This is My Life

While driving home from the hospital this week, I did as I usually do...I cried. I should be so happy that I am coming home with a beautiful baby girl that has decided it is okay to laugh again. I am very happy, but also very overwhelmed and extremely tired. Music always has had a great amount of influence on me, for good or bad. It seems that every time I get in my van to go anywhere I hear a song that hits home and I am always crying. (You would think that I would learn to turn the music off and just travel in silence!) This time it was Garth Brooks-the one where it sings "I will sail my vessel til the river runs dry..." Why on earth did I start to cry! Maybe you can listen to it and tell me why.

Anyway, Odette is home until Friday the 13th of November. (Good thing we aren't superstitious.) We will then be taking her back for her last round of chemo and then we are on what the doctors call maintenance. (Something that four months ago seemed like we would never make it to.) This is still chemo, but a lot less intense and we will be able to do the chemo drugs at home and have our home nurse come and take blood draws a few times a week. Then we just pray we don't get a fever and have to go to the hospital for that. We are looking forward to this time where maybe life can become a little "normal". Of course it will have its difficulties-I hope I can keep up with all the housework and kids homework and Ken will be back to work for a more regular schedule.

Currently, we are just taking one step at a time...the only Christmas song that has come to my mind "take one step in front of the other and soon you'll be walking out the door..." (If you haven't watched the Kris Kringle show you won't know that one.) Sometimes I don't think that I can even take one more step. Odette is constantly puking again and you can't sit her down without lots of tears and of course that makes more puke. So, instead of getting anything done, more messes are just coming. I am so glad to have her with the other kids though because everyone is more happy, but I have to stop myself from thinking the "grass is greener" at someone else's house. So often I wish I wasn't me...can't I just have four screaming kids that are fighting and making a mess, that each have an immune system and for the most part sleep at night? Why do I live in fear of fevers, nose tubes being puked up and giving wrong medicine? (I think we have 9 different ones now.) I know that everyone has "issues" that would make their grass not so green, but right now I don't think I have any grass!

This is my life...full of craziness, tears (of joy and sorrow that don't just belong to me, but everyone in my family-children included) and puke. For some reason I/we need to have this life right now and someday's I understand and others I don't. Today it is because we have been married 13 years and I have been told that the 7th and 13th years are the hardest ones in marriage...so far they are correct...at least I haven't been told any other years that stink so maybe there is a light at the end of the tunnel! When this is all over, I am sure I will have learned and been made stronger. I know the Lord is walking me through this every step of the way...through the laughter and the tears...because when I can't take that next step he picks me up and carries me.