But in my arms she was always Lolita

Okay, bad reference.  Lolita fashion is about as similar to that crazy book as a dog turd is to the Koh-i-Noor Diamond, but I needed some sort of goofy title.  Anyway, I had a little too much fun with two of my larger girls and some lolita dresses tonight.  Check this.

Delilah is clad in an Alice in Wonderland-style Taobao dress and her own shoes, while Hailey is all Etsy.  What I wouldn't give for a lolita dress of my own, but alas, lolita dresses are expensive and they don't usually come in a size 24.  Oh sure, I could order one in a custom size, but that's also expensive.  So I live out my fantasies with my girls!

Who do y'all think wears her dress the best?  Remember that Delilah is in blue and Hailey is in pink.

Much love,
RagingMoon1987

Sunday randomness: a redressed trio

Not a bad weekend, really.  Grandma is unfortunately still confused and in a lot of pain, but the hospice nurse pays his/her first visit tomorrow and hopefully that'll help some.  There IS a silver lining to the thundercloud, however, that being that First Uncle is home from St. Louis for the weekend, and we've thus been able to work things through as a family.  It's been a little painful, but it's also been fairly enjoyable, as we don't get to see First Uncle every day.  It's always nice to see him.

In dolly news...well, nothing important is happening, but I got a cute picture of three of my girls in their new clothes today.  It's not a perfect picture since it's very dark in my yard at this hour, but I managed.

From left, they are Stacie, Margaretha (Phone Fun Skipper), and good ol' Sindy.  Stacie and Margaretha are wearing old Mattel clothes from the nineties, and Sindy is clad in one of the new Nintendo-themed Barbie dresses.  I haven't seen too many of the new Nintendo clothes yet, but I'm glad I found this one with Princess Peach and Bowser on it.

Oh yeah, there's Mario too.  Dig Sindy's blouse, by the way; it has the in-game currency printed on it, and the print goes all the way around.

This outfit doesn't fit Sindy perfectly.  It's pretty loose all over and the straps like to slip off, but it's impossible to tell that in these pictures.  I don't know why I chose to put this outfit on Sindy in the first place, by the way, but I can't say that I'm sorry I did.

Let's face it, though:  Sindy looks good in everything I put her in.  She's just one of those dolls that can rock darn near anything.

I want to take a look at Margaretha briefly as well.  Her outfit screams early nineties, with long, loose sleeves, loud colors that contrast wildly, and...y'all ready for this???  This ensemble comes with a fanny pack!

I owned exactly one fanny pack during my lifetime, and guess what?  It was actually cuter than what Margaretha has!  It was a blue dog, a blue dog that predated Blue's Clues by about eight years, and I wore it...oh, maybe ONCE!!!  I used it as a stuffed animal, LOL!

Fall isn't TOO far off, but with part of July and all of August ahead it feels like an eternity.  I don't positively, absolutely HATE August like I do January, but August is definitely not my favorite month.  In my part of the country school starts in August as opposed to after Labor Day, and if one grows up in this area one learns pretty quickly to dread mid-August.  This is compounded if one of one's parents is a teacher...and guess who's mother taught all through my childhood?  LOL, August was not fun in the Moon House when I was a kid, and my dislike of the month has carried over to adulthood.  I need to come up with some way to make the month fun instead of complaining, like I do with Valentine's Day.  The good news is that it's looking to be an early fall.  Nighttime temperatures have been dipping into the sixties (danged nice), and it should be no surprise to y'all that I've started prepping my girls for that too.  I'm not going to show all of Sindy's cute new hat yet, but here's a a sneak peak.

I'll also allow that it's a darn cute little hat and I'm pleased with it, as fortunately I usually am with Etsy items.  It's sized for a Lati Yellow head and I was hoping that it might fit Freya, but it didn't so Sindy gets it.

Cheers,
RagingMoon1987

Update on Grandma

This post is likely going to be a painful one, likely for y'all and for myself as well, but...here goes.  My grandmother, to put it bluntly, is dying.  The hospital was able to get her in today, and she would have seen the doctor that did Mama's hip surgery last year, but things did not go as planned.  Late last night Grandma's blood pressure bottomed out and she got rushed to the hospital.  Mama and my maniac driver of a Second Uncle went to be with her, and they subsequently learned that Grandma has a UTI on top of everything else.  Her blood oxygen is good, but her heart is very weak and her blood pressure keeps falling.  The doctor said that she needs a pacemaker, but she's too weak to handle the surgery.  He also says...and this is the part that's really bugging me...but he says that pain medicine would make her heart rate dip even lower so they can't give her any.  That means Grandma's in pain.  And since the UTI messes with her mind that also means she's confused.

So...Mama and Second Uncle made a very hard decision.  Grandma is going back to the nursing home, and hospice is being called in.  Never in my life did I ever dream that any of us in this family would be going on hospice, but that's what's happening.  Mama says the folks at the nursing home are going to do what they can to manage Grandma's pain, but I have no idea how effective that will be.  I have no faith in that nursing home, considering that their short-staffed bungling allowed this to happen in the first place.

I guess I need to focus on the positives of all this mess, as not many thirty-year-old women have even a single grandparent, but at the same time the longer you have someone the harder it is to let them go.  I hope it'll be quick and peaceful.

