RIP Sandra Davis

Grandma Sandy passed away shortly after noon today. We're sad, we miss her, but it is a relief that she didn't suffer and that it is now over. We're also glad that we got to see her and got to say our goodbyes.
"Memory Eternal" as we Orthodox say.
The following reading is from 1 Thessalonians 4:13-18. It's read during the Orthodox funeral service, and I had parts running through my head while we were at the hospital.
"Brethren, we would not have you ignorant concerning those who are asleep, that you may not grieve as others do who have no hope. For since we believe that Jesus died and rose again, even so, through Jesus, God will bring with him those who have fallen asleep. For this we declare to you by the word of the Lord, that we who are alive, who are left until the coming of the Lord, shall not precede those who have fallen asleep. For the Lord himself will descend from heaven with a cry of command with the archangel's call, and with the sound of the trumpet of God. And the dead in Christ will rise first; then we who are alive, who are left, shall be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air, and we shall always be with the Lord. Therefore comfort one another with these words."
What was stuck in my head, over and over from Sunday morning on, was a paraphrase - "We do not weep as those who have no hope." I thought of it after Aunt Laura, having seen Grandma's chart, said that throughout it the doctors had written, "no hope". They meant "no hope of recovery" in this physical realm, but in fact, for us as Christians, there is never "no hope". There is always hope. The story of our lives may be unhappy and contain tragedies, but we know how the story ends, because Christ already wrote the ending when He rose from the grave. Death is not final, because He defeated it. We do not weep as those who have no hope.

Closure, of a sort

So. We got to the hospital Saturday evening. At that point, Grandma had some reflexive responses, but not much. One, which was disturbing, is called posturing - it's sort of like the body is trying to curl into a fetal position. It's something the body does to try and protect the brain when the brain is being damaged. Aunt Laura said she kept doing it again and again. All four ventricles filled with blood, they had a shunt in but couldn't drain it all. Neither could they stop the bleed. Sunday, she wasn't tolerating the feeding tube well, and they had to increase IV fluids. By today, she was no longer showing any reflexes. We had a meeting with Grandpa and the doctors - the doctors said she is going to continue going downhill. She will probably have a heart attack in the near future. It was decided to "not perform heroic measures" which I think I understand to be a DNR - she is dying, and we're letting her go.
We know God always answers prayer - He just doesn't always say yes. Sometimes He says "Wait" - and sometimes He says no. We had been very, very concerned about my grandfather's mental state, as he didn't seem to be understanding the situation. My grandpa is a wonderfully soft-hearted man who never had a baby animal on his farm that was too sick and too far gone to be swaddled and nursed by hand. Every time we visited, I think, there was something wrapped in blankets in the barn or on the back porch getting milk, vitamins, medicine. And they didn't always make it - some things are just too sick to live, born too early, too small, or both, and all the milk and vitamins in the world can't change it. But Grandpa always tried. He was talking about taking Grandma home on the ventilator and caring for her himself - no way, not possible, he has a farm and she needs to be in ICU. She needs 24/7 care. And so we had been concerned about how hard it would hit him when he finally did realize that this time, there is nothing he can do. To our great relief, it seemed at the meeting that he has accepted it - she is not coming home. She is going home. We're all going to miss her very, very much.
Thank you so much for your prayers. Really, thank you, thank you, thank you. I got on my cousin's laptop at the hospital yesterday and saw in my e-mail comments from people I don't even know, and it was very comforting. Thank you.

