born again”, on the other hand, would make one think that most likely our Siberian Husky, Aleutia, was also “born again”-- only more so.
The majority of last week was spent cleaning the basement and washing clothes… will I ever get done?
The basement is improving... but by micromillimetrical nano-increments.
Friday afternoon Hannah called. She was needing to take a shower and wash her hair, but her shower is in her basement, and she didn’t yet feel up to walking up and down steps. In fact, her porch was difficult for her to navigate. So I cleaned the little bathroom from top to bottom, curled my hair, and went to get her.
And then...*I* got to hold a precious little sleeping bundle while she took a shower. Do you know, I haven’t held a tiny baby since Victoria was born? And I like it. I like it a lot. I sat down in my desk chair, carefully tucked a pillow under my arm, and proceeded to discover that the Hunt and Peck method is indeed tedious--but well worth it, at times like these.
A little later, Dorcas came home, so I let her hold little Aaron while I finished writing a post to Aunt Ardis.
After taking Hannah back home, I went to the Salvation Army to get her some clothes. Nothing in her closet seems to fit, she has discovered. When she told me her troubles in trying to unearth something suitable, and having precious little success, I laughed.
“Happens to the best of us, those first few days after new baby!” I told her. “But it goes away faster than you’d think.”
Hannah waggled her eyebrows at me. “That’s fine for you to say,” she retorted, “but I can look around and see for myself that for some people it never goes away!”
I laughed again. “Guess that’s true…but some people get to looking that way, even though they’ve never had any children at all.”
Hannah sighed. “Just bring me a muumuu,” she said.
I found quite a few things (no muumuus), but it was getting late, and I didn’t have time to look around like I wanted to. But!--the sale was going on the next day, too--and the dresses and two-piece suits were $.99; sweaters, skirts, and blouses were $.50; shoes were $.25; and all other clothing items were 50% off. So I put on my false mustache and nose and went back on Saturday, too.
You should have seen my cart. Well, you couldn’t...it was completely BURIED. The only trouble is, although the Salvation Army cleans all their clothes before they put them on display, the employees smoke, and the clothes smell like cigarette smoke. UGH!
I hate that stench, and Hannah cannot tolerate it at all. She is quite liable to have an asthma attack, if she breathes it even in the most infinitesimal amounts. Sooo... I washed and dried clothes all day long. But there were several very nice things for her; some were brand new. I’m ever so pleased with myself, for getting such a pile of things for such a little sum of money. Listen to this: I bought 90 clothing items, including dresses, jackets, blouses, short-sleeved sweaters, and skirts--all for slightly under $75.00. That’s no more than one nice outfit from Herberger’s, Younkers, Dillards, or even J.C.Penney’s would have cost! But Hannah has an entire wardrobe for that amount.
I even found a pair of brand-new never-been-worn shoes for her. She wanted some lower-heeled ones, a size bigger, because her feet and ankles are still swollen. And they hurt.
Saturday morning Dorcas took Hannah, along with the baby, of course, to David City to see Dr. Luckey. Hannah was feeling much better by then, and the baby is fine... he’s a dear little sweetheart.
“The more I see of Dr. Luckey, the better I like him!” said Hannah. “Especially when I compare how gentle he is, with how rough so many of the nurses are.”I agreed with her wholeheartedly.
Lydia once said about Dr. Luckey when she was just three years old, “And he IS a doctor lucky for us!”
I took them part of our dinner (with Keith, Teddy, and Joseph looking over my shoulder as I filled bowls, to be sure I was leaving enough for the rest of us): baked chicken, dressing, carrots, baked potatoes, lettuce salad (“You can give them more of that,” said Joseph), buttermilk biscuits, and fruit salad with raspberry yogurt.
Hannah came to church Sunday night, but Aaron took her right back out again, post haste. (He said, in a very high-pitched, polite sort of way, "I want to go out--RIGHT NOW!!!") (I heard him, with my own two ears.)
She walked across the street to our house to feed him and take care of him…and I don't know if she ever managed to get back to church before the sermon was over, or not. She was gone when we got home, however; and their car was still in our driveway, so I expect she was somewhere in the school, showing the sweet little babydear to everyone who would look.
Socks, suddenly realizing he is a tomcat, howls most of the night, and keeps me awake. So Joseph filled a big squirt gun for me…and YES! I used it on that cat! He got himself a bath, that’s what he did. A fierce, fast shower. A car wash! Well, maybe a cat wash.
Why does he think the best place to howl is right outside my bedroom door? And Victoria’s door, which is right next to mine? But last night, I was ready. As soon as he howled, I leapt silently out of bed, grabbed that water blaster, and soundlessly pulled my door open.
There he was, standing not two feet away, and just as I took aim, he howled.
“YeeeeeeeeOOOOOOOOOWWWWWWWLLLLLLoooooooRRRROOOooooo!!!”
SLOSHSHSHSHSHSHSHSHSHSHSHSHSH!!!
And then wasn’t there a frantic scurry of toenails on wood floor, as cat tried desperately to extricate himself from earth.
He then spent a good deal of time drying himself (how do cats dry themselves by licking themselves??), which effectively prohibited him from howling, and I slept.
For fifteen minutes, that is.
As soon as he was dry, he went back to howling. I jumped out of bed, snatched the squirt gun, yanked open my door--and the cat, knowing what was coming, ran. This infuriated me further, and I raced after him, pumping up the gun to full bore. As soon as he was cornered, ka-BLOOOOOSSSHHHH! I let him have it.
And the cycle repeats itself.
Lets hope his upcoming operation this week turns the beast into a docile little pussycat, for I have no wish to drown him.
(Well, actually, I do.)
Or perhaps we will throw him to the wolves--or the horrid yellow cat, as the case may be --and let the best cat win. That is to say, we will let him go outside, instead of trying to make an indoor-only cat of him.
Yes!--I lose my feline sympathies fast, when the stupid thing yowls and behaves like a revolting ol’ tomcat! Also, he periodically loses his marbles and evidently thinks we are set to murder him, or something, for no more reason than that someone is picking him up from a chair they wish to sit on; and he thinks he must fight for his life to save himself. He nearly got himself scalped, for that.
And if any of you readers are PETA, or even PETA sympathizers, I have this to say to you: COME CLOSER. THAT'S RIGHT... JUST A LITTLE BIT CLOSER... CLOSER...
When I went to take a bath this morning, all my best towels were missing.
“Hey!” I exclaimed, “Where are my towels?!”
Victoria came trotting down the hall, opening the linen closet to get out another towel for me.
“Well, you see,” she explained, handing me a towel, “I walked out of my room really early this morning, and for some strange reason, there was water all over the floor. So I had to dry it all up, because my socks got wet.”
Ooops.
Hannah needs our swing for the baby--but Larry cannot find the legs for it! We have the motor…the seat…and I washed the pad…but where are the legs??? Larry even climbed up into the attic to see if perchance we’d stored them up there. No luck. Rats! Or mice. Did the mice eat them?
Perhaps Bobby could simply stand and hold the top of the swing, while baby swings?
Well…in the midst of all this turbulence, tumult, and turmoil, here is something I like to remember: “Stressed” spelled backwards is “desserts”.
Please pass the doughnuts.
P.S.: Baby Aaron has now forgotten he wanted nothing but a bottle, and is eating the right type of milkshakes. Things are looking up!
P.S.S.: OH! Guess what! Kitty is now a grandmother! Yep…Tippy, the kitten that Keith and Esther took, had four little kittens. They were born yesterday afternoon… during Sunday afternoon nap time… on Keith and Esther’s bed… while Keith and Esther were sleeping… and she had them… right in between Keith’s feet. HAHAHAHA
Esther suddenly heard “mew! mew! mew! mew! mew!” She sat up and looked around--and there was the cat family, with two kittens born already.
Esther immediately screeched, “Keith! Don’t move!”--making Keith move remarkably fast.
We went to see them tonight, and Tippy leaped out of her box and hissed ferociously at several of us. But we were very quiet, and didn’t get too close, and she soon settled down, climbed back into her box, and took care of her kittens, purring.
P.S.S.S.: A little while ago Victoria said to me, “Isn’t Bobby and Hannah’s baby really, really, really cute? Aren’t you glad they had a new baby?”
“Yes,” I replied, “I sure am!”
“I’m glad, too,” said Victoria, “so I could see what he was going to look like!”
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