Thursday Odds and Ends

My great nephew turned 3 this week.  Hard to believe.  This photo was taken in the neonatal  ICU the day after he was born.  He was the biggest baby there.  He had some problems his first year of life.  Kept throwing up every time he had any kind of milk.  They tried them all and nothing worked.  Eventually he grew out of it, and today he is a happy, healthy little boy.

I guess I was about 3 in the above photo taken with two of my favorite people, my grandmother and grandfather.  They were already quite old when I was born.  My mom had been a change of life baby.  My grandmother had one glass eye that she took out every night.  You can imagine how scary it was to a small child to go in her room and see her teeth in one glass and her eye in another.  Never did find out what happened.

Coney Island beach in Autumn.  Deserted.  Best time to go.

My daughter in front with my three grandchildren.  This was a few years back.

My sweet girl helping with the Christmas decorations. She always had a hand in the decorating. This was her last Christmas.  I miss her so much. 

This is a great book for people with eating disorders.  This book is for those who are looking for healing.  I'm a binge eater.  Still am at times.  Had an episode last Friday that I had to check myself on.  I'm pretty sure boredom and a slight depression triggered it, but in a 1 1/2 hour time period I ate a cup of Quaker's Banana Nut Bread with protein instant oatmeal, 3 pancakes, and a huge chunk of Entenmann's Cranberry and Orange Loaf cake.  And after that I started thinking, "What can I eat next?"  That's when I reeled myself in.  Was I really so hungry that I needed something else?  Not really.  I just wanted to go through the motions of eating.

This is one of the first pictures I drew in art class.  LOL!!!

This is actually part two of a series.  Part One "A Symphony of Cicadas: Sometimes the End is Just the Beginning" by Chrissi Langwell. It was only a few weeks before Rachel was to marry John when she and her son, Joey, are killed in a car accident.  She finds herself looking down  at the scene of her death and is confronted with a new reality.  In this new alternate world, she finds that she can manipulate the laws of time and space; she can visit whomever, wherever, whenever she chooses. She is actually in a kind of limbo, a dimension where the spirits of the dead who cannot let go of their connection to the living world, linger indefinitely until they are at last ready to leave and enter Heaven. Unable to take this final step, she becomes obsessed with not being forgotten and haunts John relentlessly. Though he cannot see or hear her, she is, nevertheless, constantly on his mind, preventing him from moving on or even taking care of himself and his son. At first, she does not realize the harm she is causing by clinging  to the living world. It isn’t until her influence almost causes an event as tragic as her own death that she begins to change, to learn what it really means to love, and to accept that the most loving thing she can do… is to let go.  Awesome book

Part Two  follows the story of Rachel's son,  Joey, as he navigates the afterlife. He also follows his best friend’s struggle to deal with Joey’s sudden tragic death, as well as the difficulties and emotions of being thirteen. While Joey struggles in the afterlife to help his best friend Cameron deal with grief and the meanness of the living world and the difficulties and emotions of being 13, other characters bring contrasting ideas to the story.  I love how this story shows that each of us can continue to grow and discover what it really means to live our lives authentically from our hearts.   We only have to open up and tear down the walls we construct to embrace this. 

As one character says to  Joey’s best friend, “There is always something good, even in the bleakest of times. You just have to allow it to reach you by refusing to build walls around you to keep everything out.”