October is birthday month in our family. John and I celebrate our birthdays a week apart (9/16) and there are birthdays in our family on the 8th, 12th, 13th, 18th, 19th, 21st, and 24th.

Last year on my birthday, Laura gave me a nice picture of Oaks. Behind that was another card, an IOU for a picture of Kellen. Behind that was yet another card, an IOU for a picture of “your next grandchild, maybe that granddaughter you’ve been wanting.” Whaaaaat? Woo Hoo!

This year on my birthday, I spent several hours holding Sweet Olive, a fulfillment of last year’s gift and many dreams.                               Grandchildren are, indeed, a crown for the aged. Proverbs 17:6
 

And now that Annie has posted her Facebook Announcement, I am able to share another “birthday” story:

Our family vacation this summer was an emotional roller-coaster. We were thrilled to have Anne and James home for a month and planned cottage time together as a family. It started with our Re-Wedding, a fun day of sharing their love and commitment for one another with the whole family. Two days later, Johnny flipped our car on a country road not far from the cottage. He was able to crawl out the driver’s window and wasn’t injured beyond an achy body and depression. He was taken the the ER, but released that night with a couple tickets in his hand. A bit of family drama followed. (I will spare you the details.)

We went on to another cottage with just half of our family (+ 3 friends) for a fairly restful week in Canada. We were traveling home in two cars, planning to stop for a few hours at our small group “Day at the Dunes” and then drop James and Anne off at Midway Airport for a quick trip to visit good friends in Alabama. We had overnighted in Grand Rapids and had started our trip homeward.

I wanted to stop by and check out a mental health facility that I’d found on the Internet. (I joked that they could just drop me off there.) As we were following the GPS to it, Anne called from the other car asking about appendicitis symptoms. We missed our first turn and pulled into the next parking lot, which happened to be an Urgent Care facility. I talked more with Anne and decided that appendicitis was strong possibility. I told her we needed to check this out before putting her on an airplane.

(Interesting side note: Because of Obamacare, we still have Anne on our insurance even though she is married and living on the other side of the world. It’s crazy, but also turned out to be a real blessing in this case.)

So, we went to the Urgent Care. Anne and James came out a relatively short time later saying she needed to go for an ultrasound. I asked what they had said and her first response was “I can’t really say.” I asked if she was pregnant and a minute later, she admitted that she was! At that point, there was the possibility that it was an ectopic pregnancy, hence the need for an ultrasound.

She actually had been sent to the ER, where they did more tests. Her appendix was fine and a cyst was noted on her right ovary, which is what was causing the pain. Her hormones were rising appropriately and the fallopian tubes looked normal. She was told that it would be okay to fly to Alabama and that she should follow up with an OB doctor in Chicago the following week.

My heart started dancing. Even though we knew we weren’t out of the woods with an ectopic pregnancy and that the cyst could rupture, we all started feeling excited about the surprise pregnancy. For me, it was such a treat to be physically present as all this unfolded, as it so easily could have been just a phone call or Skype message.

The following week, Anne had another ultrasound and blood test that indicated that it was a normal pregnancy, progressing as expected. The cyst was large and still could cause problems, but also might resolve on its own, which it has.

We had a few fun days of anticipating a baby together and shopping for maternity clothes before putting them on a plane back to New Zealand. The goodbyes were a bit harder than usual, but I knew I’d be seeing them 10 weeks later. I was already imagining how hard it will be to say goodbye to grandchildren in the future.

So those are my two birthday stories, sweet hours of holding Olive and remembering last year’s birthday gift. Ultrasound pictures of our next grandchild and hearts full of gratefulness for the blessings of old age.

And now I’m on my way to New Zealand with a suitcase full of baby things, looking forward to seeing Anne, who will be just stating to look pregnant at 16 weeks/4 months.

I’ve been working on the signature wedding quilt that I started the week we traveled to New Zealand. This is my third time around using this pattern (with variations) and I thought I had come up with the best idea ever. The first time (Laura’s wedding shower) I made the whole quilt and left it on a table for people to sign. Some of the signatures ended up upside down. The next time, Mari and I assembled the top and closely monitored the signature signing. This time I left the pieces unassembled and left them on a table (with instructions) for signing. Not a good idea.

First of all, I neglected to made a detailed “map” of how I wanted the pieces to go back together so I spent a lot of time just trying to figure out the pattern again. Then, I found that I had a good number of upside down signatures as well as not enough of some squares. (I’m pretty sure the second design differed from the first.) I’ve done a lot of ripping and re-sewing, complicated by the fact that the best place to lay out my work seemed to be the first floor guest bed and my sewing machine and ironing board are upstairs. I’ve been pinning and marking, and still making more mistakes. What a puzzle–but it is coming together, slowly but surely.

Besides quilting, my goals for May included getting back into a regular work schedule and a road trip to see Mari, attend two family showers and spend more time with my Aunt Carol, and visit my Dad.

My work goals looked bleak at the beginning of the week last week. My “zero hours” status leaves me to fill in the “holes” in the schedule, and there weren’t many. I was only able to sign up for 3 days for the whole month of May and was discouraged by that. However, on Friday, my lead nurse called to ask when I might be available to work because there had been some sudden staff changes and now I could work as much as I wanted. The story behind the changes was both positive and negative, but I’m seeing it as an answer to (my) prayer. I’m sure it didn’t feel like that to others. I’ve worked three days this week and have three days a week scheduled after I return from the road trip.

