Hope House

I think we might buy a house for Mommy. 

This house.

A woman named Hope owned it for more than fifty years,

and we are so hopeful to get to live there for the next fifty.

(Hopefully, many of those years with Mommy!)
So, this was a house for Hope, and is a house for hope.
Hope House is the proper name.
(Special thanks to Jeanie, the bestower of the name.)

Shady Lane

Look what I found while sorting through Mom's papers!

(I've also got it at 600 dpi if you want to read what she sketched.)

and Stephan found this for us . . . 

http://www.antiquehome.org/House-Plans/1961-Aladdin/Shady-Lane.htm

She's really not easy to distract from the iphone as soon as I'm holding it up like a camera. (Even when I try and use stealth - lol)

So, I say: "Mommy, you look so sad. Are you sad?"
She says: "Noooo."
Then I say: "Are you happy?"
She says: "Yes."
Then I say: "Can you smile for the camera."
She says: "I'll try."
And the above expression is the best I get out of her.

It's really early in the morning.  It's too early even for birds, but Mommy and I are awake. I laid her back down and now she's watching pretty scenes on her TV while we wait for the sun to come up. I don't take too many pictures of her lying on her side, but she does get turned on her side from time to time, and here is a pic to prove it.

The Hospice nurse suggested that we let her hold on to rolled up washcloths to help with the contractures she's developing in her hands. Mom's so cute with these washcloths. She examines them really critically and turns her hands this way and that to look at them, and then when she wants to look at her book or card or other object that I've got lying there to entertain her, she lays the washcloth carefully aside. Mommy makes me smile.

She's really concentrating on the view out the window.

Believe it or not, that glass feeder was

 full an hour before these pictures were taken.

Here she is watching Stephan fill the bird feeders this morning.

The whole time she was getting her breakfast poured through the tube, she was just intent on this book, and she was so happily intent. She was just exuding a feeling of deep interest. (I'm not sure what she was looking at, but whatever it was, it's amazing.)

So, I decided to share with you, and as soon as I took the picture, she looked right up -- for the first time in probably a half hour. I think she's got some kind of "picture" radar. (The phone doesn't make noise. She just knows.)

When she looked up, I said: "I love you," and she said: "You do?" with this tone of amazement, and here is the picture of her saying that: