Pollyanna-ish - a fab gift from a blog friend

Last week Friday, I got the coolest surprise gift from Deb at the Craftymoose. She sent me one of her beaded prism suncatchers. I love prisms. I want to live inside a rainbow just like Pollyana.

If you really want to live in a rainbow--I don't see but we'll have to have a rainbow for you to live in!"

Pollyanna had not hung up three of the pendants in the sunlit window before she saw a little of what was going to happen. She was so excited then she could scarcely control her shaking fingers enough to hang up the rest.

But at last her task was finished, and she stepped back with a low cry of delight.
It had become a fairyland--that sumptuous, but dreary bedroom. Everywhere were bits of dancing red and green, violet and orange, gold and blue. The wall, the floor, and the furniture, even to the bed itself, were aflame with shimmering bits of color.

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"Oh, I forgot. You don't know about the game. I remember now."

 "Suppose you tell me, then."

And this time Pollyanna told him....For a moment there was silence. Then a low voice from the bed said unsteadily:

"Perhaps; but I'm thinking that the very finest prism of them all is yourself, Pollyanna."

"Oh, but I don't show beautiful red and green and purple when the sun shines through me, Mr. Pendleton!"

"Don't you?" smiled the man. And Pollyanna, looking into his face, wondered why there were tears in his eyes.

"No," she said. Then, after a minute she added mournfully: "I'm afraid, Mr. Pendleton, the sun doesn't make anything but freckles out of me. Aunt Polly says it does make them!

The man laughed a little; and again Pollyanna looked at him: the laugh had sounded almost like a sob.

It has been so very cloudy that it wasn't until yesterday that I had a chance to see sun shine through it. It works very well (and I know for a fact that if you didn't have a massive living room and that if your walls were painted a light color it would work even better).

 Here it hangs in the entry window above the the three WWII tank prisms that I have in the window. As soon as the sun hit it, K who was in the kitchen pointed to the microwave and said Mom look a rainbow!!

They are hard to see in this photo but it is scattering little rainbows around my paper mache cross - the big rainbow is from one of the tank prisms.

Naturally, once I got out the camera - I took scads of photos of my little Pollyanna in rainbows. BTW I posted a few shots of her birthday over here if you want to look.

When Deb makes these for her shop, I am definitely buying more (I wish I had the money to make a whole curtain of them all different lengths above the entry!!)

My Baby Turns Eight Today - Sniff!

  

What happened? Where did eight years go?

All the photos were taken by me - even the studioish looking one.

13-ounces or less - letter in a bottle to Grandma

Craft stick puzzles. I always knew these would be harder to make than they should be - and they were. The girls wrote letters to my Mom on the back.

something made AND a big scare

I made this clipboard recently to send to a friend whose little one likes the song "I will Make You Fisher's of Men." It was a fun project and I am very pleased with how it turned out.

The girl you see here gave me a good scare on Tuesday night. It happened while we were in the backyard waiting for the dogs to 'Do Their Duty.' To give you an idea about context let me tell you what 'Do Your Duty' entails, we have a small area covered with woodchips where we have always trained our dogs to go to the bathroom. Think doggie litterbox. In the past, training has been simple and we trained on leash. However, after tremendous frustration on the part of almost every single member of our six-member family, I fenced it last week.

Kei has it all figured out and is pretty good about doing what is expected of him. Yuuko has it figured out but isn't as interested  (or wasn't interested - we had a very interesting break through yesterday) in doing what is expected.

We often sit in lawn chairs while we wait. Typically, we write or draw. K had finished her letter to her pen pal. She had gotten bored and had wandered off. Suddenly she comes up to me and lays her head on my shoulder and asks me, "Is it broke?" Questions and statements with no context are part of K's m.o. Consequently, I have no idea what she is talking about. I wonder if she is hot and thinks she has a fever so I check her head and it is fine. I ask her what she means.

She says "I feel funny. Is it broke?"

"What feels funny?"

She is incoherent and faints but is up within five to ten seconds. I put her in the lawn chair and she starts wretching but is unable to bring anything up. After two or three bouts of dry heaves, she says she feels better.

Then she tells me that she was trying to practice a trick by standing on a ball and that she fell.

Suspecting a concussion, I take her to Urgent Care, where a nurse triages her and then sends us to the Emergency Room.

By the time we arrive at Mercy, you would never have guessed that anything had happened to her. She keeps running off and playing. When we see a doctor he checks her neurological function and her neck. He says she is fine but since I didn't actually see what happened, we should wake her up every four hours in the night.




