Baby Shower

Last Sunday, May 28th, Julie G. and I hosted a baby shower for Melissa and Elliott at their lake house. Melissa and Elliott have been working very hard to get the house ready for Baby and for the shower. Elliott is quite the carpenter and handy man though he intensley dislikes his carpenter duties. Regretfully I do not have pictures of the baby's nursery, but the room is complete with custom-built shelves compliments of Daddy Elliott! The nursery is so adorable! Everything turned out great for the shower too. We had a nice turnout and the parents-to-be received lots of adorable and useful gear for baby. Everyone enjoyed themselves, including the hostesses. Those who remember what the lake house used to look like thoroughly enjoyed seeing all the hard work that Melissa and Elliott have done to make the lake house their home. So Melissa now has just 6 weeks to go--that is if she makes it that long. We are hedging bets as to how much longer it will be until "Delivery" day. I'm betting she's got 4 more weeks at least. That way she can attend our annual Folly Beach week coming up June 18-22. One thing's for sure: Thanks to all of their friends and family, Melissa and Elliott are now prepared for baby's arrival.

Here's a photo of the generous gifts that Melissa and Elliott recieved.

Melissa and Elliott had lots of help opening presents!

Margaret stopped moving long enough to take a picture with GuhGuh and Grandpa.

Progress!

This past week, Dave stopped working one of his full-time jobs! Yey! So we got a great jump start on several of the projects we've been planning. Finally we have started on the back yard! We got all the weeds cut down and we dug up the ones around the pool. Last night Dave sprayed the whole yard with weed killer and sometime this week I plan to finish staining the privacy fence. We also borrowed Dave's brother's tiller so we can start tilling the yard, releveling and creating some terrace steps. I'm so excited to have some progress finally! Now if I could only get the pool pH balance in range (this is quite a feat and I didn't do that well in chemistry in school--who thought I'd use it so much!). I'll have some pictures very soon to show off all our hard work.

Here, kitty kitty!

Mom and I now can add the title "Animal Rescuers" to our resumes. Earlier in the week Dave and I went to Mom's house to pick up some pine straw. When I opened Mom's shed, what did I see? A kitten! But I only saw her for a second before she vanished. So Dave and I set about searching the shed high and low for any sign of this kitten or others. To no avail. I called Mom, who was at work at the time, and she said she'd seen a grown cat coming and going from the shed which we now know was the mama kitty. After considering the repercussions of passiveness on our parts, we put our heads together and came up with a plan of action to capture all the kitties in the shed. Being that these cats are completely feral and we had no chance of them coming to us on their own we had to come up with some way to catch them. We decided that once we caught them we would take the kitties to one of the no-kill shelters in Columbia or if said shelters were not currently accepting any rescues we would have the kitties spayed/neutered and then bring them back to Cameron and release them.

Mom called Uncle Pell who has a "live" trap which he brought over the next day and set up for us. By the afternoon we had the mama kitty and one female kitten. Mom had seen 2 more kitties when she went in the shed, though, which meant our capture was not complete. I drove down to Mom's and we reset the trap and caught one more female kitten. The 3 kitties came back to my house and are set up in the carport until....well I'm not sure yet. Mom caught the third female kitten the next morning and someone has already adopted her.

Dave and I would love to have another kitten, but I'm not sure we're going to keep one of these. They are still pretty small, about 7 or 8 weeks old, but they are completely wild. I'm not sure that they will ever be good pets. And we can't bring any of them around Mom's kitties or mine since we don't know yet if they are positive for Feline leukemia or other contagious diseases. I did a little math on the reproductive possibilities of these 4 female cats and came up with an astonishing number of feral and reproductively sound felines to take over Cameron if we took no action. We simply could not in good faith sit by and let this situation go unchecked. Before the end of the calendar year, Mom would probably have a half dozen or more feral cats living and reproducing in her shed. Here are a couple of photos of the little hissers. If you're interested in having one of the little girlies, please let me know :). They will all be tested, vaccinated and spayed and could make a good yard pet to keep the mice in check.

Happy Mother's Day!

So today is Mother's Day. I am thankful that I live close enough to my mom to have been able to drive home this morning, go to church, and take Mom out to lunch. Today is also the one year anniversary of when I brought Taffy home. I tried not to make her feel to guilty for not getting me anything.

If you are like me you know a few people that feel that Mother's Day is just another "Hallmark holiday." I certainly don't feel that way. On the contrary. I, for one, believe that mothers and fathers should be honored far more often than one day each year. As for the naysayers, please tell me what is more worthy of a holiday than a day honoring all that our parents have done for us, given us, taught us, and sacrificed for us?

For those of us who are lucky enough to still have our mothers, grandmothers, aunts, and other mother-figures here on earth with us, we should take more time that just one day to show our love and appreciation. So, Mom, I pledge to you that this year I will tell you and show you more often how important you are in my life.

Baby update

Well, I don't have any new pictures of Melissa to post since she threatened me with the termination of our 25-year friendship over posting the last pics of her. But she did invite me to attend her 3D/4D ultrasound today and I have attached a picture of what a 4D image looks like to show how incredible it is. We had a room full of viewers including Elliott, Sandra, Melanie, Margaret and myself. I earned my position in the room by filming everyone's facial expressions upon seeing the images of Baby A. In a word, it was amazing! It is unbelievable to me that we have the ability to see pictures of a what a baby looks like before it's born. It's nothing like the old ultrasound pictures you've seen where you're left questioning, "Is this supposed to be a baby?" Thanks to Melissa for including me in the experience!

Now we just have to wait to see if the little monkey is a boy or a girl. Everyone seems to have a very strong opinion on this matter except for me. Maybe I just don't like to be wrong and that's why I haven't formed my own opinion. We'll find out soon enough (this is week 30). Next up for Baby Askins in the coming weeks: 3 baby showers and 2 belly casts.

Movie Critic, I'm not...

But I do love to watch movies and don't consider myself terribly hard to entertain or please. But I was pretty disappointed with my latest viewing choice. Mind you I had very little, if any, desire to see King Kong when it came out in theatres, but Dave and I were at Blockbuster the other day and he really wanted to pick it up. And I had also read/heard from some friends that it was actually good not to mention it got good reviews. Well, that should have told me something right there. The last time I chose a movie according to what Gene Shallot approved, I ended up wasting my money on Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow. I rarely dislike a movie that I pick out enough that I don't even finish watching it, but it's been two days since we rented King Kong and we have yet to finish watching it. Not only is the movie entirely too long, but we found a large majority of it quite laughable and ridiculous. I won't even go into here the many aspects that we disliked. If you have more questions, let me know. I'll just say I enjoyed Jurassic Park about ten times more than this. Enough said.

Home again, home again!

As many of you know by now our trip to Minnesota was extended a bit. And actually Dree will still be there for a week or two more. Thanks again to Charlie who was going to pick me up on Friday from the Charlotte Airport. I actually arrived Monday night and Dave came to get me. Although he's been sick and was still feeling pretty rotten, he was ecstatic to be the one to pick me up and was very happy to see me! Boy, is it great to be home! Teaspoon has barely let me out of his sight since I walked in the house, poor thing. He was sooo happy to see his mama and obviously thought he'd been abandoned.

I hated to leave Dree up there, but I had to come home. Luckily I left her in very good, albeit expensive, hands. It was a long and very difficult week for her and I'm glad that I was able to be there to care for her. She still has a long road ahead but her attitude is outstanding. As this wasn't a vacation or a "fun" trip I don't have any photos. Who really wants to know what the buildings of Mayo Clinic, Methodist Hospital and St. Mary's Hospital look like anyway? I certainly hope to not have to see them again especially not for medical treatment. But if you have to have treatment, its the best place to go hands down.

Now I have to go. There is quite a lot of DVR'd programming to catch up on...hehehe.

The Minutes from Minnesota

Well, the sun finally came out in Rochester today after three days of rain. The temperature stays in the fifties which this hot-blooded gal really can appreciate. It' been strictly short sleeves for me since we got here on Saturday. Hopefully everything is on schedule for us to return home this Friday with a new treatment plan for Dree to try.

Tests, tests, and more tests today and tomorrow then we see the doc again on Thursday for the final word. The people up here are extremely friendly from the cab drivers to the hotel staff to the doctors and nurses. It's amazing how much more advanced the healthcare is here. We finally found a ride home from the Charlotte Airport. Mom will be out of town when we return and Dave doesn't have any leave from his new job yet and I wasn't willing to risk him getting in trouble. Because of Dree's condition she can't lift much of anything but has to bring so many things with her when she travels in the way of medical supplies and medications so it was not feasible for us to drive ourselves to the airport since I was having to deal with my suitcase and carry-on as well as her two large suitcases and carry-on. Luckily Dree and I both have some really gracious friends, Lisa and Jim, who woke up in the middle of the night to get us to the airport on time Saturday. And many, many thanks to my friend Charlie who agreed without hesitation to rearrange his schedule this Friday and make plans for his two children so that he can be there to pick us up at the Airport. We are lucky to have friends like Lisa, Jim and Charlie who thought first of Dree's and my needs before their own.

As is the norm for most hospitals, we are on the "Hurry-up-and-wait" schedule with Dree's appointments. I probably won't post again until I return home because computer access is limited. Thanks to everyone has been praying for Dree and for us to have a safe trip to and from Minnesota. We can't wait to get back home so Dree can have some real southern GRITS!!!