Beautiful Things

One of the best things about traveling is getting to see new things, and the best thing about traveling abroad is seeing all the amazing things that people make! Valerie brought back a lot of beautiful things from Ethiopia, and a delicious smelling bag of coffee!

It was SO hard to choose one! Ana called the purple one, so it was between the turquoise one on the left, the red and gold one and...

The blue and white ones. CLEARLY I wasn't good at narrowing stuff down! 

Valerie found a beautiful selection of silver crosses and a Star of David

They had beautiful detail on them!

This blue and gold one is the one I ended up with-- the light in our apartment doesn't do it justice!

And this is the cross I chose

It has beautiful detail, and all I need is some black silk cord to make a necklace of it!

Full Day Camp!

Jeremy used the camp camera to document the paper airplane fun during full day camp a few weeks ago-- check it out!

Monday Monday!

OK, so back to Memphis for a brief period of time... Monday we got to spend time playing with Ana and having fun, we cooked lunch (my new favorite stuffed zucchini), and then we hopped in the car to head home.

Ana walked around the back yard with Grandma for a while 

Then she put on her new princess sunglasses and played with sidewalk chalk!

 

And then learned a little about badminton!

 

Then she hopped in the old car and drove around

 

We went inside to eat a mid-morning snack and Ana helped me make miso soup!

Then we made a funky alien headband with pipe cleaners

After that, she lint rolled Uncle Jeremy-- he was much cleaner after that!

Tennyson Lee

Congrats to my old friend Janie! Tennyson Lee was born 6/7/11 at 4:07 PM. 7 lbs, 5 ounces, 21" long

Family!!

I know I've fallen behind on my Memphis updates and I have TONS of pictures to post, but this is the most important one right now-- Valerie received word today that the MOWA letter finally reached court today which means Jeremy and I have a new niece and nephew!

Welcome to the family China and Mitike!

So WHAT happened to your leg?

With my injury in slow repair (finally), I've had a lot of folks asking what went wrong with the whole thing... here, to the best of my understanding, is a general rundown... (I claim absolutely no medical knowledge, please don't judge me...)

When I hit the floor last summer...

(via)

Was pushed out of place, so that nifty little bone that the line points to was pushed out from under the overlying bone that comes down from the knee. At the same time...

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Got sent the wrong way when I hit my hip on the floor. When I went to physical therapy, they attempted to put my ankle back in place but didn't really do anything for it and at the end when I said it didn't feel quite right, they told me to just keep doing those exercises and I'd be A-OK. Note that they did NOT do anything for my hip, against my protests.

What I've come to understand from Carl (my new PT and possible wizard or some other practitioner of dark and magical arts) is that due to the position of my ankle...

(via)

and

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AND

got so screwed up that my hips weren't functioning properly and my lower leg wasn't functioning properly and that caused my knee to go all wonky and give out!

So basically, we're re-strengthening my knees, re-aligning my hips, completely loosened up my hip flexors and abdominal muscles to re-train them, and did some crazy massive acupuncture on my calf (which didn't go deep enough, so now I have a huge knot next to a bundle of nerves which is KILLING me!). I'm sore, but doing a lot better now-- when I think about the fact that at this time last month I couldn't walk I'm amazed! I still have a long way to go before I can hit up Desiree's class again, but I walked all over Zoo Atlanta on Wednesday for the field trip and didn't want to die when I got home and Carl says he'll probably clear me to climb Stone Mountain next week! HOORAY FOR PROGRESS!

Sunday, that's my fun day

Sunday was actually fairly relaxing-- Jeremy went to church with his parents-- I didn't go, partly because I don't do church and partly because Marc reports their sound system/band is through the roof; almost literally! I slept in a while and then when Jeremy got back, we went over to Buffalo Wild Wings to see Suzy! I was so glad we got to see her and see how well she's doing-- back in school, living with a guy she really likes, enjoying Oxford, and having the life she deserves!

After that, we hopped on home to get ready for Valerie and Ana to arrive! As you may have noticed in an earlier post, that didn't go as planned... Chicago (their connection between Europe and Memphis) was slammed by storms and the flight from FRAORD got diverted to DTW. Of course, United managed to not record the flifo correctly (flight information) and so it showed that Valerie had landed in Chicago NOT Detroit! She doesn't have a US phone (being as she's here infrequently at best) and we saw her ORDMEM flight had been canceled, so we were very worried when we couldn't get in touch with her!

After several rounds of talking to United customer service representatives (who weren't so much with the service or the brains), we finally got one to tell us that he was fairly certain she wasn't on the plane that got to Memphis at 10 something that night. Thankfully, none of us felt like going to bed until after her potential flight had landed because sure enough, we got a call from the Memphis airport that Valerie and Ana were there! We hopped in the truck and ran up to grab them. Valerie was exhausted, and Ana in all her PK glory was wired from being trapped on a plane all day, and when we got home Ana suckered Jeremy in to sleeping in her room that night! Valerie shared a few items while unpacking for nightclothes, including some delicious smelling Ethiopian coffee! Finally, we rolled in to bed at about 1a and slept till morning!