The lucky winner of our BusyBodyBook planner giveaway is…
(Results determined by random number generator.)
Congratulations, IrishMom. Drop me a note with your address (thebonnyglen AT gmail DOT com) and I’ll pop it in the mail ASAP. Which, just so you know, probably means not until Wednesday. 🙂
I jotted down some notes at Bonny Glen Up Close the other day about the hummingbirds that are in love with our feeder. We think they are Anna’s Hummingbirds. (Someone please correct us if we’re wrong.) The one above is the male: emerald back, ruby throat. These next two photos show the female, more modestly attired in shimming green without the crimson ascot.
How we have marveled to see them perching on the feeder instead of hovering, wings aflutter! Besides their coloring, the reason we’re pretty sure they are Anna’s Hummingbirds is because they sing:
This bird is most often found singing a series of scratchy sounds, including a sharp “chee-chee-chee”, from a high perch. This is the only California hummer to sing a song. When moving between flowers they make a “chick” sound.
Our trio—we’ve counted two females and a male at once—are quite the musical bunch, chittering away all day. They seem to live in a tree right behind our backyard fence. We’ve seen them perched on a branch there (more perching!) and zooming back and forth to our feeder.
Don’t be fooled by the female’s demure attire. “Though she be but little, she is fierce.” Should a weary sparrow happen to pause on the feeder’s perch for a moment, she will fly in his face and scold him furiously.
Reminds me of someone else I know.
The time has come upon me sooner than I expected. I knew I was going to need a good lightweight double stroller when the baby came, but I figured I could wait until, you know, after the baby was actually born. But the other night I took the kids on an outing, and when I went to pop Rilla into the sling, there was a big old belly in the way. I guess it had been a few weeks since I wore her—I haven’t been out much since the food poisoning nightmare. All of a sudden toddler-wearing is impossible. And because Wonderboy’s developmental disabilities mean he is much more like a two-and-a-half-year-old than a four-and-a-half-year-old, I can’t finesse group outings unless he’s in the stroller. It’s sort of like being six months pregnant with two-year-old twins.
I need a stroller that can contain both twins.
We have an ancient sit-and-stand stroller dating back to our New York days. I have rosy memories of wearing baby Beanie in the sling and pushing Jane and Rose down a steep hill to the little white church at the bottom. I would jog a little and get up some speed, and the tiny girls would hold up their hands and wheeeeee all the way down. (My memories of getting back up the hill after daily Mass are less rosy. Jane’s too, I’ll bet—I always made her walk home. That was one heavy, heavy stroller.)
The sit-and-stand still works and is great for our walks around the neighborhood. But I can’t lift it in and out of the minivan. Pathetic, I know. What can I say? I am a spaghetti-armed weakling.
So: what I’m going to have to find is a double stroller or sit-and-stand that doesn’t weigh very much. And doesn’t cost a fortune. And which can take abuse. Easy-peasy, right?
Any suggestions?
Books we’re reading and books I’ve recently read:
A Murder for Her Majesty by Beth Hilgartner. Middle-grade novel about an 11-year-old girl hiding from her father’s murderers. She witnessed the crime and has reason to believe the killers were acting on orders from Queen Elizabeth. Half-dead from hunger and cold after making her way from London to York, young Alice Tuckfield encounters a group of amiable choirboys (most of them are amiable, at least) who take her in and convince her to hide out in the boys’ choir as a lark. I thoroughly enjoyed this suspenseful tale, which I read before giving it to Jane so that we could have the fun of discussing it. I think Scott is next in line. He’ll like the setting: much of the action occurs in and around the York cathedral choir.
The King’s Fifth by Scott O’Dell. Next on my list of read-before-Jane-gets-hold-of-it. She has so much more reading time than I do that if I give it to her first, she’ll be miles away from it before I ever turn a page. Also, I bought it, so ha-HA, I get first dibs. This is another compelling and fascinating read. A young Spanish cartographer sits in a prison in New Spain, awaiting trial for failing to give the King of Spain his share—one fifth, following the precedent set by Cortes—of the treasure he is believed to have discovered in the Seven Lost Cities of Cibola. The young man, only seventeen years old, relives his adventures on the trail with Coronado and his army in search of the fabled cities where the streets are paved with gold. I’m only halfway through and am completely captivated. Very suspenseful, vividly detailed. The kind of historical fiction I love: a “respectfully imagined” (to borrow Gail Godwin’s phrase) rendering of real historical figures and events.
