Lux et umbra vicissum…

Swim lessons…

A (chicken) pox on Eli!

And this past week was VBS. I volunteered to work in the nursery, but due to there being plenty of workers in nursery and my almost-kindergartener throwing a fit, I ended up transferring to kindergarten. I learned something very valuable – large groups of small children don’t scare me like they used to. They still exhaust me, but they don’t scare me. I actually had a pretty good time helping in their class, even having a few little troublemakers in there. (Yes, there was one fist-fight, but I broke it up right away and the parents of the children involved didn’t seem surprised.)

My grandmother has gone through at least 3, maybe 4 times where the doctors didn’t think she was going to make it. The most recent of these times was last week when they found she had developed a perforation in her colon. They had to do emergency surgery to remove her colon (she now has an ileostomy) and the doctor didn’t think her body could take another surgery. But there was a lot of prayer going on, and God brought her through it. Since then, she’s improved dramatically. She can now sit in a recliner some days, she’s responding more (nodding and shaking her head, lifting her hand sometimes, etc.), and it seems like she’s trying to talk sometimes. She has a trach in now, so she can’t talk at this point. They’re planning on putting on the flappy thing that allows the person to close the trach and talk, but the first one they tried was too large so they need to get a smaller one fitted. We’re all looking forward to that. At this point we’re not sure how many people she actually recognizes or if she’s just responding to people sweetly like she normally would without knowing who’s talking to her. Once she can talk we should be able to find out. 🙂 She’s still in ICU for now, but maybe they’ll be able to move her to the step-down unit soon.

And we’re almost finished with our adoption paperwork. We’ve finished the required training now. We just need to get a couple more clearances and letters from agencies and I think we’ll be done. We’ve looked at several vans, too, but we haven’t found the right one yet. (In other words, they’re all too expensive or too… er… well-used.) Anyway, the main thing now is to somehow come up with the more than $15000 we need to send in our dossier. I can’t wait to find out what this testimony will be! 🙂