Do you miss me?
It's been a while since I've written, I know. There's been a lot going on. I'll start with the happy stuff first.
The video above is a video of Ella from last week. She's seven months now, and probably going to walk before she crawls. She's beautiful, usually happy, and has her first little prosthetic arm. So cute!
I'm also living at home with my husband now. (Yea!) I haven't done any gardening yet, but I do have flowers and a lilac bush sitting outside waiting for me to start digging in the ground. Any day now...
What I have been doing is a plethera of things, none of which have anything to do with school (uh, oops). When I first got home, I had a carload of stuff I had to fit into the house. I finally got that done and then we went on vacation (a road trip through Minnesota, South Dakota, Wyoming, a bit of Idaho, Montana, North Dakota, and back to Minnesota again) and spent our first anniversary packing up my car, Al's truck, and a trailer with the rest of my stuff. We got back on June 11 and our house is still not in order. I do have to start on school stuff, though, since I have a job interview with Western Michigan on Monday. Wish me luck!
Okay, so the not-so-happy stuff. On June 11, my mom was diagnosed with sarcoma. It's a kind of cancer that grows in the connective tissue of your body, and hers is on her chest wall. The thing is, this kind of cancer is rare in adults and they don't really know what causes it. Usually the only treatments for it are radiation and surgery. It's affecting her spine and she's in a lot of pain most of the time (she had to quit her job). She started radiation this week, and Beth and I are driving her to most of her doctor's appointments. She's got a mass in her kidney, as well, which they're biopsing next week. They think it may be where the cancer started and they also think it's causing her foot and ankle to swell (it's twice the size it should be) by pinching blood vessels or something. Finally, she's got an enlarged uterus and they can't figure out why, so they're sending her to an oncology gynecologist.
What else? My brother, Ryan, needs a job. He got laid off a month or two ago and could use work since they just got into that house in March. He'd like a job that would pay for school, too, since he and Rachel both think they'd like to go back and get teaching certificates.
Okay, think that's it! I need to get working, so maybe I'll write sooner next time...