A Prayer Request - and updates thereto

My grandmother, Sandra Davis, is in ICU after having had a stroke. My parents were called at 11:30 last night and called me at 6 this morning, and it took until now for us to know anything but "in the hospital, had a stroke".
She is in ICU, sedated and on a breathing machine, with blood on the brain. I don't know exactly what that means, but it doesn't sound good*. On the up side, she rested well and her blood pressure is under control.
Unfortunately, the Springfield she's in is five hours from ours. MO, not IL. Five hours, not TOO bad... I did almost tell my husband to call off and we were going for a road trip, but I thought we should wait to hear whether she could even have visitors before driving five hours one way. We don't even know what hospital. I know NICU is very strict about visitors, I'm sure ICU is the same way.
Please pray. I will update as I know more.
* Okay, so I talked to Daddy and apparently blood on the brain is not necessarily a devastating fact, it depends on how much there is and where. There could be only temporary damage - there could be permanent damage (we pray not) - there could still be no damage. We won't know for a while.
UPDATE: As of about half an hour ago (4 p.m. Central), we have official word - "prognosis is poor". The ventilator is not back-up, it is her breathing. She has no reflexive breathing. She has three centimeters of blood on her brain, and prognosis is poor. We will be driving to Missouri tomorrow, God willing, assuming we have the gas money and Husband can wrangle the day off (by begging, borrowing, or stealing, so to speak). I would not drive myself and Kittyboy, no matter how I might want to, because I am a wreck and that is simply not safe. God have mercy.

Another New Restaurant

Well, we have a favorite place to go for Japanese (Kiku), now we have a favorite for "crowded noisy steakhouse with line-dancing waitresses" - Texas Roadhouse.
I am not a steakhouse person. I'm not really a steak person. And why there's another steakhouse right around the block from Lonestar (another Texas-themed one, at that!), I don't know. What I did know is that some union has been giving Texas Roadhouse free advertising in the form of "Don't eat at Texas Roadhouse!" protests. From what we've gathered, whatever union it is has their knickers in a knot because they didn't get the job of building it. Personally, as fast as that place went up? I wouldn't be advertising that my union DIDN'T build it, you know what I mean? It went up at speeds I didn't know a building could. Whoever they did hire was GOOD. And this one union is having a whole big temper tantrum. I mean, billboards and everything. To the amusement of those of us on whom reverse psychology works very, very well. "Hmm, Texas Roadhouse - so they're open now? Wonder how the food is!"
Well, as of this morning, despite our Illustrious Leader's best efforts, we still have a fairly free-market economy. So we decided to take our economic power out for a drive and see how Texas Roadhouse is as a restaurant.
Oh. My. Gosh. More expensive than we normally eat, but worth every single penny. I can say nothing negative. They opened at 4, we got there at half past, and the wait was already 40-50 minutes. And people were waiting with nary a complaint. It's been open a week now - obviously word has gotten around that it's worth the wait. The girl who took our names down was on the phone for some time when we first came in. When she hung up, she said, "Oh my gosh, I just took a call from a party of 23! I've never done that before!" Extremely cool touch - a huge barrel of peanuts at the counter, just there free for everyone who was waiting for a table. And little paper bags you could fill to take outside, as half the line was indeed outside.
And we did get to our table not much at all over our estimated wait time. We'd already settled on what we were getting, and it came to our table fast. We had a WONDERFUL waitress, Melinda. She was fast, friendly, and while spinning between tables, she stopped to ask KITTYBOY how his meal was going. "Everything good, little man?" His mouth was full of fresh-baked bread ("baked every five minutes") - he was on cloud nine. A kid's meal is under five bucks, and definitely not toddler-size - most of it came home. Macaroni and cheese with fries. Kittyboy was too busy looking at everything to eat - playing peekaboo with the people in the next booth, signing "Go-go-go!" at the baseball players on the television, dancing on the bench to country music (a vision I will purge from my retinas somehow, lest I go insane), and flirting like mad with the waitresses. All of whom gushed and gooed over him. One caveat - this is a totally goat-roping, boot-scooting, line-dancing, yeehaw COUNTRY restaurant. I heard Garth Brooks at least once. Ewww. But the food makes up for it. And as rabidly as I am NOT a Garth Brooks fan - that says a lot. We're already planning and budgeting when we're going back.
The nuts and bolts, for those in the Springfield area who might try it:
Appetizers - $4-10 ($3 for a cup of chili, everything else $4 and up, but a decent amount of them are in the $4-6 range)
Sides, a la carte - $2.29, all of them. Big long list. Oh, and they have sweet potatoes on the menu. You can get it with marshmallows and caramel (disgusting, if you're me), butter and brown sugar, or just butter. I don't know when or where I last saw yams, as such, on a restaurant menu. I got a salad with HOMEMADE bleu cheese dressing, which is quite a different thing than jarred, and "fresh vegetables", which that night was steamed broccoli. My palate is not a trained one, but I can tell you that broccoli had never seen a freezer. It was fresh, steamed until barely done. I should have ordered some to go.
Entrees, ALL of which come with two sides - you can spend $9, you can spend $20. I got "Road Kill", which is a big chopped steak burger, basically, with cheese, mushrooms and onions. Heavenly. Nine bucks. AND, if you order a steak, you can order it rare, and they WILL cook it rare. They have a little warning on the menu that eating undercooked meat has its risks, blah blah blah, and they will cook your steak absolutely to order, any way you like it. As someone who prefers my meat "seared and not mooing, but not cooked any further than that," that impresses me, because so many places won't cook it any more rare than medium well. They also have chicken, ribs, and seafood. And a vegetable plate! We could go during Lent! Though we wouldn't, that would be painful. We would order it to go.
They also have burgers and sandwiches, all of which come with fries, $7-8.
Seriously, if you're in central IL? Go to Texas Roadhouse. I can't say enough good about it. You just have to go there. I went to tick off a ticked-off union - and found a steakhouse I love. Swine are winging their merry way over the ice skaters on the frozen lakes of Perdition.
And now, back to our regularly scheduled programming. Infomercial over.

