Little bits

I didn't finish posting pictures from my Mom's visit. There is a wonderful little lake near our house with great mountain views. I sometimes run around the lake with Nora (haven't lately, it's just too hard to push her in the stroller and run for any significant distance) and there are 2 parks that she begs me to play at. While my mom was in town we went for a picnic lunch and played at the park (with strict orders from Nora that we were not to 'go running'). There are also some prairie dog colonies around the lake and we walked to one from the park.




Nora has started drawing circles and faces. :) I love it.

We had a terrific snow storm a few weeks ago (March 26). I had to cancel my day at work, and got to spend a snow day with Nora. We had already spent a few days locked inside together because she was on her second round of antibiotics since her birthday to fight strep. It was dumping snow all day long outside, and after breakfast she decided to put on her bathing suit and take her little people animals swimming. ??? We fabricated a great network of slides with the lamp and piano bench in the living room and she played/imagined for awhile doing this.
while it looked like this outside...
Then played in the snow later on when Poppa came home from work


Murphey took a trip down memory lane recently. We pulled a big box of Murphey's legos from childhood out of the garage and he sat down and played them with Nora. It was so cute to watch.
The other day Nora was contently playing in her playroom and I peeked in on her and she told me that she made a picnic for all the different balls. I didn't understand what she was talking about, and had to do a double take at the floor to see what she meant. I thought it was hilarious so I grabbed my camera.
And in other news... Nora broke her arm on Monday, March 30. I was in the basement, running on the treadmill and I remembered something important I had to tell Murphey, so I ran upstairs to tell him. When I walked into the room, Nora was perched on the arm of the sofa and she excitedly said "Hi, Momma!" and then lost her balance and fell on the floor. Now this girl will fall (actually, throw herself down) a million times a day, but this time she put her hands out to catch herself and ended up hurting her arm. I could tell right away something wasn't right by the way she was crying (and continued to cry, this girl just does not usually dwell on injuries or pain) and by the way she held her arm and would pull it away in pain when she tried to suck her thumb. We took her to Children's Hospital urgent care and they diagnosed her with a possible buckle fracture (they told us she bent her ulna). So they splinted her and told us to follow up with ortho in a week. Thanks to all of the advice from my friends and Murphey's intuition, he called the ortho clinic the next day and asked them if we could bring her in sooner, that we weren't comfortable waiting a week. They reviewed her x-rays and called him back with an appointment for the next day. I was working, so he took off from work and took her in. They decided that the x-rays were inconclusive and instead of redoing them, they casted her arm and told him to bring her in 2 weeks later to redo the x-rays and see if it was healed. She is now the bearer of a HOT pink cast. Which EVERYONE is telling me I have to save. Ewww....

her splintthe castAnd as you can see, it does not really hold her back activity-wise. As a matter of fact, 2 or 3 days after she got it, I had to tell her NOT to jump from the arm of the sofa onto her trampoline. I also have to tell her several times a day "Don't (insert dangerous activity such as 'jump in the bathtub' here), that's how you will break your other arm"

At first she would NOT suck her thumb, and that made for some difficult times, especially when she got sick (Strep AGAIN) and when she was trying to fall asleep. Now, she will suck her thumb, but she has woken up several mornings and told me she wanted the cast off, and would yank on it with her other hand. Hopefully we'll get it off this Wednesday.