Secret of the Andes by Ann Nolan Clark. Will I ever get into this book? This is my third attempt at reading it aloud to children. First attempt was years ago, when only Jane was old enough to listen. After three slow chapters, I gave up on the “aloud” part and just handed it to her to finish. And she loved it. Last year, I tried again, this time with Rose. Stymied once more by those opening chapters. And yet, glutton for punishment optimist that I am, I’m giving it a third go-round, this time to Rose and Beanie. (Rose never finished reading it last year.) You see, I’ve put a lot of faith in Jane’s enthusiastic recommendation. Any minute now, it’s going to pick up steam. It won the Newbery in 1952, for Pete’s sake!
For now, at least it has generated a lot of discussion about the Incas, the Spanish conquistadors (happy coincidence!), and llamas. The main character is a young Indian boy, Cusi, who lives in an isolated mountain valley with his elderly guardian, Chuto, and a herd of llamas. There have been all sorts of hints in these quiet opening chapters about Cusi’s heritage (which he knows nothing about) and Chuto’s occasional mysterious journeys away from Hidden Valley with some of the llamas—journeys from which he always returns alone. Cusi wears golden earplugs, which a wandering minstrel recognizes as a sign of royalty. And now Chuto is going to take Cusi on a journey out of the valley for the first time. There’s a brooding sense of “the time has come” in the air…you see why I don’t want to give up on it? There is rich story potential here—if the characters will just get past the preparing-to-travel stage (and the singing to the llamas, oh my heavens, enough already with the the interminable singing to the llamas!) and get on with the actual traveling. Not that I’m impatient or anything.
Some books just don’t lend themselves well to reading aloud. I’ll give this one two more chapters before I decide, for once and for all, that this is one of them.
Have you all bought your planners already? If not, you may be in luck…
Here is my 2006 review of the BusyBodyBook, a day planner for moms. The format, which you can view in the image below, is a grid which lists Monday through Sunday going down the page, and then there are five blank columns for you to fill in with family members’ names (or whatever you like). It’s a clever way to keep track of what each member of the family has going on every day.
(Click to enlarge.)
The lefthand page is blank for notes. The calendar runs from August ’08 through September ’09. Here are this year’s covers:
Special features include perforated shopping lists (very cool), pockets inside the front and back covers, a bookmark, and month-at-a-glance pages.
The publisher also offers the grid in a large fridge pad format and a wall calendar.
Now for the fun part! The kind folks at BusyBodyBook have sent me one of this year’s planners to offer as a gift for one of my readers. If you’d like to enter the drawing, leave a comment on this post. I’ll draw a name on Saturday at 9am Pacific time.
2. Agapanthus, or Lily of the Nile
Also called African lilies, these lovely shrubs grow in our front yard and all over town. Their bloom season is just passing now, so the globes of purple or white blossoms at the top of each long stalk are looking a little bedraggled these days. But all summer long they were gorgeous. You see them often in median plantings and commercial landscaping, often intermingled with the earlier-blooming bird-of-paradise flowers (that’ll be a future entry).
Lily of the Nile and red geraniums
3. Pelargonium
The red geraniums in the photo above give me a freebie for our challenge. Of course everybody knows what they are. Not that they are really geraniums—the correct name is pelargonium—but geranium is what everyone I’ve ever known has called them. On the east coast, we planted them as summer annuals or grew them in our windowsills. They’re still in my windows here, but they’re also in the ground, all over the place, sometimes in the form of huge bushes. I’ve adored them ever since Anne Shirley bestowed a kiss and a name (Bonny, of course!) on the red geranium blooming in Marilla’s kitchen.
This entry has been added to our main 100 Species Challenge page which contains our list-in-progress.
This quiet blog must make it obvious I’m still taking it slow and easy after last week’s excitement. We’ve kept mostly to home, except for piano lessons. Our old high-tide mood is upon us, has been for a couple of weeks, so there are lots of read-alouds and lively discussions going on (this I can do from the sofa!), and Jane is in love with a giant tome on chemistry, and Beanie and Rose are elbowing each other for FlashMath turns on my iPod Touch, unaware that this game is nothing but math drills. I guess if it’s on the Touch, it’s automatically fun?
