Month: May 2010

Last weekend, before the Lego party, Vince put together a model of a caterpillar for school. I remember spending many enjoyable afternoons during my youth putting together these types of projects and I had to suppress my urge to help Vince too much to make the caterpillar perfect. I love having projects which can be made “perfect” unlike pretty much anything else in life where one has to acknowledge that perfection is never attainable. I did introduce Vince to the hot glue gun, which is the best invention ever!

Our own live caterpillar experiment has ended as well. The moth did end up breaking out of its cocoon. You can kind of see the exit hole:

But we didn’t let it go fast enough, I figure that the poor thing needs to find food soon after emerging as it has used up all its energy to do the transformation, so it died. I think we are having a little burial ceremony sometime this weekend. This is the moth (who is dead) that we perched on top of a slice of watermelon to try and “revive” it.

I’m spending some of this weekend quilting. I’ve joined the quilting group at church, full of lovely ladies who are a generation ahead of me in age. They are a lot of fun to talk to – they know all about the history of the church and they know a lot about quilting. We are doing a 20 square Baltimore album quilt and some of the squares that are done already are so incredibly beautiful, I don’t even want to touch them. I am contributing only one square – passable, not incredibly amazing, but pretty good for a first go round. Deadline for the square is June 1st and I just finished it today!

We are in the middle of the night time routine. Jeremy is reading aloud “The Voyages of Doctor Dolittle“. Edda is still awake at 9:30pm! I’m a little nervous about this long weekend, we don’t have very much planned and everyone else has plans – so maybe we’ll be a little stir-crazy. This morning, I had wanted to see SATC2, but it got such terrible reviews, maybe I won’t.

I am a week behind posting about our lives. Vince hosted his party last week. He was very excited.

The highlight of the party was the screening of Lego: The Adventures of Clutch Powers, a straight to DVD full length Lego movie.

Jeremy made the cake and pizza. Here he is manning the oven.

He got new glasses, I told him he looked like Steve Jobs (but I just looked up photos of Mr. Jobs and he doesn’t have black framed glasses). Anyhow, Jeremy said that he was chubbier, had more facial hair and more head hair than Mr. Jobs. So other than that, it’s they are EXACTLY the same. Two white guys in black turtlenecks. I don’t think Steve Jobs makes his own pizza (from scratch!).

There were a few kids who did not like pizza, so PB&Js and Ramen were made, but very little of it all was eaten. Although we did notice that Ruby managed to snitch half the sandwich when no one was around the table. I think Ruby is so good at stealing food from the table and we are so forgetful about what we leave on the table that Ruby probably gets another full meal from leftovers left on the table.

Lima bean got so big – had to go plant it in someone else’s garden. Our whole lawn is shaded, no sun for veggies. Vince did not want to let it go somewhere else, but it was tipping our little styrofoam cup over on its side. I asked if he was going to try some lima beans when they were ready. He was not sure at first, but finally relented. I told him they were almost like edamame.

Remember I mentioned that I was thisclose to getting pretty unlucky with the Times Square car bomber? I was in Times Square buying these awesome green PJs for Edda from the 4-story M&M World store. Who knew that M&Ms needed such a large store? The world is a funny place.

Last week, Vince had his final cub scout pack meeting of the year. He got promoted to Bear. We love our cub scout troop! Vince needed to pee in this photo. Can you tell?

After the awarding of all the promotions and badges earned, the kids had a chance to see lots of reptiles! The reptile guy was pretty funny.

Many years ago, when we were first dating, I bought Jeremy a new copper bowl, which, as I recall, was very expensive, but I was in the swoon of new love and I wanted very much to impress him. I bought him a copper bowl because he mentioned to me that a copper bowl is properly used to make beaten egg whites; the copper in the bowl helps stabilize the foamy egg whites (or you can use cream of tartar). And I thought it was the perfect gift – a combination of chemistry and cooking, both things which Jeremy liked.

We’ve owned this bowl for about 14.5 years and we’ve used it maybe 4 or 5 times. This is what I consider a very poor return on my investment (but we did get married, so maybe the return on investment is just fine). Turns out Jeremy hates making cakes in which the eggs have to be separated and beaten. Jeremy is usually not adverse to making complex baking recipes, so this admission surprised me.

I also found out about 4 weeks ago that Jeremy does not actually like salad very much (we usually have salad 3-4 times a week! for 15 years!). Who is this mystery man that I’m married to? Maybe tomorrow I will learn that he’s actually a huge college football fan. Will the surprises never end?

An unscheduled Saturday that was (and perhaps still is) headed towards disaster. We all love each other, but an aimless weekend day together sometimes sends us into fits of bickering. So we needed to get out of the house. Headed to the local ice cream parlor and then the adjacent park. It was not an entirely satisfying excursion. We came in grumpy and left grumpy. But we all had some ice cream, so maybe I should count it as a success,

Ruby says – I’m cute! Give me some ice cream!

Jeremy is covered in hives. After he gets any sort of cold, as he’s recovering, his whole body turns into one big itchy swollen hive. It’s getting worse now, he wasn’t even really that sick this time, at least not enough to tell me and this is day 3 of the post-sickness hive reaction. Poor guy.

I haven’t been in the mood to take photos. I’m not really sure why except for the fact that I’ve really been busy. So no photos today. I have been searching all day for the perfect snack. I have not been able to figure out what it is…

Vince is so odd to me sometimes, he’s so much more social than either me or Jeremy. This weekend, he’s planning, pretty much on his own, his own party (with a theme: Lego) for 3 or 4 pals. He has activities planned, lunch planned, things that both Jeremy and I are suppose to do for the party; the first of which was to email the invites. Last night, we sent out the emails and we got all these replys which indicated that the parents had already heard about the party via their own kids’ excitement from Vince’s own hype during school that day.

Edda has been sleeping better these days, I think the Prevacid has been helping, especially with the falling asleep part. And her gut seems to be moving smoothly. I’ve been encouraged by her improvement to reach out and grasp something this year, I’m wondering if I should try and help her relearn how to finger feed. That would be a biggie.

Ruby passed her off-leash test in our fair city last weekend. Jeremy bragged that she was the best of the bunch. I think she got some BBQ as a reward for passing the 2nd year in a row!

I am still a little wound up today, I’m trying to dial down my anxiety a notch. It’s mainly about work, but I’m also trying to diet to lose the 5-7 pounds that make my pants too tight and the diet compounds the anxiety. It feels like I haven’t really left the house since Monday and I get a little twitchy if I’m in the house too much.

It’s not really true that I haven’t left the house, I went to Edda’s IEP meeting which was really just a formality to add the eye-gaze computer stuff to next year’s IEP goals. We gathered Edda’s teacher, the AAC person from the county, the principal and assistant principal of the school and a reading specialist and me at the meeting which was held in the principal’s office. A little surprised to have all these people there – of course, the principal had never heard of eye-gaze communicators, she runs a school of 500 typical kids and maybe 8 or 10 special needs kids, so it was fun explaining it to her. The principal is a hoot, I had never met her before this particular IEP meeting, very fun and engaging and extremely supportive of everything that goes on in Edda’s classroom and also encourages a lot of mixing back and forth between the typical classrooms and the special needs classrooms.

I’m very excited to tell you that RSRT has somehow managed to get their hands on a YAZ plaque signed by Vince Clarke and are auctioning it off to raise funds for research on Rett. I’m a huge Erasure fan, how do you think we decided on Vince’s name? (just kidding!) Bidding is over $1000, pretty impressive. Ahh, memories of 1988! I wish we could have gotten our hands on Obama’s old car..