Sunday Afternoon Ramblings

Violet is sick again (AGAIN! STILL?! I cannot bear it!) so we stayed home from church this morning. This has been the most ridiculous 4 months of illness we have ever experienced, mostly Violet-centered, although Grace and we adults get some of it as well. What is the explanation for this? Just random bad luck? Is there something wrong with her? (I am 90% sure she has my style of asthma with irritated airways at the tail end of an upper respiratory infection, but is there something else?) Some difference in climate and thus the virus pool compared to what Grace experienced at the same age? Too much travel? Our giant church's giant nursery? I really want to know, and I really want to FIX IT so we can be done with the snot and the sleep disruptions and the coughing and the misery. It is putting a serious damper on our quality of life.

I would really like us all to be healthy by the end of this week because we are leaving town again (AGAIN! This spring is totally kicking my butt!). This time, we are going to California to visit Robert's parents before his dad has a big surgery for his cancer in mid May. He has finished up the first round of chemo and radiation and is currently healing up from that before the surgery, and then he'll have another round of chemo and radiation after he heals from the surgery. It's been a little over a year since our last visit to California and it will be good to see them in their home surroundings.

Speaking of cancer, our dog Abbey is dealing with it again. While we were in Chicago, she went to the vet for an extended visit and had surgery (AGAIN!) to remove a tumor in a lymph node. They think it was a metastasis of the doggie breast cancer for which she had that doggie mastectomy last year, which is not great news certainly, but she seems to be doing well. Abbey is certainly aging and dealing with a lot of health problems; fortunately nothing yet has really dealt a serious blow to her quality of life and she still trots around the house happily if slowly. I have told her that I expect her to keep this up and be the world's first immortal dog.

We drove around a lot yesterday to go to the birthday party for the sweet 2-year-old son of some friends of ours (Jeremy was the best man at our wedding!) who live about an hour away, so we saw a lot of billboards. Specifically, we saw a lot of billboards for the local Christian music station which uses the tagline, "Safe For the Whole Family." GAH. Wrong on so many levels.

Grace is confused about the meanings of the words "city" and "building". She thinks the former basically means "tall skyscraper-ish building" and is proving hard to disabuse of the idea. Also, she has asked me multiple times why sometimes we can see the moon in the morning and evening but my explanation about the phases of the moon never seems to satisfy her. It is a lot for a 4-year-old to digest at once (round Earth, orbits, rotation of Moon, and so forth).

Violet is adding a lot of verbal communication to her repertoire these days. A recent addition is "TA DA!" which means, "Look at what I have done" or, "I have completed this task." Another one is "AT-CHOO" which means, "Thank you." This is rather confusing to all the clerks and waiters and other people she is always trying to thank.

Rob's job hunt appears to be nearing a successful conclusion! Hooray! He is currently negotiating a contract so hopefully soon we will have some definite news about where we will be headed at the end of June. Which is, I now realize, two months away. What we do not have a contract for is our house. Our house has now been on the market for 5 weeks; we have had a lot of showings and get a lot of positive feedback from the prospective buyers but no offers yet. Now that we are over a month into the process, we have fewer showings, which is of course normal but also disheartening. The good thing about that is that the showings are almost all on the weekends now, which means Rob is home and I am not doing the wrangling-children-cleaning-house juggling act on my own. The bad thing is that when we do have a showing during the week, I have had more days without showings to let the house get messy and it is a real Herculean effort to put the house to rights. It is hard not to resent the people who come for showings; is that a terrible thing to admit? I know we need them to come but sometimes I feel annoyed with them. Don't worry, though, prospective buyers-- I have a very easy way for you to get back in my good graces. Make us an offer! And while you're at it, why not make it for more than our asking price?