thought for the day

well, the girl who "had a fraction of her head removed" - as kyra has begun calling the adenoid surgery - is back to school today, happy as a clam. no complications over the weekend (hooray!) and we are in the home stretch of antibiotics, et al. yay!

i am going to florida this week! hooray! i am super excited! i am all about the warm, as you know... and i'm going with a great friend, so it should be glorious. *aaaahhhhhh*

i'm rereading a little book called 'abandonment to divine providence' which is basically a collection of letters/writings from a 16th century french priest, that focus on - strangely enough - being abandoned to whatever God has for you...and how that attitude of abandon is all we need to become truly holy. i am having recent trouble abandoning myself, so i picked it up again. it's full of wisdom & ideas that are worth thinking about, and here is one for you today...it's my longtime favorite in the whole book:

"my dear souls, you are seeking for secret ways of belonging to God, but there is only one: making use of whatever he offers you. ... there is no need for you to understand the lessons (His will) has taught others, nor to repeat them cleverly. you will be taught matters which are for you alone." - jean pierre de caussade

meg update...

(this from an email i sent out yesterday)

Well – here I sit, with a sleepy and sore (and drugged) meg laying on the couch across from me. she did very well, and the doctors and nurses all commented on her maturity and beauty. (truly!) the most astonishing thing about this moment, (aside from the fact that meg is actually awake and not speaking), is that she is breathing out of her nose – already! The doctor said that her adenoids were even larger than she anticipated (and unusually large for a girl her age, which is when they should start to recede in size), and so the surgery covered more surface than expected, and it could take up to 10 days for the swelling to resolve itself and for us to see an improvement. But here the two of us are, and she is breathing with her mouth closed while she sucks on a chocolate! This is exactly what we were hoping for, and why we chose to go ahead with the surgery. With her mouth closed, I suddenly see how beautiful Megan’s lips are… it’s been such a long time since I saw them closed! I am seriously verklempt over here! :) We have 72 hours of recovery & rest, but if all goes well, she’ll be back to school Monday.

Also, while they were dealing with the breathing tube & tongue depressors, one of her troublesome loose teeth was “accidentally” (as far as meg knows) pulled, and so now the tooth fairy gets to come, too! I was about to make her a dentist appt. to have that tooth pulled, so this is a bonus!

Thanks for all your thoughts & prayers!

i'm a survivor!

i think children are well adapted to survival, even if dropped off in the middle of the forest. they are natural scavengers. i sat on my back deck last night and the girls played around me as i chilled on my reclining deck chair (God bless the person who invented that!), and i was alternately amused and amazed. meg, fashioning a spoon by pulling the stem end of a leaf through the face of another another leaf, just enough for it to be held in a concave curl; kyra, running a sturdy stick through the rings of the swingset to suspend a bucket of clean water (for "stew"); collecting dry sticks for firewood, covering their "drinking" water with a cloth so it stays clean overnight, pulling up the wild chives & onions that grow in our yard to "eat", dividing tasks and "chores" so everyone is pulling their weight... i mean, i'm not saying i'm going to abandon them in a forest somewhere and see how it goes, i'm just saying that they're much more instinctive survivors than say, the grown-ups on 'survivor'. :)

why today?

today might be the first legitimate day of beautiful weather here... the sun on my yard illuminates the emerald leaves, half-sized and stretching themselves out more each day, the birds flit past windows and across lawns, and there's not a cloud in the carolina blue sky. and i am going to spend the bulk of today in the hospital ... sigh. for reasons that escape me, meg has 2 separate pre-op appointments this afternoon, and i will miss this glorious day. of course, meg is worth it, and there will be many more beautiful days to come... but there's something about wanting to sit on my porch all day in the fresh sunshine that i can't shake this morning. i'll definitely have to spend the morning outside!

happy day to you all!

green eggs & ham?

i can tell it's spring - my windshield was green this morning, and my red truck was definitely tinged green. the puddles are all rimmed with green powder, and after walking the dog today, the calves of my sweats were green from ankle to knee, just from walking on a paved path! pollen is in the air, apparently. :)

back to the real world

... where my mom isn't cooking my meals, and no one is going to clean the bathrooms if i don't. *sigh* vacation must be over...

meg is getting her adenoids taken out on friday - that's the biggest news around these parts. she has chronic trouble breathing through her nose, and although she's been on 3 different adult rx allergy medications, (sometimes at the same time!), they are no noticable help. so, out those suckers come! even she is excited, hoping to find relief. poor kid...

in joyous news, durham is greening up! leaves and grass and even my lilies are making their spring appearance! hooray! a bright yellow goldfinch on my feeder, a bunny on the neighbors lawn in the dim evening light, and moths around the porch light. *ahhhhh* i love the warm.

and best of all, curtis did our taxes today! hooray! he is taking a well deserved nap. kudos to you, curtis.

surprising finds!

now i wish so much i had remembered my camera!! yesterday we went for a walk on the beach, after a night of rain, wind and pounding surf. you never know what's going to come up in surf like that, and the wind had become much softer and the air warm, so off we went. and we found...

• a THREE FOOT shark!! surrounded by seagulls, missing it's eye's and being torn open at the gills, but otherwise flawless! i was stunned to see it up on the shore. we think it may have been a baby blue shark, or even a baby white one...very very cool.

• 30 - 40 portuguese man of war jellyfish! some of them were clearly still alive, raising their "sails" every time a wave pushed them in, so kyra took a giant broken conch shell and would scoop them up and hurl them into the ocean until they got far enough out to ride the waves and disappear. very cool. very persistent girl!




• a sea slug! ew! very cool - very heavy! it curled away from me when i poked it, so i hurled it into the surf with my very best overhand outfielder throw. (it went far... i have a great arm.) :)

• dozens of round, spidery crabs, all of which megan collected in her own giant, broken conch (of which there were hundreds that would have been as big as my head if they were whole!)
  

• A SCOTCH BONNET! for FOUR YEARS every time we've been to the beach i have scoured for an unbroken one of these shells! unfortunately, their dome is very fragile and i've only ever found bits of them. until yesterday! when some of the most violent surf i've ever seen pushed an unbroken scotch bonnet right up to my feet. i screamed like a little kid!


• an united states armed forces ID from 1983 for pvt-1 tracy l. stevens. astonishing. i wonder what happened to him... i tried to google him, but came up empty. i guess i'll send it to the army and politely ask? it'd been laminated, so even his picture is still clear... amazing.

it was a great day. full of the sort of stuff you always hope to come across scouring the sand.