This is the Trekking sock I'm working on -- color 128, mostly brown, black, and white, but with that little stripe of very pale orange/salmon.  I got a little further than this last night, but still only one bright stripe!

Maddy has a birthday party to go to this weekend.  She said that the girl pictured on the invite is not the birthday girl, but looks just like her.  She found a doll, some scraps of this and that, and transformed it into a damn good likeness, if I may say, complete with presentation box.  I'm completely blown away by the cleverness and creativity of my girls sometimes -- all three!  It's one thing to have a bright idea, another to try and do it, but it's a whole different stratosphere to actually pull it off, and they do!  Wow.

I was only about 3-1/2 when my brother was born and there's a set of twin girls in between.  Fortunately, for my mother, he was a very good, very happy baby -- he's got a huge smile on nearly every picture, lighting it up.  I think we were living in St. Louis at the time of this photo -- love the fireplace!  I think I may have doted on him, too, because there seem to be a fair number of pictures of the two of us.

They reintibated with a larger tube yesterday -- the swelling has gone down, plus they didn't know the extent of cervical damage and wanted to use a smaller tube at first.  They also removed the dressing from his head and why, oh, why didn't they just shave off all of his hair?  It looks ridiculous.  I suppose it serves as something of a distraction from that awful, horseshoe-shaped incision and everything else going on up there.  Oy.  He's also got the fattest lip I've ever seen -- I guess it was mostly covered by bandages before.  One of his bandmates calls him "Lips" sometimes, because my brother does have rather full lips, but now there's new meaning.  ; )  This friend went with my SIL yesterday to see the car and take pictures; they said that there isn't room for a person in there.  I can only surmise that Michael didn't see it coming, didn't have time to brace himself for impact or get tense; he must have been so relaxed that his body just went with it.  Oy oy oy.

The brace arrived yesterday and, after some fine tuning, it was fitted last night.  In another odd turn, the man who made the brace was a classmate of Michael's; Mom had put up a 20-year-old photo of Mike's band and the guy recognized them.  When I spoke with the nurse this morning, she said that he's intermittently restless; that it's darn hot under that brace, so no wonder he's uncomfortable; they're backing off on the sedation; raising his head up more; he opens his eyes.  Another CT scan is on the schedule for today.  I will be going up later.

Our parents woke us up and brought us all downstairs in our pajamas to watch the moon landing on the TV in our family room.  Those were the days when television sets were brought from the AV Room to the classroom and we dropped everything and gathered 'round to watch rockets take off -- live; Walter Cronkite reporting and all that stuff.  Gives me goosebumps -- it was so exciting!  Mike used to play "John and Joe" with Annie, our little sister; John and Joe were many, many things, and most memorable among them was Astronaut.  I'll try to describe some of the most precious Super 8 footage my dad ever took:

John and Joe, astronauts, had their air packs on their backs (rectangular sofa pillows in big brown plaid) and their helmets on (large, shallow, plastic bowls with the bottoms cut out for their faces to shine through).  They're strapped into the cockpit of their rocket (a green leather recliner) and Michael pulls back the throttle (a small, black comb) -- you can't actually hear him, and yet you can... he's making the sounds of a rocket on take-off, and nudging Annie so she does her part, her feet twitching wildly, her curly pigtails bobbing -- she's ready to explode herself!  Michael hadn't finished speech therapy yet, so he still curled his tongue all up funny inside his mouth, and you can almost feel the spray of take-off, too.  After a few minutes, they landed, emerging from the rocket to slowly and carefully explore the surface of "the moon."