Excitement Building

I haven't traveled much lately. Our five children are scattered from Arizona to Arkansas to Maryland to Massachusetts with grandchildren in Iowa and Alabama. If you go see one, how do you choose?? So big events have been the criterion for visiting our children. And this has been the season of big events. One grandson born in Massachusetts and granddaughters graduating from high school in Tennessee, Maryland and Massachusetts. Good excuses to take the trip we always said we would to see as many as possible.

It won't be easy. My husband's cancer has weakened him to the point that we are not going to set a travel schedule. And we're taking along a new adult granddaughter to help drive and just be someone we might need. It'll be lovely to spend so much time with just her. There are so many of us we seldom have time to do one-on-one; it's usually at least five or six in the same room.

We're awfully proud of our grandchildren. Scholarships abound for these bright one women, including a National Merit Scholarship. That would be an excuse for pride, but it really is more than that. They are beautiful young women, each of them kind and thoughtful and funny and loving and full of faith. The are women such as the world needs. They will be a doctor and a teacher and a museum curator, at least as they plan now. And if they find something that interests them more, they will do well at whatever it is.

I love that my children have built such strong, nourishing families--better than the one they grew up in. I love that they have purpose and goals that aren't measured in $$. I love that they take care of babies and animals and grass and each other. And their children are ready to launch out into the world, strong and vital.

God has blessed me even more abundantly than I knew to ask.

Appointed Once

I'm trying to get my head around the fact that my beloved husband has a cancerous tumor around his aorta. And that the biopsy left doubts about whether it is a metastatic tumor from his prostate cancer, which would be slow growing, or a different kind altogether. If it's not PC, it's in a place which would not be safely operable, nor would it respond to the hormonal therapy he's been on for years. He won't have chemo. He's losing weight at about 3 pounds a week. He has no energy and sleeps a lot. I wish I could make this look like a passing illness. I wish I could just fix it. I don't think we can and the doctor looks grim when he talks. My husband holds onto me so tightly, but it feels temporary, and I never want it to end.