Happy Birthdays!

We started with a blank cake from Sam's.
Fondant Hoops & Yoyo! Wheeeee!
Some little flowers and polka dots.
All put together and the candles are lit!
Maya doing her birthday thing!
Awesome kid! Fun cake!
Her favorite gift from a BFF.
A pink mini-MP3 player, just what she wanted!
Nana & Thata gave Maya the best gift of all--
A beautiful gold and cubic zirconium ring! Shiny!
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I had my 48th (!) birthday earlier this month. We all met for dinner down in Dallas at an Indian restaurant called Kalachandji's, one of my favorites!
We had a great time! My in-laws gave me a beautiful necklace, earrings, and ring set--now if I can just get DH to take me out on a date! LOL.
Here's a rare picture of me, LOL, with my birthday kugel my friend Denise made me.

Today was Maya's 9th (!) birthday! We had a big shindig at Chuck E. Cheese for her yesterday and she had a blast. :-) Today her aunt and uncle came over and surprised her after she got home from school. We put the candles back in her leftover cake (and there was lots left over!) and sang happy birthday to her, and had ice cream too. She had a nice long visit with both of them, and they even stayed later on for dinner, and my brother watched the football game with DH for awhile.

Sam's been a little under the weather, but seems to be doing much better tonite. Praying that no one gets sicker!

Nana and Thata are leaving on Sunday--I don't know who is going to be more upset--the twins and Maya, or them! :*( We have had a very nice visit these past few months, I've been learning a lot about Indian recipes and ways to cook DH's favorite foods from Nana, and Thata has been a BIG help working around the house and the yard. Unfortunately though they need to go home to India, and get back to their regular lives. DH and his brother in Oz are planning a big family reunion in Bangalore in the summer, which sounds far away, but is actually only about 5 or 6 months from now. Maya can't wait! She's never been. The twins should be walking AND talking much better by then. The grandparents are afraid they'll forget who they are, but I don't think so. They are both pretty smart cookies! :-)

Above are some pictures from Maya's party. The theme was Hoops and Yoyo (the Hallmark cartoons), they just crack her up! I found everything I needed for the party at the Hallmark store EXCEPT cake decorations and birthday invites! Isn't that weird?? So Maya and I just made our own invitations out of thank you cards, and we got a fondant recipe online and made our own cake toppers. They weren't perfect, but we had fun and they turned out just fine for Maya! Wasn't all that hard to do either!

Well, now I'm getting a bit sniffly--hope it isn't the flu or anything. It's been really windy here so I bet it's just plain old allergies. Still miserable either way! But at least allergies don't cause muscle aches, etc. and they clear it much faster.

Gotta get some housework done tonite now that everyone's gone to bed, the cleaning ladies will be here tomorrow, and I've got to clean up so they can clean up, LOL! It's the strangest thing! :-)

Sarah Palin's Book is #1!

And it's not going to be released until November 17th, LOL!

Liberal heads are literally exploding over at amazon.com in the discussion section of the page selling the governor's book. Hysterical that they keep using the same old tired memes to describe Sarah, bwahahaha! "Quitter!" "Bad mother!" "Stupid bimbo!" Blah, blah, blah.

Oh, are these elitist snobs going to be surprised come election time in 2010 and 2012!!

Here's what the cover of her book will be:

Lovely! Sarah Palin for President in 2012!!

Mission Accomplished!!!

Before pic, that's the cap
on the titanium implant
post that is embedded in
my jawbone. (That molar's
blue because I have such a
large filling there, and teeth
are transparent and it reflects
the metal filling.)


After pic: after several years of braces,
bone graft and gum surgery,
surgery embedding the post
into my jawbone, and finally
a porcelain/metal (gold?) crown
cemented on top--wooooohooooo!!!

Well, it's done, finally! Last Thursday
my regular dentist, Dr. H, cemented
the porcelain crown to the implant post.
Unfortunately we had a little trouble
Eventually the gum will grow up
and over the base of the crown
there...I am amazed at how natural
the color and feel of the implant is! :-)

Now to work on chewing food on that side
of my mouth after 30 years of NOT eating
very much there, because it hurt when food
poked the gum there!! :-) Thank you, God,
for all the people who helped get me here!

2 More Days!!

Two more days, and then this several year dental journey will be complete!! Well, almost. On Thursday I have a dentist appointment to get my crown for my dental implant...background: I was born without a permanent tooth (19) and for years my dentists wanted me to get a bridge, which consisted of grinding down two perfectly healthy teeth on either side and connecting crowns with a fake tooth in between. Aside from the $2000 up front costs, it would have been a headache having to clean under that fake tooth as well, so I always passed. My vanity over having a missing tooth on the far side of my mouth just never was that worrisome.

Until several years ago, when a routine dental cleaning revealed that I'd had a LOT of bone loss in that spot since the cleaning 6 months before. Apparently when there's no tooth there, the bone erodes, and starts taking the bone in the next teeth as well!! NOT good!

Getting a bridge would be pointless, since it wouldn't take care of the bone problem, just the cosmetic one. I needed a dental implant to take care of the bone problem, because the implant would encourage bone growth. The problem was that after all these years the two teeth on either side were leaning over (not completely, but enough to be a problem) and an implant post wouldn't fit. So either both teeth on either side would have to be 'shaved' or ground back for the implant crown to fit, or I would have to have my teeth straightened the old fashioned way-with braces!

