May 15, 2006 - Late Afternoon

The princess continues working hard and making slow but steady improvement. This weekend, she and Kurt had the opportunity to do some brewing with Chris O. and Dacia. Dacia shared the following with all of us.

"Kurt & Amanda came over Sunday for a little brewing and visiting. Our friend, Don, and my brother, Toby, also joined us. It had been about 10 days since we last saw Amanda and she has made huge strides since then. The most noticeable difference is that she never used her wheelchair. She had her walking pole, and with the assistance of someone on her other side she was able to walk wherever she wanted to go – she even managed a few little steps quite well. While she complained a little bit about her foot hurting, she wasn’t nearly as vocal about it as she normally is.

We spent most of the morning sitting outside enjoying the nice weather. The guys brewed beer and Amanda did her word search puzzles and chatted occasionally. She said she remembered Don because, “he’s always over here.” Don isn’t always at our house, but Amanda has met him before and it was at our house. In the past, she and Toby have had long conversations about his tattoos. On Sunday she asked him a couple of questions about his tattoos and then told us about hers. She said that Christine’s brother gave her her tattoos. I don’t know if that’s true but she told an interesting story about it.

As the weather got warmer, Amanda and I moved inside and looked at some magazines. One of them was a Sur La Table catalogue, which sells gourmet kitchen items. She would comment on the prices of everything, saying things like, “look it’s $99.00 for two wine glasses. Isn’t that crazy?” She read the descriptions of the products out loud and there were a number of items that were described as “hand painted Italian.” She got to a coffee set that just said “hand painted,” and she told me, “I suppose some Italian B - - - - painted that too.”

When it was time to start putting lunch together I asked Amanda if she would like to help me. She got a very big smile on her face and told me that sounded like a lot of fun. I gave her slices of bread to butter for the garlic bread and she did a great job without any assistance. Then I gave her the ingredients for our salad and she mixed the salad, making comments about what she liked about it. We put some fresh herbs from the garden in the salad and she recalled that Chris has had an herb garden for several years. I loved that she enjoyed helping in the kitchen because the last time they came over for brewing and lunch, Amanda had no interest at all in being in the kitchen. This time, not only did she really seem to enjoy herself, but she also needed very little instruction from me on what to do.

We all sat down and ate lunch, and Amanda seemed to enjoy it very much, and was quite talkative throughout. She called us all by name, and when our cats walked by, she made her now famous comment that they were 'so F----ing cute.' One of our cats had been sick, and she was sleeping in our bedroom, so Chris went and got her so Amanda could see her. Mandy said, “I thought you said that one was white? But she’s clearly black and tan,” which she is. Mandy named all her cats for everyone, and told us a little about why she named Simone what she did (because she's such a cute little girl). We had a great time as usual, and are looking forward to many more Mandy and Kurt visits."