Weekend crafting

I made these headbands and hair clip over the weekend using scrap fabric and a set of headbands from Target's dollar bin. I think I like the black/white/green one best. :)

Another new development

Starting this past week, before Lucy got sick, she had a few allergic reactions--hives, coughing, stuffy nose. The first time I noticed it, I thought, "Hmm! There must have been a bug in the bed during Lucy's nap time, because she has bug bites on her back." I am so dense. None of our kids has had hives before (and neither have I), so it wasn't my first inclination. But then, later that night, Lucy awoke crying; half of her face was swollen, and she had hives on her legs and back. Jon ran out and bought some Benadryl while I stayed with Luce on the couch; the Benadryl kicked in within 20-30 minutes, and she was fine. We didn't know what had caused the reaction.

The next day, Lucy got hives within a few minutes of having lunch. I finally was able to connect the dots and figure out what might be causing the reaction: cinnamon.

On the first day, she had helped me make some toasted almonds. When we added the cinnamon, I let her take a whiff (a big one). Her nap wasn't long after, and that's when she had the first hives. Then that evening at dinner and later, she munched on the almonds we had made. (Then she woke up around 11:00 p.m. with hives.) The next day, she had only one or two almonds at lunch, and she had hives soon after. She also had a reaction the next day, when she woke up from nap like this:



The problem is she hadn't had any of the almonds or cinnamon that day. I think I have eliminated almonds (she has had them many times before), her blankets (she has slept with them other times this week with no reaction), and our laundry detergent (I have made no detergent or laundry changes recently, and the stuff I use is fragrance- and dye-free) as culprits, but I'm not positive what the problem is. That makes it a bit worrisome since her symptoms seem to be getting worse each time (I know that's normal for allergies). At least the Benadryl is doing the trick, and I talked to Lissa (whose son has several life-threatening allergies) about Benadryl dosage and other measures to take.

Lucy has an appointment tomorrow at the pediatrician (I'm taking her even if she's still throwing up!) to get a referral to an allergist. I hope they can expedite the process!

Still

I think our family needs some sort of perma-prescription for Zofran. Lucy is sick now, but at least Levi is pretty much over it. Nate is still in the middle. For some reason, our kids get tummy sicknesses really strongly. Nate threw up at least 20 times on Tuesday. Goodness gracious!

Book review: The Echo Maker by Richard Powers

I started a new blog, "Katie Likes to Read," where I'm going to post reviews of the books I read. My first one got a little too long!--and I didn't want it out there in the public blogosphere for someone to search for and then use for a class paper. (I know that happens a lot, and plagiarism is not cool.) So I'm going to put the full review here and a truncated version on my reading blog. Don't feel obligated to read this if you aren't a reader or aren't interested! :)

The Echo Maker is about Mark Schluter, who is in a coma-causing car accident; his sister, Karin, who travels to nurse him to health; and the brain expert, cognitive neurologist Gerald Weber. Upon waking from his coma, Mark believes the woman who looks and talks like his sister Karin is really a double, an impostor. Karin contacts Weber and asks him to help with Mark's case. Amid trying to help Mark recognize Karin, Karin and Weber also must deal with his increasing paranoia about his mysterious car accident--its causes and participants--all while experiencing their own struggles and shifting identities.

Told from the third person from several different perspectives, the story is sometimes narrated with Mark's point of view in mind, sometimes with Karen's, and sometimes with Weber's.

My impressions upon finishing this book:

Drawn-out and slow
Liberal (politically)
Clever

I guess you could say it wasn't my favorite. This was one of those books I thought about not finishing, but once I'm 300 pages into a book, I figure I might as well make it to the end. Perhaps I should have known: Powers begins,

Cranes keep landing as night falls. Ribbons of them roll down, slack against the
sky. They float in from all compass points, in kettles of a dozen, dropping with
the dusk. Scores of Grus canadensis settle on the thawing river. They gather on
the island flats, grazing, beating their wings, trumpeting: the advance wave of
a mass evacuation. More birds land by the minute, the air red with calls.
(1)

He goes on in this way for seven paragraphs--saying essentially the same thing four or five different ways. The entire novel seems this way, with very little action or movement in the plot line. Powers instead slowly examines what's going on in the minds of the characters, which is fine, but still often redundant.

It was also frustrating for me to read the random, pointless attacks on conservatism and the overt "birds are better than humans" tree-hugger message. Set a few months after the September 11 terrorist attacks, the story contains several--if not dozens--of jabs at conservatism and the Bush administration: "By winter, America rose up striking at targets everywhere. Rupp's duty time increased, and a few guys he served with were dragged off to Fort Riley, Kansas. On the third of February, just after the president delivered his hunt-them-down State of the Union address and Washington lost track of bin Laden, Mark came to Rupp and said he'd changed his mind" (212). Powers paints America as a predator, rising up to "strike" at targets while soldiers are "dragged" to serve. Later, Powers writes, "[Weber] ran the gauntlet of news-magazine headlines: U.S. bombs obliterate Afghan wedding. Cabinet-level Security Department rushed through" (220-221).