It is a strange thing to see your child's eyes roll up in her head, to see her sway like grass in the wind, and then collapse. When she began wretching, I wondered if she had somehow gotten into the ant bait in the laundry room for our ant infestation (another fascinating trial in my life).

She is perfectly fine. She got to bed very late that night and so the task of waking her up every four hours was easy - it happened once, at two a.m. And, since my husband usually doesn't come to bed until four or five, I didn't have to do it.  For which, I am truly thankful.

Apart from being exceptionally affectionate, K was perfectly fine and loving yesterday. 

bits and bobs and dogs

Kei and Yuuko are starting to figure out our life and how they fit into it. They are terribly sweet dogs. Kei has a way of asking to be petted by walking up to you, putting his paw on you, and looking soulfully up at you that is just heart melting.

The girls are finding the dogs to be much more work than they anticipated. I think that getting these dogs for was one of the best things we could have done for the girls.

My low-profile here is a result of my struggle with depression. I have many things going on in my life right now that I cannot share on this blog and they have resulted in some mild depression. I've confided in several people and I know their prayers help so I will share with you too so that if you are inclined, you too can pray.

Speaking of family, many of you have inquired after the twins. They are gaining rapidly and were moved from NICU to ICC on Sunday. Bryson the bigger of the two is 5 lbs 14 ounces. Unfortunately, he still struggles with his breathing and has oxygen drops. He also has a ductus that has enlarged rather than decreased as he has grown.

Bennett the smaller of the two just broke the 5 pound mark. Bennett is strong and doing very well. His big job right now is to learn how to take all his food from a bottle.

My girl K is sweet and bright!! I am reading a book called "Loneliness" by Elisabeth Elliot. K saw the book and asked me about the title (my reluctant reader is rapidly becoming an avid reader but still doesn't like to bother with hard or long words). I told her that it was "Loneliness." She flipped the book over to the photo of Elliot and asked me is it because her husband died? No she doesn't know the story of the Auca Missionaries. She just made a logic leap. I replied, "Yes."

K inquired about how he died and I told her that he was a missionary and some Indians killed him. She responded "So that is why she is lonely?" Then she continued "But she knows she doesn't have to stay lonely because God is with her."

Sometimes my children amaze me.

Winging Away

Here is some 13-ounces or less mail that I sent to my MIL. She sent me a bunch of notions last fall so I thought this would be a fun way to thank her.

This box made its way to a dear friend this week. I covered it with burlap and then stenciled the birds and letters on.

For shipping, you reverse the flaps so that plain cardboard is on top allowing the address labels to be affixed.

I also made a stenciled fish box - where I painted over reverse stencils and allowed the girls to decorate the areas left blank in the shapes of fish. It was awesome and the mailman was great about being careful about the label placement but I forgot to take a photo!!

meet Yuuko and Kei

Kei is a male. He is a goofy but handsome little man. He has scars on his muzzle and tongue, a piece of tongue missing and a bit of his ear missing. Life as a male at a puppy mill is obviously not easy.  He is terribly sweet and affectionate but unbelievably stubborn.

Meet the lovely of Yuuko. Yuuko is a classic Shiba Inu.  She is more aloof than Kei and equally stubborn. They are adorable, which might be a downfall for me.

We left the Twin Cities on Friday afternoon. About half-way to my parents, we stopped at an Arby's for supper. While we were there, the storm sirens started blowing. The Arby's staff asked us to either leave or enter the freezer. So we joined about seven others in the Arby's freezer. C was terrified but we managed to keep her calm.

On Saturday, Tim and I drove from my parents to the freeway and met the dogs' foster mother. The dogs were friendly and affectionate from the beginning. We brought them back to my parents to meet the girls.

The dogs do excellently in the car. I told Tim that next time we go on vacation, we should board the girls and take the dogs.

They do tolerably well on walks too. The great difficulty is that they are not as well housebroken as they were described as being. They seem pretty good about bathroom duties but they both mark. Kei has marked in the house as well as marking me twice. So we've got some work to do. Because we are making the girls take on their share of responsibility, they are finding the dogs to be not exactly what they anticipated.

Today, while preparing for a walk, C locked us all out of the house. Sigh. The dogs really are good dogs but at the moment - between them and the girls, I am frustrated.

P.S. I don't suppose the fact that I am a bit under the weather helps at all.