Off

It has seemed for the last week or so that life is just a little bit off. You know, like out of whack. Or maybe its just me. Just as we were getting back to some semblance of normal after all the sickness -- back to work, back to school -- we were thrown a snow day. Just plopped right in the middle of the week. The roads were bare everywhere we could see, but the school district still felt compelled to delay the start of school by two hours. Ugh. Don't they know what that does to people? Not only did I miss Bible study for the third week in a row, but I had a out-of-sorts, who-messed-up-my-routine, psycho 6 year-old on my hands. What's a mama to do? Oi.

You know I'm out of sorts when I'm not excited about the Missions Conference at church. I love the Missions Conference. I always love missions-related stuff. But this year it just made me sad. Sad because a piece of me is with a child in another country. Sad because her family doesn't know Jesus. Sad because given the chance to do so, I would gladly pack up and move to another country and do what I could to show them Jesus. Sad because it seems I'm supposed to be here instead. Sad because I don't know what to do with myself here. Sad because I don't know what I'd do with my particular family there. Sad because that leaves me in limbo land where it seems my only purpose is to keep my family intact. Sad because I don't think I'm doing a very good job. Sad because I don't know how to bring God glory in where He's planted me. Sad because I wonder if my desire to participate in missions isn't just a misguided vision of how to serve God.

Boy, I sound like a mess, but really I'm not. My heart is just really heavy right now. And my mind is just a jumbled mess of thoughts.

Having my eldest child so sick for such a long time was really a strange thing to experience. When he's sick, he's almost "normal". Someone should really do some research on this. Its really true. When he's sick, his whole body just sloooows waaaay down (I joked with my mom that its what he'd be like on Ritalin -- a lump of his true self), he takes the time to be polite, he accepts affection without resorting to hitting or name-calling, he acknowledges people when they speak to him like any normal child would. And now we're not only back to his particular normal, we're back to that point in his cycle where he's at his worst. (The irony being that he loves the Missions Conference too, and has just been thrilled at the idea of participating in the kids' program. Kudos to Mrs Carter and Mrs Galle -- two of his very favorite people!) I haven't blogged about him in such a long time. I think its because what we deal with now on a regular basis is just simply too complex to describe. Sometimes its so subtle, other times its these glaring moments when I wonder how on earth he's going to function in the world. I want to blog more about it because it helps me think things through. It makes it a little less abstract in my mind, this crazy thing we deal with on a daily basis.

As we worked through the adoption process, one thing we've been told repeatedly is that we should prepare to become conspicuous. Ha. If you've ever been around our family -- especially at church -- you know we're hardly just part of the crowd. Mama's blubbering over the hymns, one boy's under the row in front of us building a fort out of hymnals, the other boy is jumping from chair to chair like a kangaroo (during service), and daddy's grinning away in spite of it all. Adding a child of another race is only going to make the party that much wilder.

Speaking of the adoption, we hauled our crazy family to Walmart today to use the Coinstar machine to count the change we've amassed through garage sales and our change drive. I should note that we had hoped to avoid the Coinstar machine, as they charge a whopping 9% on each dollar counted, but we ended up with so much change we had few options. We had been told by our bank that we could bring our change to their main branch and they would count it for us. Today we found out that wasn't true. So, it was either roll it all by hand or go with Coinstar. We had over 1000 quarters, 1000 dimes, and over 6000 pennies -- we were not going to roll it by hand! In the end, after a whole lot of clamor and an occasional audience, we totalled $467.76 in change! How about that?!

Even in my "offness", the Lord still blesses....

Again, a Meme

I'm not really sure the point of this meme. Do people really care what books I've read? Anyway, its a list of books that somebody somewhere has concluded that people have read or are likely to read. My job is to put an X next to the ones I have read. So I did. I love to read and I expecially love the classics. (ie. OLDER books) There are very few "modern" books I have found that really should be put in the same category as say Austen or Dickens, but I guess these days "popular" seems to equate with "good", so they all get thrown together. And that's my 2 cents on that.

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen X
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien X
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte X
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling X (almost all)
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee X
6 The Bible X
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte X
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials trilogy - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens X
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott X
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy X
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller X
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare X
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier X
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger X
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald X
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens X
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy X
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky X
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck X
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll X
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame X
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy X
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens X
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis X
34 Emma - Jane Austen X
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen X
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis X
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini X
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Berniere
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne X
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell X
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery X
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding X
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen X
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens X
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon X
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck X
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold X
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville X
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens X
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett X
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce X
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zol
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray X
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens X
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker X
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White X
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Alborn
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle X
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad X
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare X
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl X
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

Seven of Seven

Hooray for memes! Now I feel like I'm keeping up on my blog, when I'm really stuck as to about what to write.
Per Amy, I'm to find the 7th photo in the 7th file on my computer and write about it.
This photo was from last year on one of many trips to the Pacific Science Center. (We had a family membership and used it lots!) Here my boys are sitting in a space capsule, one of my eldest son's favorite spots at the Science Center. It doesn't move, but it very loudly simulates the sounds of taking off...which is a little strange to him since astronauts used to splash down in these capsules, not necessarily take off. But that's just him. Our youngest son braves the capsule until the noise of the rockets begins...then he bails. That's just him. Also, note that the big guy is pictured with his good buddy, Moo, who, six years later, is ever his favorite.

