more february

 The snowstorms are inconvenient, snarl traffic, cause school to be cancelled, but they are sure pretty.

 Saturday we went to the Model Train Museum.  It's a quite fun, low-key place. The adult train model is a huge spread of Minneapolis and St. Paul, the Mississippi River, very impressive and detailed.   Around the sides they have kid-touchable trains where buttons can be pressed to cause actions in the model trains.

It's just fun.

And the people who volunteer there are friendly and kind.

 This is a whole Lego train set, and it had everything including Netflix and Petticoat Junction, Ghostbusters, and one creative kid I love made a huge Mario guy out of Duplo blocks and one of the volunteers transferred it from the Duplo table to the display.  It was pretty impressive true.

He's also been making original creations in Perler beads, also an exacting art form.  I told Alicia I may turn the counted cross stitch over to him.  I could explain how to count and do it.

 This is where the roller coaster springs into action, push of a button.

 This set is tiny and miniature and also muted colors, lifelike and delicate. It's on  loan from some family, was created in 1970, according to the sign.  It's just lovely.

 The snow started falling this morning right before Maria and Kirsten had to leave for the airport to go spend a few days with my parents in Florida.

Oh my goodness.

But later the snow stopped and the late afternoon light was all the lovely pastels of February.  Periwinkle snowbanks, pink edges everywhere, absolutely breathtaking.  And it was not all that cold either. It felt good out in the bright air, shoveling the sidewalks.

 There he goes, clearing the way, all the time.

This lovely peanut ended up back at the hospital yesterday.  When she was first born, she could drink her milk and grow. Then she was deathly sick with RSV for weeks on end, and then had open heart surgery to repair her heart defect.  During this time she couldn't eat and was tube fed.

She's lost the strength to gobble up bottles, and some ends up in her lungs and that cannot happen, so the tube feeding continues for now.

Last Monday she made it back home after two months at this beautiful hospital, and by Saturday she was back there again due to desperately bad tummy pains when her tube feeding was run.

So. The good people are trying to figure out why, and making sure she's nourished and doing well.

She's found her thumb and as her former thumb-sucking aunties and uncles could tell her, that is a very great thing.  Enjoy that thumb.

Back when James was tiny, my dad asked him what his thumb tasted like.  James paused a moment, looked at his little wet thumb and said, "Tastes like chicken."

Oh, Lord have mercy.

So much love,   Grandma, aka Val