So on December 9, 2005 I had braces attached to my upper teeth, and in Feb. 2006 on my bottom teeth. Strange at my age (over 45) to be wearing braces :-) but better than having NO teeth at all due to bone loss! Wore them faithfully until June 4, 2008 (a month before I delivered the twins) and then I had to go through some bone graft dental surgery, heal up from that for several months, then the implant surgery, heal up from that for several months...FINALLY, the last step is happening in 2 more days!!

After that I have to go back to my orthodontist to get impressions made for new retainers. The bottom ones I have now are useless since there's a post in the empty space that used to be there...and soon there'll be a tooth in that spot, looking like it has always been there! I CAN'T WAIT!!! :-) :-) :-) God has blessed me with some good insurance and the means to pay the remainder, thank you Jesus!

"Rally912"/TEA Party March on Washington DC

http://www.jeffhead.com/americaawakes.htm
Update: Turns out the picture below wasn't a picture of the DC912 Rally after all, but an old picture from a Promise Keepers conference years ago!! Above are pics from the actual 912 Rally, in a great collage by a fellow FReeper, Jeff Head! Awesome!


Totally forgot to mention how great this turned out yesterday!!! Here's a beautiful picture!!

Estimates are upwards to 2 MILLION participants!!

CAN YOU HEAR US NOW, HOLYO?!? LOLOL!!

'Sup with us :-)

What can I say, busy as usual--700 emails behind, hanging out on FaceBook and Twitter when I have a chance, trying to organize my collection of over 4000 pictures from my extra hard drives over to FLICKR--whew. Since I blogged last time:

*DH and I had our 15th wedding anniversary. Didn't do anything since it was the middle of the week. Got some lovely red roses but forgot to take a pic of them.

*The twins are walking more steadily, and trying to talk...they giggle and laugh easily, to the delight of the grandparents and their big sister Maya. :-)
Did I post the video of Sam cracking up over Maya playing basketball? Can't remember. If I haven't I will after posting this update.

*The grandparents have decided to go back to India early due to their health (several major problems for both of them at their age) and also because they have a tenant leaving their rental property there who's lease expires soon, and they will need to fix up the place for a new tenant asap. I don't know who will be more upset,
the grandparents or the twins, who have gotten very attached to them! :*(

*Slowly, the housework is started to come together--I've been working on FLYLADY principles for a few years now, but there always seems to be distractions unfortunately and things get put off--Maya's room is very nearly done, the playroom probably around 80%, and my hobby room is around 50%. Can't wait to be totally finished someday sooooon!!!

*Starting to babyproof the house for the twins, they are able to climb the stairs now, so baby gates going up today! After that, no idea what the plans for the day are--it's rainy and dreary here, I'd love to open the doors and windows, but we've been having so much trouble with mosquitoes getting in and chewing all of us up (poor babies just scratch themselves raw! :*( and fire ants trying to escape the rain so they come in (babies have also had a few of those, I hate them!) so we're closed up unfortunately. The humidity is high, but not unbearable, since the outside temps are hovering around the 70s. Thank goodness!

We also have a butterfly funeral to plan--Maya adopted a deformed one and kept it alive for a week and a bit, and boy, did she sob when he finally died (me too! :*(
Fixed him up in a little coffin made from an old clear baby food container (rectangular with a lid), found an old scrap of material, blue with clouds leftover from the nursery decorations, folded it up and propped him on it upright, with a little pink flower under him...then she couldn't bury him in the yard because she wasn't ready, she said. So his little coffin's sitting up on the mantle of the fireplace--waiting for this rain to settle down so we can did a hole in the landscaping on the side of the house for him, where no one should bother him. I hope.

Gotta go get those gates up now.

Sam Belly Laughing

Okay, blame Facebook!!

I signed up a little while back, and yes, I am addicted! LOL! :-) Haven't meant to ignore my blog, but there's only so many hours in the day, what can I say?

Since my last check in here, Maya has started 3rd grade (yesterday) and she loves her new teacher Mrs. M. (who was one of the kinder teachers when Maya first started school, so a familiar friendly face for Maya). We thought there might be a problem when school started because Maya lost pretty much all of her best BEST BFFs this school year--a new school opened and a lot of teachers and kids transferred over there! But when we went to Meet the Teacher night last Thursday Maya found a lot of friends who may not have been BFFs, but now there is a chance for that to happen, so yay! All is well in the world.

Well, until this even when our showerhead broke and fell and hit Maya right on the lip, splitting it! Lots of TLC for Maya, and now she's sleeping like a baby in my BR.

Other news: Sammy has two new teeth. Both babies are now toddling around like little drunken penquins. They fall down, and get right back up most of the time. Talking in some foreign language too, with expressions and hand gestures to match--delighting their grandparents to no end. :-)

We adopted 3 catepillars about a week or so ago, they consumed TOTALLY the fennel plant we had in the back yard (started out with 6 total, no telling what happened to the other half)--looked'em up on line in google images, thought they were monarchs at first, but now I believe they are black swallowtails--was kind of cool to watch them turn into chrysalises (chrysali?) in the plastic shoe boxes we put them in!!

Gotta go get some rest now, it's been one of those days and I'm exhausted. I'll try to post some current pics of everyone soon!