October

October and cooler air has come rolling in like this "train" the kids made on the floor here.  We have Julia as the conductor with her cash register where she took our money.  Jacob and Xavier are in the first car playing a states trivia game using the train's wi-fi.  And Ellie is lounging enjoying the on-board television show.  It happened to be Blue's Clue's - what a coincidence!  I rode in the caboose to support the Georgia bulldogs.  

My view from the school table.  A patriotic Ellie watching the iPad.

Ellie climbed up one evening after bath and shared some chips with Daddy.

Here Jeff is pushing her hair out of her face.  Ellie has this "trust face" she gives us that reaches right down into the depth of your soul!  It's a rare chance that I catch it on camera.  Jeff paid the price of having a mouth full of food in this photo but we both know the cost of being married to a journalist.   

Now to announce a very special project on my sewing table!!!  You might recall when Ellie was in the Cardiac ICU at Egleston the nurses just doted on her like crazy with stuffed animals, blankets and hair accessories.  It was so caring and sweet to come in each morning and see how they'd dolled her up!  All the blankets got washed with the sheets so we saw many different ones during our stay.  One in particular though stood out. It was a quilt.  It was blue and white and on the back I noticed there was stitching that read "Made with Love by the Women's Group of (insert church name here)".  If that was not THE moment I decided to learn to sew when we got home, I don't recall a more powerful inspiration.  I had a machine that I knew how to turn on and sew a straight line.  Thus in 2014 I began my journey to sew clothing for the kids and I loved it.  Always with that ICU blanket in my mind, I started the process of learning to make a quilt.  It is a craft indeed and I am thankful I've had some on line resources to help me learn.

So two years and four quilts later, I wanted to donate a quilt back to Egleston to be used to provide comfort and cuteness to another child in a scary medical situation.  There is a national organization that you go through to donate quilts to hospitals - isn't that handy?!  And there's an Atlanta chapter that has a list of places they deliver quilts to including Ellie's old ICU home!!!!  There's a lovely woman who I connected with and imagine my surprise when she said she'd mail me a "kit".  This group meets and with all donated fabric, they cut up squares and borders and backing and put it all together in a plastic bag with instructions and mail them out to people that can't come to meetings!  I got my kit two days and just stared at it for a few minutes.

My materials to start piecing together.  Cute little animal print with nice cheerful colors.  The instructions were just like every other quilt I'd made with some special notes to make it very "sturdy" like adding a few extra rows of stitching to hold up through the washes.  

Making this quilt has made me so full of joy! I think about the past of her being there, the present of her being so much better and home and the future of what children it will touch.  There's even a tag that comes with it that you can write your name on.  That part of the story will be a future post.  There's a special name I'm going to write on this first one. I expect I'll make many many more and they say you can write whatever you want on the label.  When this one is finished I'll most certainly share every inch of it with you!

Now to some unexpected events that came at the end of September.  Jeff and I both lost our last living grandparent.  Actually my step-grandmother is still with us and lives in Indiana near her children.  But the loved ones that passed are my dad's dad, and Jeff's mom's mom.  My Pepa died on a Monday and Jeff's Oma died the following Tuesday.  It was sad for us both and when we told the kids they associated it as losing their own grandparents.

My extended family still lives in Kentucky so we decided to make the trip to attend the funeral.  It was not an easy decision as we have about 27 things that we have to sort out before we go.  At this stage of our life, even at the very last minute another variable got thrown in the mix.  We decided to leave on a Saturday morning after a soccer game.  But for the third time in about a year now, Ellie did the "wake up and go back to sleep on the couch" thing.  It is the strangest thing to watch and we really worried the first time it happened last year.

Dr. Xavier checks her out.  Good respiratory sounds, good heart rate.

This is no joke.  If you leave her side she wakes up for one second and must feel good enough to get up.  But she makes it two feet then....just lies down wherever she is including the hardwood floor.

I put her back on the couch and here's another attempt she made of getting up.  At least this time she found the rug.

We've talked to both her pediatrician and her cardiologist about it and they both say there's nothing to worry about. Some kids just don't get enough rest and feel tired in the morning. The other day I saw Ellie close her eyes and nod off and dinner so I think when she's tired she just wants to sleep.  She's always been a good sleeper, from day one.

By 10:00 in the morning she was feeling better so off we went to Kentucky!  Of course you-know-who was right there with Ellie the whoooooole way!  Meet "Steve".

The iPad and its charger came in huge during the FOUR hour delay we had due to an accident on I-65.  It was a terrible wreck which is very sad to think about.  Luckily Ellie never even noticed and the other kids were occupied with their own games and books and bags of chips and cookies snacks.  :) 

Once we arrived there was excitement in the hotel of course!  Hotels are FUN!!

Here we are getting ready for my grandfather's funeral.

We were on the top floor which was a mix of scary and cool!

Back at home, someone was turning 7!  Happy Birthday Julia!  She wanted to be "Toad", a character from Mario on Nintendo for Halloween, so here's what the internet's good for. Behold the toadstool hat she's barely taken off since the party!

 Julia loves rainbows which suits her bright, beautiful personality!

One final note here.  If you will allow the melancholy moment surrounding a...plastic fork.  In 2012 when we moved into this house we had a 6-week old Ellie on oxygen, feeding tubes, medicines...you remember right?  :)  A simple but thoughtful gesture of one of Ellie's loving grandparents was to supply us with some paper products and eating utensils to make life easier with the move. Plus now we had the pantry space for such items!  This orange and white box has been on our bottom shelf for four years.  It's not that it took us four years to use 600 forks, we could have used them in four months. They were just so nice (so sturdy and strong, it even says so on the box!) we only used them occasionally.  This weekend for Julia's birthday though we came down to the end of the box.

The one remaining fork with our one and only Ellie.

Each time I see something from "the old days" of that difficult season I pause and thank God for all of it.  The challenges and the triumphs, the tears and the laughs and most importantly that Ellie is now "strong and tough" holding her own fork full of chocolate cake.