Mom again

Haven't been posting updates on my mother's health, but it hasn't been too good. She had three weeks of steady improvement, then started heading downhill again. Friday she was readmitted in congestive heart failure and had a tube placed to drain her pericardial effusion. She is remarkably improved today. She is now out of ICU and has her tube out, but I for one am not anxious to see her head home again until we are certain her heart can manage this time.

Thank you for your prayers.

Miss B's Birthday

Miss B said if anyone is wondering what she would like for her birthday, she wants iTunes gift certificates.

I said I'd spread the word.

A really, really good movie

Serenity

Where I Wanna Go on my Next Vacation

Key Lime Sailing Club

Weekly Goal

Miss B was writing a weekly goal for herself in her school assignment notebook when one of her friends, H, discovered it. "You're such a geek!" said H. "Gimme that notebook and I'll write you some better goals."

Here are a few of the goals H has set for B to accomplish in weeks past:

1. Get married.
2. Travel to the moon, shave your head, then eat the world's biggest hotdog.
3. Sleep in a giant shoe.
4. Sit on a cotton ball and dream about spinach. Travel to Atlantis and find your long-lost love. Paint yourself pink.
5. Bite your ear, click your elbows and touch your wrist - all at the same time.

Baby panda

We wanted to give Sweet Baby E a bear for her birthday, but the stores were depressingly low on cute bears. There were weird-colored Care Bears galore, and a few cute teddies that Lil Miss A rejected as being "too squishy," so I finally just came home and made this baby panda for her for her birthday.

Pray for Snow

Well. After that horrible frozen December we had, now it's been warm and wet and sloppy for a good week... and most of our snow is GONE! This is a very bad thing, because my nephew from Georgia is coming for a visit later this month and he is absolutely counting on playing in the snow. I don't think mud was what he had in mind. He can see that at home.

Right now, in my yard, there are a few dirty piles of leftover snow (you can tell where the snowmen were because now there is what looks like a snow rabbit where one stood and just a glob of dirty snow where the other was). All around the dirty piles are - no, I'm not kidding - GREEN grass. Green. I know it's just leftover chlorophyll from last summer, but it looks very weird in January, let me tell ya!

Anyway, we are praying for snow for Nephew N's sake.

As my dad put it, "So much for nuclear winter."

Movie Goer's Revenge

Heading off to see the Chroni(what?)cles of Narnia tonight, Barry had a brilliant notion: Popcorn bags activated not on microwaves, but on cellphone transmissions.

It'd be such sweet justice: The more obnoxious movie patrons are yappin on their cellphones, the more your popcorn pops up fluffy and delicious. In fact, if you were sitting right next to a yapper, you could hold your bag up next to the phone and it'd really take off.

UPDATE THE NEXT MORNING: How was the movie? It was great. ("Gweat," said Little Miss A sleepily from her carseat on the way home.) I cried and I cried and I cried. And then I cried again. And then I got teary. And then I cried some. But don't mind me; that's the mark of a good movie, in my opinion. I cried most when the White Witch's filthy minions mocked Aslan and stripped him of his royal mane, when he went willingly to the table rock to be the innocent sacrifice for a sinner. I completely fell apart.

Yes, by all means, go see it.

And remember, He's not a tame Lion after all.