March 27, 2006 - Late Evening

The following is an update from Chris O. about their Saturday together in Amanda's first purely social outing. "As many of you know, Kurt and I are big into the hobby of homebrewing,and this is obviously something that we haven't had much time to do in the past five months. Now that Amanda has been able to come home on the weekends, Dacia and I thought we’d invite them over to our house for a Saturday so we could hang out with them, and perhaps Kurt and I could squeeze in a brew. Eric F. (also our brewing partner) and his wife Jennifer and her sister Rebecca also joined us.

Kurt and Amanda arrived about 9:30 am, and Eric and I had already started the brew, so that we could spend more time visiting with Amanda. She looked very cute as usual, and was rattling off cute phrases left and right, which I’ll try to remember. Right off she said, ‘I have to be earnest, you’re my favorite guy here,’ which really touched me! She then said, ‘Kurt informs me that we’ve scheduled some brewing, and I’m very excited.’ (Mandy used to come hang out and help us when we brewed. When Dacia came along, they used to make lunch for us, including dishes made
with some of our spent barley from the beer making)

When I helped her push her chair up the step into the garage, she said, ‘Thanks, you Rock!’ She then came inside and spent a little while looking at some of Dacia’s scrapbooks, and then decided to stretch out on our couch. I asked her if she’d like to watch a video of one of our trips, and she said, ‘That’s a good idea, Chris, you’re the winner.’

Kurt, Amanda and I used to travel quite extensively together, and I made several videos of some of our trips. We decided to put on the video of our trip to Ireland, which starts out with the U2 song ‘Streets have no Name’ playing and credits rolling like a real movie. (Yes, I’m a video geek) When the credits were rolling, Amanda read them out loud. When it said Ireland 2000, she said, ‘Two Thousand, is that when we went?” Then it began to list the people that went on the trip (the ‘starring cast’). When Amanda’s name came up (top billing, of course) she said ‘Starring
me...that’s good news.’ Then when Martha Lee’s name came up, she said ‘Staring Martha, that’s delicious news!’ When Chris Palmeri’s name came up, she said ‘That’s Amazing News!’ She continued cute little comments like that with each name, and then began to comment on the things happening in the video, such as ‘oh, there you are kissing that rock (me kissing the Blarney Stone) or ‘awe, there we are in a pub.’
After they’d been there for a while, Dacia’s cats, Stinky and Miss Piggy, came out to visit Amanda, which she loved. Stinky climbed up on Amanda while she was laying on the couch, and the normally shy Miss Piggy even hung out and let Mandy give her some cat treats. Mandy commented many times that the cats were ‘so f**king cute.’

After we finished brewing, Dacia prepared us a wonderful lunch of Cream of Asparagus soup, Pasta Salad and Chicken Cordon Bleu, which Mandy seemed to thoroughly enjoy, eating about twice as much as normal. When Mandy said how much she liked the food, I said, ‘that was our goal.’ She said, ‘Everyone should have a goal, and that goal should be to make me happy!.’

Mandy then came outside and enjoyed the beautiful spring weather while Kurt and I cleaned up the brewing equipment. Before they left, Kurt commented about how the next thing they’d had scheduled to do when she was supposed to come home from Savanna had been to brew at my house. He said, ‘well, it took five months, but we finally made it!’ I was quite touched by that, and as always, very impressed by Mandy’s progress. Every time I see her, she seems much improved over the last time. Her verbal skills have gotten so much better, and most of the time she talks perfectly well. In addition to her physical and verbal improvements, she just seems more and more like the old Mandy with each passing day. Her same old sense of humor is definitely back, and she said so many other wonderful, witty things in the course of the day. When they were gone, Dacia and I both were amazed at how much fun we’d
had having her over. A truly special day for us, and we’re looking forward to many, many more in the future. ~ Chris"