Yesterday Beanie asked for a turn on the computer to play “the typing game,” which means the Mavis Beacon typing tutorial CD-rom. Jane hunted it up for her. But I think she might enjoy this new discovery even more: the BBC’s online Dance Mat Typing site. I found the link at Educating Emme. Personally, I’m a little mixed on these lessons—the whole rock-and-roller goat thing wears thin very quickly. I mean, he’s a goat. On the other hand, I love his Scottish accent. On his tongue, banal phrases like “use either of your thumbs on the space bar” become delightful dialogue.
On the other hand, he’s a goat.
(And his cartoon hands—a goat with hands?—in the keyboard demos: shudder.)
But I guarantee Beanie’s gonna love it.
Thank you all so much for your comments and well-wishes. I am making a good recovery. The food poisoning or stomach bug or whatever it was has finally left me alone, and yesterday I was even allowed out of bed for a while by my very protective husband. 🙂 Today I am feeling more like my old self, though I find I run out of steam very quickly. I guess we’ll be laying low here at Casa Bonny Glen for a while.
To address a few questions from the comments (and comments, by the way, are split between the Typepad and WordPress blogs because some readers still seem to be landing on the old site instead of the new one):
1) Yes, I am looking for a new doctor. Possibly a new hospital as well (though we like how close this one is to home, especially since I tend to have very fast labors). I’m sure I would fare better in the Labor & Delivery ward during a real delivery than I did under last week’s circumstances. The nurses there just weren’t geared to take care of sick people. (And as my night nurse said to me at discharge: “You were one sick lady!”)
I would probably have been better off in the ER for the hydration and potassium treatments, but they were just too scared to keep a woman who was having contractions.
2) No, I am not eating lots of bananas! I’m afraid bananas are the food I loathe above all others. Can’t abide even the merest hint of banana flavor in a smoothie or anything. But no fear. Knowing this, and having suffered from bad leg cramps during my very first pregnancy—which all the books said meant my potassium was low—I have ever since made an effort to get LOTS of potassium from other sources. Peaches, melon, spinach, oranges, orange juice, and lima beans, to name a few. Dried apricots are especially high in potassium, but I’m thinking it’s best to go easy on the dried fruit for a bit longer.
Also, I’m taking pre-natal vitamins, of course. I don’t think I headed into this illness with low potassium; I think its sudden onset and severity just depleted my reserves. Of everything. I also think, now that it’s over and I’ve had time to do some reading, that I am fortunate the whole thing didn’t turn out much, much worse. ::::shudder::::
Back in her chemo days, Jane used to sometimes get high doses of potassium. This was always a serious business: she had to be hooked up to a heart monitor during the hours-long i/v drip, and a doctor was required to be present in the room the entire time, watching the monitor. That last part was actually a very good thing for us: usually it was one of the young interns assigned to babysit the monitor, a twenty-something first-year doctor fresh out of med school. Scott and I were twenty-somethings ourselves, so we generally hit it off with these docs and wound up making friends with many of the people caring for our little girl. This helped so much as the months of treatment wore on: when your doctors feel that kind of personal attachment to you and your child, they really listen to you. They respect your judgment. You get better medical care that way.
This OB barely knew me—I had only had one appointment with him. My first choice of OB retired over the summer and sold his practice to this fellow.
Anyway, back to the heart monitor: I was a bit surprised nothing like that was mentioned during the four hours I was getting those potassium boluses. No one so much as brought a stethoscope into the room. They did use the Doppler thingie to listen to the baby’s heartbeat once or twice, but not during the potassium treatment. I can tell, now, how sick I was because I never asked about it. It is NOT like me to keep a question to myself. Looking back, I’m shocked at that part. But that’s the trouble with hospital stays, isn’t it? When you most need to advocate for yourself, you’re least likely to be able to do it.
At any rate, I’m glad it’s over. I’m glad we all had a four-day weekend to recuperate in.
A few sweet moments from that awful day:
On Thursday morning, while I was waiting for my OB to return my phone calls, Wonderboy climbed up next to me on the bed and said, “You sad, Mommy?” “Oh, no, sweetie,” I told him, “Mommy’s just sick. My tummy hurts.” He laid a gentle hand on my belly, his brow furrowed with concern.
“I go get you a band-aid?”
Melt, melt, melt.
Also, there is something indescribably sweet about using your husband’s cell phone to call home and seeing, when you dial the number, that the name that pops up onscreen is: Love.
Have I mentioned I’m glad to be home?