Author: Doris

Dad’s birthday is on the 25th (Noel – get it?), and since he was going to be in SF for that day, Donald threw him a little brunch birthday party – including the cutest cupcakes ever. Look at the photo carefully, yes, the candle flames are caught in the breath just so, but also it reveals interesting tidbits – my brother has his bed in the dining room and reads InStyle magazine.  What – does he live in San Francisco or something?

Because of being sick and scheduling issues, we weren’t able to celebrate his birthday on the East Coast until the 31st.

Vince woke up today with a fever – actually, he’s had a low fever for a few days and now it’s really kicked into high gear. Poor thing, I just hope that he gets better soon and not get the rest of us sick.

I am ready to get back to regular eating. Feasting for a week is delicious and no good at the same time.

I need to go upstairs and take a shower – I’m smelly. I also need to give Edda a shower and Boba (our extra dog) a shower too. It’s going to be an inter-generational, inter-species, coed shower. At least we can all use the same Dora branded Suave shampoo.

Last night, we introduced the kids to Back to the Future. Such a good movie. We only saw the first one, I’m interested to see the 2nd one which is set in 2015 which is pretty much now – lots of flying cars apparently.

So its been about 6-8 months since I’ve really noticed Ruby slowing down – she doesn’t like to walk on hot days, and even on cold days she’s a little wheezy. Two nights ago, she couldn’t jump on to Vince’s bed. Yesterday, when Maxi and Boba were barking like crazy at the doorbell, Ruby barked a few times from the comfort of her doggie bed – not wanting to get up from the poof-y comfort. Last night, she did not even seem to want to come upstairs – but did so at the very last minute before lights out. Ruby is going to be 12 in January. Still eating and wagging her tail like a champ! She is a good dog 🙂

Even though I don’t love Christmas – I do love the days between Christmas and New Years – a time to catch up and clean up. A time to make New Year’s resolutions. I’m working today – I think very few people are going to be at the office. We are getting a little bit of snow now – snow before and after Christmas. Not too shabby.

I made triumphantly decorated sugar cookies.

And I went to a candlelight service.

I have always wanted to have a holiday party for my Rett Syndrome family, but it always seemed like it would be a little sad – having all these non-verbal girls sitting on Santa’s lap just asking for the wish that they could walk and talk and be seizure-free, so I never put it together. This year, just serendipitously, our friends, Lauren and Kevin, parents of Molly, organized a photoshoot with CureRett, a UK organization to take photos of our girls and raise awareness and funds to find treatments for Rett Syndrome.

So on the 22nd we cleared out our living room and turned it into a photo studio:

And people brought food:

And we partied like it was 1999. I can’t wait to show you the photos, Kevin did such a great job!

Vince held babies and introduced him to the wonders of Coca Cola (the baby did not have any Coke, I made sure of that):

Happy winter solstice! May the days get brighter from this day forward!

Can I just say how grueling this class is? My final is tomorrow – not cumulative. Thank goodness! For example: here is a post it note of some of the anatomy that I have to memorize:

Not too bad huh? Until you realize that it is one of one thousand post-it notes.

And that is the easy half, there is the physiology, which is what all this stuff does. How the cerebral spinal fluid moves around, the functions of all 12 cranial nerves, how we hear/smell/taste and see. This is the class that is kind of making me doubt my ability to multi-task – I mean I’m really good at not wasting time, but this is kind of ridiculous.

This is lecturing in the modern era – a prof talking about the ventricles in the brain and 17 people with their phones out taking video of the lecture.