In addition, the "green" theme was blatant: "Something in Daniel mourned more than the cranes. He needed humans to rise to their station: conscious and godlike, nature's one shot at knowing and preserving itself. Instead, the one aware animal in creation had torched the place" (57). To Powers, the earth has been ruined, and man is the culprit. And later:

In the first week of October, the family [of birds] roosts on the eastern prairies of Colorado. After daybreak, as they graze the fields ... the space around the fledged crane colt explodes. His father is hit. He sees his parent sprayed across the nearby earth. Birds scream into the shattered air, their brain stems pumping panic. This chaos, too, lays down a permanent trace, remembered forever: open season. (277)

These examples are just a sampling of something bigger--something in the overall tone of the novel that borders on anti-human.

One aspect of the novel I did enjoy was Powers' clever use of changing syntax, diction, and word choice as Mark's brain function and self-awareness return after the accident. When the third-person narrator narrates from Mark's point of view while Mark is in and out of a coma, the language is stilted, choppy, barely understandable: "Where his mouth was, just smooth skin. Solid swallows up that hole. House remodeled; windows papered over. Door no more a door. Muscles pull lips but no space to open.... A room of machines, the space he can't reach.... Someone says be patient, but to not him. Be patient, be a patient is what he must be" (19). After he comes out of the coma and is recovering in the hospital, the narration begins to make more sense but shows how Mark isn't fully well:

They ask him who's the vice president under the first bush. Insane. What next?
Senators in the trees? They tell him to count backward from a hundred by threes.
Is this a particularly useful skill, might one inquire? They give him tons of
quizzes--circling things, crossing them out, and whatnot. Even here, they jerk
him around, make the print way too small, or give him ten seconds to do half an
hour of work. (66)

Later, out of the hospital, Mark is back to a normal level of brain function, but his paranoia and confusion are evident:

But the details aren't worrying Mark right now. He's after the full jigsaw.
Which is exactly what everybody wants to keep him from seeing. Some kind of
systematic cover-up, to keep him from finding out too much about what he's
stumbled into. Look at the facts: A few minutes after he picks up this angel
hitchhiker in the middle of nowhere ... he has an accident. Then, in the
hospital, something happens to him on the operating table. Something that
conveniently erases his memory. And when he does come back to himself, they've
swapped out his sister, who might help him remember, and replaced her with a
fake who keeps him under 24/7 surveillance. That's a lot to call coincidence.
(282)

Although Power's use of interesting, dynamic language is clever, for me it did not redeem the book. Overall, it was still too slow and too annoyingly liberal. I don't think I'd be tempted to read anything by Powers again.

Fabric

Don't these fabrics look fabulous together? I ordered them at different times for different reasons, but when they all came, I had to stack them together and admire. The aqua polka dot (Michael Miller Ta Dot) is for the quilt back. The other two (Michael Miller Ta Dot and Amy Butler Love Tumble Roses) are for clothes for Lucy... and maybe for me too! :)

Ricci asked about the fabric co-op I'm in. It started as a yahoo group (see here) and now is a website where you can get the wholesale discount if you are a member. The website is cottoncandiefabric.com. Click on Wholesale and apply to become a vendor. I think that's all you'll have to do--but I'm not sure since I started off in the yahoo group and automatically was a member of the other website. The wholesale price for most fabrics ends up being about $5 a yard instead of the usual $8 a yard.

Oh yeah, and I will probably send the quilt top/back/binding here to be quilted: The Back Porch Quilters. A penny per square inch isn't bad!

Two sick boys around here. Lots of outfit changes and laundry. I thought Levi was on the tail end of it today, but apparently he isn't. Poor Nate is only 12 hours into the sickness, so he has it bad right now. :(

Our kids get stomach bugs bad!

Update:
We took Nate to the doctor last night (Tuesday) because he was throwing up pretty much every half hour all day. Once he got some anti-nausea medicine, he could drink a little bit and start to hydrate himself. Levi is improving. We're all home and healing now!

Sent Items

After we got back from Virginia, we set up an email account for Nate so he could get emails from Mimi and my sister and brother. Although Nate can read, he can't really write yet, so he usually dictates his emails while I type. Here are some of his sent messages:

hi mimi today i had a great day at school. alright. then i went to the playground in Miss Karen's class. Alright. See ya later. Bye bye.

Lulu thank you for writing me an email... it's so big. So, you should come and visit us at California. okay? I really really want to go to Virginia.... okay New York instead. I love you Lulu. Bye bye

yes mimi we got the package. thank you for the brownie mix. is it for my birthday on may first? great! OK, bye.

lulu
what is new york like? does it have all the things? does it have trains? and shuttles? and airplanes? does it? great! OK, bye.

mimi, thank you for sending me an email. school was good. i played and played and played and played and played and played for like 20 hours. alright, talk to you later. bye

Auntie Jennifer I really love you very much. I want to come over to your house in a little while.
I'm all done with breakfast. I had pancakes for breakfast. OK bye.

