re-entry, rights of passage, and house elves.

for once i actually vacated on my vacation! very little blogging, almost no reading of email, and NO paper work!
it was great just to wake up whenever, stay in the pjs, read books, work on a really hard puzzle, eat good food, walk on the beach, collect many, many rocks, watch amazing sunsets and be with my favorite people..rob, mac, and hudson!
it was also good to see my journey group friends...at least some of them and we had a great cook out the last saturday night of our trip. (photos soon)
we also were blessed with amazing weather, the reason folks from ohio have gone to michigan for decades, to escape the heat and humidity really proved true for us. we enjoyed beautiful breezes and even turned off the air conditioning several days ...so great to hear the waves through an open window!

returning home has been rather eventful... i'd thought it would be an easy week, with a couple of doctor's appointments getting back to school physicals done, unpacking and laundry, and time to catch up on paperwork... and maybe even start painting mac's room so it can be finished before school starts! ha!
that was a lovely thought! makes me think of proverbs 19:21
Many are the plans in a man's/woman's heart,
but it is the LORD's purpose that prevails.

since we go to the family cottage for vacation, there is a full day of clean up to do before returning home. not a bad trade off for a free place to stay, but it does take an entire day to get it all done...so having played on sunday rather than startiing the clean up, and sleeping later than planned on monday, we didn't make it back to cincy until 12 midnight, which meant we got to bed in the wee hours of tuesday morning.

and tuesday morning meant driver's test #3 for mac...he'd had to wait two week to retake it, he just kept hitting cones doing the maneuverability test...basically parallel parking, backing through cones...yuck! i'd have never been able to legally drive if it was based on my backing skills!
but praise jesus! he passed! and is now a legal driver!
a right of passage indeed!
i have now discovered that i do have my mother's worry wart genes! and i lay hands on the car on a daily basis!
i digress.
while we were away, rob's dad went in the hospital and was still there as we arrived back in town,
rob's uncle's health had gone down hill while we were away and he was in hospice care.
and one of rob's sisters was scheduled for surgery (already on the calendar...a known quantity) on thursday.
so as the week went on, rob's dad went home awaiting surgery next week, rob's sister had surgery but more involved than planned, and his uncle died thursday morning....
rob got some kind of flu bug around wednesday...and finally made it to the doctor early friday morning...
i was busy trying to track down a priest for the funeral...which happens to be this coming monday...it helps to speak the language (episcopalian that is) and i'll be working on the order of worship with another uncle on saturday afternoon and probably doing a kinkos run in the wee hours of some morning!
the other thing that took energy was finding "dress" clothes for the boys...coats, ties, belts, dress shoes, pants that weren't too short. we very rarely ever get that dressed up. and the guys have grown so much in the past year, this was a major undertaking...trying on last years stuff, passing down big brother's gear to younger brother, finding a tailor who can do last minute alteration for the new stuff....
i know, extreme measures when there are folks dying around the world, but there are expections ...at least dress code ones for funerals in our family and it's taken some work to get'er done.
definitely wasn't what my bank account was counting on this week.
and to add to the "fun", i crunched the front fender of my car backing out of a parking space at the hospital! shoot! why is it i can never see those darn posts!
i told mac that now he didn't have to have an accident, i had it for him!

another glitch, rob did do a lot of work while on vacation...wrote up some amazing things for his church while away, but he did the creating on a large sketch pad rather than on his lap top!
we know the sketch pad made it back from the beach, but somewhere between the office and home...it wandered off...house elves? theives? hamsters? those gnomes who steal socks from the dryer...
who knows...but it is yet to reappear.
now rob is having to recreate everything from scratch and that has made for loads of "fun" at the office.
(prayer for finding this would be awesome)

so i'm tired.
i'm also thankful for the time away so i had some margin to deal with all of this...
but really wishing i could have stayed away a little bit longer...because reality is definitely not a vacation! at least this week : )

Comments

[Dan]

Can I please have a vacation like that? It sounds so nice.....

[susie albert miller]

oh lilly, i can so relate... the lovely lull of vacation, and then the slam of the real world... sometimes it is just better to crawl back in to bed and spend the day in your pj's... but i guess that will have to wait for a week or so... thoughts and prayers form me to you...

[lisa c]

Prayers for all of you during this stressful time.

lisa

[Dana Ames]

Beautiful photos.
Your plate is very full and you have a right to be tired.

No current literal deaths in my world, but I'm sending child #2 to college at the other end of California. This has been much harder for me than child #1; some reasons I know about and others I don't. I'm doing a lot of mourning.

Congrats to your son! In a few months you will be very happy that the older one can drive not only himself, but his brother to where they both need to go ;)

I pray for peace for you from places unexpected.

Blessings-
Dana

[Lori]

Dang. It just never stops for you, does it? Amazing, you are. Wise, you have become. Tea we must have sometime soon! Speak like Yoda, I must stop!