Now I'm going to sit back, mope, hope that no children come into the library, and wish that I could trade places with Delilah for a week or a month.  Yes, Delilah, who has a hollow head and no heart or brain to feel or think with.  Millicent from MillicentandFriends guessed correctly that the artsy pic in the last post was Delilah Noir...whom I desperately wanted my grandmother to see.  I know she'd have liked Delilah; she liked almost all of my dolls (except for poor Johnny), and she'd have loved Delilah.

Delilah has gathered the Peanut Gallery and is keeping an eye out for storms, by the way.  On top of everything else that could happen today, we're expecting violent weather.  Here's what we're facing.

Not the worst I've seen, but not great either.

I'll keep y'all posted on what goes down with Grandma.  Right now I'm just hoping they all make it back from Sikeston in one piece.

Always,
RagingMoon1987

Dollies and drama

This is one of those posts that will start off light and end heavy, so bear with me.  Yesterday the library had one of their summer reading program meetings, which we have every year for the local children, and one of the little girls brought a friend with her.

Posea Reef, from the Great Scarrier Reef line.  She's got a few pieces missing, as children's toys inevitably do, but what a beautiful face!  I was sorely tempted by this doll when she came out, and I wish I'd grabbed her.

Not that I have anything to complain about, as I have still another someone new added to my queue of things to be reviewed.  She's a little shy, but here's a sneak peak anyway.

Some of y'all might be able to guess who she is.  Talolili is disqualified from guessing because she's already seen this doll on Facebook (sorry, Tal), but the rest of y'all are free to take a stab.  This post's labels will offer some clues.

Alrighty, so that's the dolly part of this post.  Now to the drama.  My grandmother has been staying at the nursing home, and she had stabilized to the point where she was wanting to try and walk.  Unfortunately the nursing home is understaffed, sometimes with two women working a single very long wing, and long story short, Grandma fell and broke her leg last night.  First we thought it was her kneecap, and then we heard it was her hip, and it turned out...to be neither!  Grandma broke her femur right above the knee, and of course it was a serious enough injury to warrant a visit to Sikeston, MO's emergency room.  Simple enough since Sikeston has a very good hospital...but it was so late at night that the orthopedic surgeon wasn't on call.  So Grandma's leg did not get set, but that's not the end of it.  Sikeston, for reasons I'll probably never know, did not admit Grandma as a patient and sent her on a forty-mile ride...back to that damned nursing home here in Malden. 

So there y'all have it.  I haven't seen Grandma, nor do I want to see her in the state she's in, but she's obviously in a lot of pain and the nursing home is trying to do what they can to control it until she can take another forty-mile ride back to Sikeston.  The past seventeen hours have thus been quite stressful; my whole family is this bizarre combination of angry and sad and scared and anxious and sleep-deprived, and we're trying to go about our daily lives while keeping tabs on the situation.  To compound things somewhat Grandma has a history of blood clots (the last one almost killed her), and I personally am fearing that she'll have another one and that'll be what finally takes her.  I worry that the longer that bone goes unset the more likely that'll be to happen...so please pray.  Grandma is ninety and it's not like I'll have her forever, but I'm still not ready to let her go, and I know the rest of the family isn't ready either.  Prayers will be greatly appreciated.

EDIT:  I've subsequently learned that Grandma's leg was splinted and she was given enough painkiller to knock out a horse, but it's still not set and I'm still pissed.  Sikeston could've kept her and had the doctor see her ASAP.  The doctor WILL see her though, and it's the same doctor that replaced Mama's hip last year so that's some good news.

Much love,
RagingMoon1987

The ol' 'tater wagon

We're having a heckuva thundershower right now, or an "ol' 'tater wagon," as my grandmother would say.  Dig this rain!

Shot through the window of the library, so it's not the best quality.  I think y'all get the drift, though.  This is one of my favorite things about this time of year, though; you get random thunderstorms at random times of the day (or night).  They make a lot of noise, drop about a quarter of an inch of rain, and usually that's it.  As they say about the weather, if you don't like it just wait fifteen minutes.  That holds true for much of Missouri AND her surrounding states.

In dolly news, Freya's eyes came and they look very nice.  I chose green ones in the hope that they'd provide a nice contrast to her purple plastic, and I think that proved to be a wise decision.

The downside of doll eyes like this is that they are harder to place than eyes with round pupils.  Most of my ball-jointed dolls have eyes with rounded pupils and I can just fasten them in with eye putty and call it a day.  Not so with cat pupils!  I had to take out and reposition these eyes four times before I was finally satisfied with their position, and they're STILL not perfectly straight.  But...name a ball-jointed doll in this world that DOES have perfectly straight eyes!

It's a slow day at the library due in part to the storm, so here's a glimpse of what my dolls' living space looks like.  Freya is with her usual companions, Usaggie and a Dreamtopia Chelsea doll that I renamed "Calypso." 

Not much of a living space, just a pile of books and cards, plus some other odds and ends that I crammed into the shelf and never pitched.  I need to clean this space out and make a couch for the girls to sit on; at the very least it'll make the patrons smile.  I don't make a habit of showing off my dolls to my clients, but every now and then a patron sees this trio and makes some good-natured comment.  So a nice couch might liven the space up a bit.

The ol' 'tater wagon is moving off to the southeast now, though it's still raining and thundering here in Malden.  Hey, as long as lightning doesn't hit either of our houses I'm happy.  That's happened twice in the past, and God willing it won't happen again!  I'm praying it won't, because that's scary!

Much love,

RagingMoon1987