Hi Daddy! i would love to play Wall-E! i was so excited that you wrote to me. soooo, i would really like to do something with you. soooo, i would love to play ticklefest with you after Wall-E. OK, bye.

And some he has written and sent on his own without my knowing:

lulunate

jcjgdsyafgygsysdeyuhjnkw

uncle greg natenot

miminate

Quilt

I finished the quilt top for our bed a couple of months ago, but I never took pictures. I unfolded it yesterday to take these and also measure it, since I'm finally going to make the back for the quilt. (I'd been waiting all this time for the fabric I ordered; I'm part of a buying group that gets a discount on fabric, but sometimes it takes a long time for orders to arrive.) The backing fabric is a cute white with aqua polka dot. Once I get it put together and decide which fabric to use for binding, I'll send it all off to be quilted!

Stair lover

I started taking the gate off the top of the steps last week to Levi's absolute delight. His favorite part is the descent:

Nate's first video game experience

Jon brought home the WALL-E video game for Playstation last week, and he and Nate have been playing it together. Yesterday, Nate played it by himself for a while. I just had to record how precious and sweetly sad he looked trying to get the game to do what he wanted.

Peekaboo

Kiddos

In the picture with Jon, Lucy was being a little bit disagreeable. But she cheered up for the next picture when her favorite person (Daddy) did something funny.

Good food find

I just took out some raw pine nuts I've had in the pantry for a while and gave some to Levi. They are perfect because they are pretty soft, and they are loaded with good fats and protein. Yay for easy lunch foods!

Books!

These arrived today (bought with some Barnes & Noble gift cards--thanks Lucy and Greg!). I can't wait to sit down tonight and decide which one I'm going to read first. New fiction!--I'm in heaven.

Just for fun

Some old pictures:

2007




2008






2009

Whoa

This lake is our street.




And this waterfall is a dirt hill next to our house.




Praying our garage doesn't flood!

Update 1/21/10 - Our garage was fine and the street is driveable again. Yay!

ABA

I can't remember what I've mentioned on the blog about Levi's therapy, but his physical therapy was completed in December. He then qualified for 6 hours/week of applied behavioral analysis (ABA), the same play-based therapy Nate did. The ABA started today, and I like his new therapist, Caroline. The therapy is at our house Mondays and Wednesdays 8:00-10:00 a.m. (I realize that only adds up to 4 hours/week, and I'm not sure what the discrepancy is about but will find out about that this week.) The in-home aspect is nice in that we don't have to leave the house or be 100% "ready for the day" by the time the therapist arrives at 8:00; however, it also means that Lucy wants to be involved. Today it just felt like she was in the way a whole lot. I guess that will get better in the next couple of weeks as my involvement in the therapy lessens and Levi can do more one-on-one time with Caroline.

I'm very excited to have him starting in ABA so young. Even though we don't know for sure what delays he does or doesn't have, it really can't hurt to have him in therapy.

Annoyed

I just spent 2 fruitless hours trying to get a duplicate charge taken off our checking account. One of those hours involved running three children from car to store in the rain (one umbrella, but it didn't help much), then trying to wrangle those unruly children (whose kids WERE those, anyway?) while the store associates spent 30 minutes having no idea what they were doing. Another 30 minutes was spent on the telephone on hold. All for a measly $17.66, which still has yet to be returned. Grr.

Today's creations

I cut out all the pieces for these dresses at this month's UFO night (that's UnFinished Objects--the first Monday of each month a group of girls gets together to work on random projects and gab), and I sewed them up today. I have one long-sleeved dress's pieces cut, too, so maybe I'll finish that one tonight.

School decisions

Since Nate will be 5 in May, he will be going into kindergarten in the fall. Jon and I anticipate he will "graduate" from special education at his next IEP, or at least that they will recommend a "full inclusion" setup with minimal to no special help. Because he is doing well, we feel more freedom in choosing where we might want to send him to school.

The first and only place I've visited is Living Word Christan Academy. Cost is definitely a factor, and the tuition at this school is about one-third that of other Christian schools in the area. One third. I met briefly with the principal and also for a while with the kindergarten teacher. She is nice, young, and strict--all great attributes. And get this--this year, there are 5 kindergarten students. They expect close to the same number for next year. I can really see Nate thriving in a small environment like that and with a teacher whose discipline ideas and strategies mirror our own (i.e., parents and teachers should try to address the attitudinal/"heart" issues and not just behaviors; the reason we need to obey is because it pleases God). Both the size and Biblical discipline facets of the class would be impossible in a public school setting. In addition, it sounds like they always tailor the academics to each child (e.g., separating the kindergarteners during language arts/reading time according to ability, or even sending a kindergartener to the 1st-4th-grade teacher for reading or math, etc.). The school is very small, with one class for kindergarten, one for 1st-4th, and one for 5th-8th. If we can make it work, we are planning on sending Nate there in September! (Actually, they have a 3-day-per-week summer program we might send him to first.)
:)