If you look back to my last post, it was named "Hope for a Monday." I love good days. Today though, not so good. Kinda comical actually. :-) You know when you have days where your life seems like a cosmic joke? That's been mine over the last 2 days.
I say all this with a slight grin on my face because I am so grateful that these are the problems right now. We are not dealing with Josh living at Mary Free Bed or Josh just beginning the road of paralysis. The things going on right now are very minor in comparison, and for that I am thankful.
Ephram continues to not feel well. Poor little buddy. He started out with a really high fever and no other symptoms. Then the fever went down and he got little red dots all over his diaper area and legs. Didn't think too much about it. Then I got a rash on my back that was totally grossing me out, thinking I had ringworm (or something else equally disgusting) from a mat at the Y. I happened to have an appointment with my nurse practitioner yesterday so I decided to suck up my pride and have her take a look. :-) No ringworm, thankfully, shingles. Yes, shingles. Yuck! My back is now killing me, I feel like I have the flu, Ephram may have gotten the chicken pox from his mommy (shingles and chicken pox are the same virus) and I'm a bit high on Vicodin. Praise the Lord for pain meds!
All in all, not the end of the world. It will not hold up surgery on the 12th and for that I am thankful. My N.P. said we were cutting it close but it would be okay. We are working on childcare for the time after my surgery and we got some great news. Zach and Rachel are going to come and stay for the first 4 days while I'm in the hospital and at my parents. It eases my mind a ton knowing that they will be here and I have nothing to worry about. Yay!!! The kids will have a blast and they both already know how to help Josh. This means that everyone will be well taken care of and I don't have to be concerned at all! God definitely worked that one out for us. What a blessing!
Josh and my Uncle Randy met today in regards to the charity golf outing this summer. It's so nice to see Josh excited about working on something. He's making calls about and designing shirts, talking business with printers and generally just staying busy. The outing is being held at Pilgrim's Run, and gorgeous course north of Grand Rapids. Some close friends of Holly and Jason's got us the "hook-up" and Josh is really psyched. This is the main place he has played golf over the past few years before his accident. It will be nice for him to go back. He loved to drive the golf cart like a crazy man down the paths and now he can just drive his chair like a crazy man. Some things never change.
We got everything worked out with the Department of Human Services today. I am thankful that the mountains of paperwork and running around to get all the forms signed is officially over for this year. All of our services will resume in about three week. The meeting went surprisingly smoothly. To get everything back in order, we officially put our old house on the market. You probably wonder why we kept it in the first place. Neither Josh nor I were convinced that he would never walk again. If he could walk, we could move back home. Josh put his heart and soul into making that house our home. He put up fences, built decks (three to be exact), finished a play room in the basement, and was ready to renovate upstairs to make room for Ephram when everything came to a halt. The hardest thing for me is that selling the house means giving up a little more of Ava. We made memories in that house and lost her in that house. After she died, I never imagined we would stay, but when we did go back, the feeling of peacefulness was nearly overwhelming. We knew where our little girl was, even though her life on Earth ended in that little house on Auburn. Our little Ava with the nearly auburn hair lost her life in a little house on Auburn Avenue.