The road trip seemed perfectly planned but ran into a quick detour when Mari’s brother-in-law died earlier this week. I quickly decided to just wait a day before leaving and found myself relieved by the extra time to work, sew, and organize myself. I’m leaving early tomorrow to drive across I-80 to Ohio, where I’ll head south and stop at a couple of quilt shops before meeting Mari in Bucyrus. Back-to-back showers on Friday and Saturday and then up to Detroit for Mother’s Day and a few days of rest and quiet with my Dad. I’ll drive back home on Wednesday and start back to work on Friday.

When am I ever going to learn that you can make all the plans you want, but life has a way of keeping us puzzled, with or without plans? The perfect quilt plan requires hours of seam ripping, work schedules change all the time, and a simple road trip requires flexibility. And yet, in the end, life works out. Maybe not perfectly, but good.

I want to add a couple more stories as a sort of postscript to the Puzzling blog. Stories from our trip, stories about plans that didn’t turn out quite the way I expected.

I made a Strawberry (Jello) Pretzel Salad tonight. I tried to make one in New Zealand for the rehearsal dinner and it didn’t work at all. First of all, where our grocery store has about 20 different packages of pretzels to choose from, New Zealand stores have either none or maybe one or two types. I never found stick pretzels at all, and finally settled on a very small package of another kind. That’s the first layer.

The second layer is made of cream cheese, sugar and Cool Whip. No Cool Whip in New Zealand, of course, or other non-dairy creamer. But I looked through the dairy section and bought whip cream and something like creme fraiche or maybe it was creme anglaise. Mixed together, it seemed to be a reasonable match so I spread it over the pretzel layer and put it in the refrigerator.

Next I made the “jelly” layer. The boxes looked pretty much like ours and said something about gelatin so I figured it was the same thing. Frozen strawberries (or any strawberries for that matter) were not to be had, however. I decided to just add a layer of jello and worry about the strawberries later (presuming John would bring some home on his trip to the store. Not.)

It didn’t matter because when I pulled the pan out of the refrigerator to see how the jelly/jello was setting, it wasn’t. It had all disappeared into the cream cheese layer. What the heck? I ended up dumping the whole thing. Anne said I should have kept it because even if it looked awful, it would still tasted reasonably the same. (She knew because she’d tried to make the recipe for 50 Capernwray students once and had the same results. I remembered a few panicked phone calls asking for help in the process.)

At the time (and a few other times) I assumed that Anne just didn’t know the stores or the supplies available. She had the same problem for awhile with pie crusts because they don’t carry Crisco. She has since learned to make butter crusts and/or to use Edmonds Pastry which comes in several varieties and works quite nicely.

I was looking forward to spending some time in the stores figuring out how to make substitutions for our recipes. I learned the hard way that it might be better to just use kiwi recipes. (I did that too, learning to make hokey pokey with golden syrup and baking powder and hokey pokey biscuits (what we call cookies.) As far as I can figure out, Americans don’t have the equivalent of golden syrup so it works both ways.

Minced meat is ground meat, what we call hamburger. Corned beef is a common meal, served up with a homemade mustard sauce. Tomato (pronounced with the emphasis on the “ma”) sauce is ketchup so you have to look for cans of tomato puree if you need sauce for the taco recipe.

Another plan that we had was to save the money on renting a car and use that money to help Anne buy one. We sent money ahead but they weren’t able to find a car before we arrived. Anne had borrowed a car that took care of our needs (and hers) during the pre-wedding week, but we felt that we needed to return that after the wedding. One of the bridesmaid’s Dad offered John the use of a car for the rest of our trip. (Josie and her twin brother, Scott, had visited Chicago in December.) We decided to take him up on his offer so arranged to pick up their car and drop the other one off before heading out for our day’s adventure. Brent had planned to lend us one of his company cars, but at the last minute decided to lend us Josie’s car and let her drive the company car. Good decision.

I was following John, my first time driving on this trip, as we made our way to drop off the other car. We came to a one-way bridge with a light at both ends. A biker started across against the light and John decided to follow. I was unsure of what to do and not really paying attention to the left side of my car (which spatially was not in my normal frame of reference way over there from where I was sitting in the right-side drivers seat.) I inched forward–smack into the concrete side of the bridge. I’d been driving all of about twenty minutes and I put a big dent into the bumper.

A day or so later we confessed our “sins” to the owner–who was extremely gracious–and made arrangements to have the car fixed after we left. $450. Later that week, John backed the car into a low post at Monavale and put another big dent in the rear bumper. (We felt like idiots and apologized profusely, but once again, the Martins smiled and commiserated with us.) Now we were up to about $1000 in repairs, the amount we’d send to James and Anne for a car.

A few days later, Brent offered to sell the car to James and Anne for just a bit more than that, so we decided (with them) to buy the car and hand it over to Anne. John spent an afternoon bumping out both dents and realigning the light. So it looks pretty much like the kind of car that Anne is used to, it drives well, and they can take their time choosing a better car when they want it.

(On John’s last trip, a hit-and-run sideswiping driver, left John with an additional repair bill of $1200 on the damages. We’re thinking that we should just budget about that much on future trips for accidents 🙂

Even small disasters can somehow work together for good. Life, driving and cooking will continue to challenge us, puzzling us, and teaching us to roll with the punches.

Many are the plans of a (wo)man’s heart, but it is the Lord’s purpose that prevails. Proverbs 19:21