August 31 and September 2, 1943. A couple of letters from home. There is no real news in the letter of the 31st. Anna mentions that Joe Miller is home again for the weekend. It looks like he manages to spend a lot of weekends home as he is stationed in the Boston area. A drive to Albany for the weekend has become routine for him. Anna also writes that they stayed out late with the Millers on Saturday night “and didn’t get home until almost one. …On top of that I forgot to pull out the bell for the alarm … when mama woke me up it was seven o’clock and she was handing me the bottle to feed the baby.”
On September 2, Anna writes that they took the baby to the doctor for her Diphtheria shot. It seems Anna had a little bit of “mommy guilt”. She writes, “I felt so sorry for her. When the doctor put the mercurochrome on Terry’s arm it was all red and she liked the color and kept looking at it. The doctor was talking to her and she kept on smiling and all I could think of was the way she was going to get stuck pretty soon. …Everything was fine until the doctor stuck her and my heart almost bled when she raised up that little wailing voice of hers.” They tried to calm the baby down, but “she would stop and then she would remember and start crying all over again.”
Anna also reports that the doctor said that the baby’s belly button hasn’t healed yet “because it keeps popping in and out. He says it is nothing to worry about until she is a year or a year and a half …He told me that if it don’t heal he will put something on her stomach and pull it together until it heals.”
Anna also writes that she bought baby Terry new bedroom slippers “bunny slippers in natural color…when you press the bunnies on top they squeak. …more of a novelty than useful.
In other baby related news, Anna says, “the report about me having another papoose seems to be a false alarm….before he (the doctor) seemed almost positive and now the story is different.”
As Anna closes the letter, she writes that “The gasoline ban came off a few days ago and how long it will be that was we don’t know. However on Labor Day we hope that is it will be nice so that we can go out for some part of the day.”