In recent news, we are finally coming out of quarantine today after a week and a half of sickness. The culmination was a trip to Mary Bridge Saturday night because we were very concerned about the big guy. He was on his sixth day of the flu, complete with fever the entire time. He wasn't eating and we were getting very little fluid into him. He would just lay there, to the point that we'd have to carry him from room to room. We called his pediatrician's office, concerned that he might be dehydrated. They recommended a trip to the ER. It was determined that he had an ear infection, the second in his entire life. He insisted that he felt no pain at all. (That's very much a spectrum thing.) The ear infection fueled the fever which kept him hot/cold and lacking in energy. Poor guy spent his entire mid-winter break on the couch. Daddy and the younger guy were sick too, so we basically went nowhere for 7 days straight. Ugh. SO glad we're well again!

And that's all the news from here. Really.

Bubble Boys

The Flu and the Fear of Flying

So, where have we been? Two words: the flu. First me, then the youngest boy, now my biggest boy --er, hubby. (He's really my biggest baby.) None of us got flu shots this year. Maybe next year we will. Its hard to say because last year the boys got them and both still got the flu. One of the two other times I've been as sick as I was this time around was a year in which I had gotten a flu shot. I can only imagine what the flu I didn't get because I got a flu shot that year would have been like. Eh. Enough about that.

One thing I have been pondering (ie. been anxious about) lately is the fact that in two "short" months I will have to board not one, but two or more airplanes to fly me across the continent, then over the Atlantic Ocean, then over a whole bunch of countries, to land me safely in a developing nation. Up until September 11th, 2001, that would have seemed like an exciting adventure. Now the very idea is enough to keep me up at night -- if I let it, of course.

I haven't always been afraid of flying. (Who really is afraid of flying anyway? Aren't we all just afraid of crashing? Aren't people who are afraid of heights really afraid of falling from a high spot?) Growing up I was afraid of airplanes crashing. I don't know why. Too much MacGuyver maybe. In the Second Grade, a friend of mine died in a small plane crash, but that didn't make me afraid to fly. Instead I was afraid/still am afraid of planes crashing from the sky. If a plane flying overhead at night seemed to make too much noise, I would either dive from my bed onto the floor, or just lay there paralyzed with fear until it had passed. These days I pause in whatever I'm doing and listen intently until I know the plane has gone.

Throughout the years I've flown all over the States, overseas to Europe, and south to Costa Rica. (The landing at our stopover in Guatemala was terrifying. I swear we bounced off the ground at least four times.) Prior to 9/11, I didn't really give it too much thought. The reason September 11th changed everything for me was not that planes were hijacked, that so many planes were involved, or even that it all took place in the United States. I think what made the difference was that for the first time I was really made aware of what the people on those planes went through. We heard about every detail and we heard it for months. It personalized it in a way that has haunted me ever since.

I have flown since then. In fact, my husband and I flew to Hawaii the following Spring. (I cried at each take-off and landing.) Each trip, however, is full of panic and anxiety -- and a whole lot of prayer. The recent plane crashes -- both the miraculous and the tragic -- haven't exactly helped my frame of mind regarding our upcoming flights. Neither does the fact that we're leaving our boys behind AND having to prepare a will of sorts as we do so.

I take comfort in God's Word, in passages such as Isaiah 59:1,"Surely the arm of the Lord is not too short to save, nor His ear too dull to hear," as well as John 14:27, "Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you. I do not give as the world gives. Do not let your heart be troubled and do not be afraid." And Hebrews 13:5-6. And others. But I would covet your prayers in this and other anxieties that would rob me of preparing with joy for our daughter's arrival. Oh, and that flu season will end very quickly!

Sitting Still

Sit still, my daughter! Just sit calmly still!
Nor deem these days -- these waiting days -- as ill!
The One who loves thee best, who plans thy way,
Hath not forgotten thy great need today!
And, if He waits, 'tis sure He waits to prove
To thee, His tender child, His heart's deep love.

Sit still, my daughter! Just sit calmly still!
Thou longest much to know thy dear Lord's will!
While anxious thoughts would almost steal their way
Corrodingly within, because of His delay --
Persuade thyself in simple faith to rest
That He, who knows and loves, will do the best.

Sit still, my daughter! Just sit calmly still!
Nor move one step, not even one until
His way hath opened. Then, ah then, how sweet!
How glad thy heart, and then how swift thy feet
Thy inner being then, ah then, how strong!
And waiting days not counted then too long.

Sit still, my daughter! Just sit calmly still!
What higher service could'st thou for Him fill?
'Tis hard! ah yes! But choicest things must cost!
For lack of losing all how much is lost!
'Tis hard, 'tis true! But then -- He giveth grace
To count the hardest spot the sweetest place.

-- J. Danson Smith, from today's reading in Streams in the Desert (Cowman)