This Daredevil Child, Pt. 2

Sir Edmund Hillary, famous for climbing Mt. Everest, probably gave his mother at least one scare from atop some tall piece of furniture while he was yet in diapers. And WHY does one feel compelled to climb the dresser, bookcase, or changing table? "Because it's there, Mommy!" I mean, really, why else?
This afternoon, I entered the nursery in search of my son. I could hear rustly little noises, but could see no Kittyboy. I looked behind the rocking chair, behind the door, no child, and the nursery is NOT big. It's a very small office-space. Kind of the size of a really nice walk-in closet. I could hear him. I couldn't see him. Then I looked UP.
Twice, earlier today, he had brought me books which I would have sworn had been put out of his reach - books awaiting repair for a torn page or cover, or which were beyond his attention span or something. Last time this happened, this daredevil of a child had figured out how to tip his toy box over and use it as a stepping stool to fetch pretty breakables from the top of his bookcase, then got something from the top of his very tall dresser by use of a rocking animal and a couple drawers pulled out. (here's the blog post on that)
This time, he was seated quite comfortably on some folded blankets in a box, on top of another box, on top of the former changing table, next to a shelf at least four feet off the floor, reading a book. His head was above mine. After I caught my breath, I asked him, "How do you think you're getting down from there???" He looked up, grinned, and launched himself in my direction. Every toddler knows, a mommy will always catch.
When Husband came home, we said nonchalantly, "Hey buddy, why don't you go get a book?" and Husband recorded the process on his cell phone. My apologies for picture quality.





Note that the air purifier (thing from which he climbed into the box) is missing from the last two pictures - it fell as his feet left it. And according to Husband, after I left the room, Kittyboy rolled over and slid off backwards - given the length of his body versus the distance from box to floor, it was a free-fall drop of about a foot at least.
Ahh, carefree youth. Nothing surprises me anymore.

