Recovering

It's been a rough summer for the family! I heard today my brother went into the hospital with chest pains. Results all came back fine, but another scare on top of several this summer. And not just scary in the past-tense, but in the ongoing, progressive sense.

The upside is that Eva is eating like a champ. I tried a prune-banana-formula gruel yesterday that she ate two bowls of! Sam had a good day also. He played trains tonight, was doing some sort of story with his alligator and monkey.

The last two nights Sam's also offered some interesting thoughts on his pooping. Yesterday he said "not a cockroach... a poop!" Tonight it was "nice to see you!" when Emily flushed it. It's pretty fun watching the wheels churn in that hard little head. I told Barb and Randy that the other day there was thunder outside and I told him it was thunder, but then a few minutes later he came over and explained he wasn't scared because it was "Underdog!" (a move he's been watching lately). Oh, such an interesting world.

I went to language class today. It was good to be back in it again and it was nice to have some time to practice medical terms and also to be immersed in non-medical things for a while. I really like the people here a lot. I think they really understand basic human struggle. One of my teachers lost a brother to a kidney disease and a sister to a stomach illness. This all happened many years ago, but I could tell it was still close to her. She talked about how she and her siblings and their children were all tested for the kidney disease and four of the five had it.

We're still in the middle of things here but the pace has slowed a bit and we're having a little more time to put things back together. People have been very nice to us and we're grateful for the community we have. We'll check in again soon. Jonathan