Back to Aqua Therapy

A year ago, Kittyboy was in aqua therapy, aka pool playtime, because he refused to be bathed. I hadn't even TRIED to bathe him for months at that point, because I just wasn't going to wrestle the slippery infant who screamed as if traumatized whenever I set him in water. Not worth it. Baby wipes kept him clean "enough" anyhow, you know? Well, one session got him taking baths with no problem, so we never did it again... but this last winter, he decided that baths were once more WWIII. He got his first haircut not because his hair was all that long, but because it was matting into dreads in the back because I couldn't wash it. Rasta boy. Husband tried one day, after I cut off the dreads, to give him a bath - saying, "If he needs this, then we're doing it one way or another" is a daddy thing. I stood at the other end of the house listening to the truly terrified screams of "MOMMY!! MOMMY!! ALL DONE!! ALL DONE!!" in tears myself. And Husband did conclude that it really wasn't that I'm such a softy after all - Kittyboy had a real problem with either water, our tub, or both. And he's so strong, it's just not a good idea to wrestle him in the tub. BUT, he is no longer of the age where baby wipes are good enough. His hair, especially, smells quite like a lockerroom. He splashes in puddles, he splashes with his hands in buckets, he plays in the hose, but he will NOT go in the bathtub.
So we restarted pool time today. It'll probably be every other week. He was excited to see the pool - not excited at the idea of getting in. I'd been dreading that he would not show any problems at all with the pool (like taking the car to the mechanic and having it run just fine then), and that he had a problem with just bathtubs, and if that were the case, what would we do? My fears on that were unfounded. Ginny and Janelle, a new OT, got in the water, and asked him if he wanted to sit on the edge and splash - "Uh uh, all done." Waving his hands, backing up, not going near that water. The more they tried to coax him in, the more anxious he got. He was willing to stand near the edge and throw a ball through a basket floating in the water, but he wouldn't go in. Twenty minutes or so of every trick in the book, and an OT's book of tricks is pretty extensive, and any time they tried to put him in, he cried and ran away. He was happy being splashed - he would lay on his stomach on the side and splash with his hand - but when Ginny set him with his feet in it, he cried and scrambled out.
It was fascinating to watch while they troubleshot and bounced ideas off each other. Idea #1 - he doesn't like the 360 degrees of pressure from the water. But, he likes tight hugs, sleeps under 8 lbs of beans, etc. Rejected - but modified into Idea #2, which is he doesn't like that the water partially supports him while being fluid, he feels insecure in it. Okaaaay, so it's like the proprioceptive dysfunction which got him sleeping under weight in the first place. He needs the weight for truly sound sleep because it keeps him feeling grounded - in the water, he feels much less grounded even than normal. So we tried one-pound ankle weights.
Ankle weights, like chocolate, make everything better! He stomped about with them quite happily. They got him to dangle his feet in the water and kick, and once he figured out that something was different now, he was okay with going in. You could see he was still a little anxious with each new activity (working towards less and less support around him) but he was willing to give it a go, and by the end, he was having such fun he didn't want to leave!
So we have a shopping list - ankle weights, a wading pool (ours from last year cracked) and a round, colorful laundry basket. Get him to sit in the pool in the laundry basket, for sort of a boundary, and then once he's happy and fine with that, move the Happy Boundary-Providing Laundry Basket into the tub. I should add a swimsuit for me to the shopping list, because somehow I suspect this will become a communal affair, at least for a while!

A Favorite Southern Recipe

This morning I read a lovely recipe for bacon gravy at Civilla's Cyber Cafe that just made me ever so hungry... not that I desperately need to eat things of which the main ingredient is grease, but it's not my fault those are most of the best foods! I'd heard of sausage gravy, but not bacon, and bacon gravy sounds to die for.
MY favorite artery-clogging luxury is Wilted Lettuce. Very easy. Fry a "whole bunch" of bacon (exactly how much is up to you, but you want plenty of fat left in the skillet), remove the bacon and leave the fat. Snack on the bacon while tearing up your lettuce to fill a big salad bowl - romaine, not iceburg. Iceburg is mostly water and will turn out really gross. Add to the hot grease 1/4 c vinegar, 3/4 c water, and 2T of sugar, stir and bring to a rolling boil, then QUICKLY pour over the lettuce and stir until it's all covered. The heat "wilts" the lettuce, and it's just heavenly. All bacony and sweet and sour all at the same time. And you want to eat it before it cools too much!
You might have to play with the recipe to determine how sour and how sweet you want it, and to match the amount of "dressing" to the amount of lettuce.

And for my Orthodox friends, here is Wilted Lettuce for the fast!!!! Actually, the recipe (from Cooks.com) is designed to be vegan and kosher, but if you substitute canola for olive oil, it's also suitable for when you just have to have something fattening but it's a month yet until Pascha. I haven't tried it yet - you do the same thing as the above recipe, but brown the onions in place of the bacon.

2-3 heads leaf lettuce (Romaine, red leaf, etc.)
salt and pepper, to taste
1/4 to 1/2 cup vinegar (Kosher balsamic works best)
1/4 to 1/2 cup water
1 tablespoon to 1/4 cup sugar
3 tablespoons olive oil
1/2 cup finely chopped white or red onions
2 drops/splashes liquid smoke (optional)

This recipe is Kosher Pareve if made as instructed. Full, detailed instructions here.