We had a FUN Halloween. We love Halloween! This year Jason was Davy Jones and Xander was Cap’n Jack Sparrow from Pirates of the Caribbean, Katie and I were witches, Becca was a evil doll and Susie was something scary…she kept changing what she was calling herself…I lost track!We had a fun Ward party. Jason didn’t get home in time from VA to make it but the kids and I had a blast! The YW were in charge of it so Susie was busy the whole night. Xander and Katie spent most of the night doing the cake walk…Katie won numerous times. She started giving away cakes because she had so many. We came home with 3 plus a bunch of cupcakes!!! The picture isn’t one of the cakes Katie won, my friend Debbie made this one and I thought it was so cute! Xander won a couple of times too and Becca. The Swans scored big time!

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Halloween night was so fun too. We had 3 families that we went trick or treating with, the Andrews, the Escobars and the Husseys. Then the Martins joined us for a hot dog roast afterwards. We had a great time.  Xander cracked us up. When it was time to leave we were taking photo’s and I realized Xander forgot his pumpkin bucket so he ran back to the house to get it. He came back with 3 buckets!!! He was READY to load up on candy. His Daddy has taught him well!  The only bummer part of the whole evening was that the time came that we had to let Susie go…sigh…she went trick or treating with friends so we didn’t see her at all that night!!!

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We have had another busy month. Jason has done a lot of traveling this month. He and Katie went on a road trip together, cross country, at the beginning of October. He has done some kind of road trip with each of the girls at this age. It was Katie’s turn! He helped a co-worker move back to CA. He and Katie drove a Uhall truck to San Diego and then flew home. Katie was super excited…it’s all she talked about for a good month. As a thank you, Jason’s friend took them to Disneyland!!! They had so much fun together. It was a lot of driving in a short time but Katie was a real trooper and they made lots of memories together![slideshow=127]Jason also spent a week in VA for work last week and this week he is back in CA for another week of work. When Katie heard he was going back to CA, she asked “why didn’t you just do the work while we were there?” Good question! Work is good for him, he is keeping busy with several different projects. We are very grateful to have this good job.I feel like a taxi driver constantly taking the kids from one thing to another! I have also been busy with preschool, primary and I started a photography class that I am pretty excited about!  Preschool is going great, Xander loves it and the trade thing is awesome! We have had some fun fieldtrips together. I will do a separate entry for all of it! We had our Primary Sacrament Program a couple of weeks ago. It was wonderful. It was entertaining (I know it is not suppose to be but how can it not be when you are dealing with 35 kids!!!), spiritual, and very sweet. There were a lot of teary eyes in the audience. Especially when Xander sang a solo “I am trying to be like Jesus” It was the sweetest thing I have ever heard! All by himself!  After it ended Becca came to Xander and gave him a hug and said “Buddy you did so good, you made Daddy Cry!”We also celebrated our Anniversary this month…16 years!!! AND I got to see Jason in a Tux…haven’t seen him in one since…well 16 years ago at our wedding! He looked GOOD!!! He was asked to be a part of the Stonecliffe’s wedding who are some friends from our ward. We had a great time celebrating with them! I will include a photo I took of the newlyweds![slideshow=120]Susie is nearing the end of the soccer season. She has really enjoyed the new friendships she has made. Her music lessons are going great. The Bishop asked her to sing a solo for the Christmas Sacrament Program. She is nervous but excited too. Her life right now is horses. She loves the time she spends each Saturday at the barn. She is considering switching from English riding to Western. There are not many options for Western here so we will see what happens. She says she is drawn more to Western. She dreams of riding in a Rodeo. I tease her that she was born to the wrong mom/sister in my family, I am the least into Agriculture in my family!!! Unless you count gardening…Susie finally got around to painting her stool, and herself and Becca. It turned out beautiful. She is so talented![slideshow=116]Becca’s soccer team will play in a tournament this Saturday to finish up the season. She did really great this year. She played a lot of both offence and defence and one day her leg was hurt so she play goalie. She did awesome, she stopped several from scoring! Way to go BEX!!! Becca chose to not do fencing this year. Daddy was disappointed but we left it up to her. Becca started up a club for kids to do crafts. She is calling it Kids Craft Corner or KC2 (squared).  She needed to come up with a way to earn money so she can pay her parents back for a HUGE phone bill! I gave her the idea from my niece Ashley, she has been doing it for a few years now to earn money. We are very proud of Becca, she took that idea and ran with it. She planned it all out, looked up fun activities online, made supply lists – even planning to use leftovers from one craft to do another. Made invitations with a calendar and everything…all on her own. She did a great job and has had two successful crafty afternoons![slideshow=117]Katie came home from school with some great news. She was the only one in her class to get straight A’s! They made a huge fuss over her and she felt really special! We are so proud of her. Her strengths are math and reading. She really loves school. They have gone on a few fun field trips too. One to Camp Don Lee and today she went to the NC Aquarium because she made honor roll. Fun stuff! Katie loves fencing…unless Daddy is gone then she doesn’t like it too much. And she has been coming to Xander’s swim lessons and playing with friends in the pool, she is almost as excited as Xander when Tues. and Thurs. roll around! Katie and Xander also talked me into setting up a sprinkler for them on Halloween afternoon. I know strange… the weather has been so weird lately. We had a few really cold weeks, the tree’s started changing colors, it was beautiful, felt like a real fall. Well then it heated up again, 80 degrees on Halloween. We had friends over after trick or treating and it was weird having our fire pit going because it was not cold at all!  And now it is cold again…wacko![slideshow=118]Xander is doing great. He is such a funny kid. Still into dressing up. He was so excited when his costume arrived, put it on nearly every day and slashed his sword around the house fighting the bad guys! He would be Cap’n Jack Sparrow then take off the dread locks and become Will Turner or how Xander says it “Will Tunna” trying to have a accent! He was so cute on Halloween! We have a Xander story to tell…a few Sunday’s ago Xander kept telling me that he has a surprise for me and that I needed to go take a nap so he could do my surprise. He was so excited. Well guess what the surprise was, you will never guess…he talked Jason into giving him a mohawk! I am sure he didn’t have to talk too hard, but that is what they did. They sent me off to take a nap and shaved Xanders head! No I am not kidding!!! I was not happy. Poor Xander was expecting me to be thrilled and I wasn’t!!! So after Jason and I had gone the rounds we decided that, ok ok I admit…I decided that he could keep it for 3 days and then we would shave it off. Xander was happy with that, he was able to go to school and show his friends. When I picked him up from school he ran and gave me a hug and said “Mommy, I didn’t let my hair make me be bad!!!” Lesson here: don’t argue in front of a 4 year old!!! He had obviously heard my argument that he looks like a punk, kids are going to treat him like a punk  and he’s going to act like one! There is also a picture of Xander and his green tomato family!!![slideshow=119]

We are having so much fun doing this preschool swap…I would recommend it to anyone. The first week in Oct. we talked about Families. It was at our house and the kids went on a “family vacation” together. They had a great time taking turns being the mom or dad and deciding on where they were going to take their family on a vacation. They went to the Airport, the Beach, Texas, and Utah (Xander insisted that they go on a spaceship to Utah not a airplane!). For the fieldtrip that week we met at the park near our home and each family shared a family history story. Xander and I talked about Grandma Chief (Xander’s Great Great Grandma) and shared some stories and pictures from the neat scrapbook my sister Lori made for us. The Hussey’s talked about their Grandpa and how he ran in the Olympics, they even brought a trophy he had won. The Peterson’s shared their family history of TWINS in the family and I think it was 8 sets of boy twins that they were able to trace back. Wow!

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Our next week was Fire Safety, we went on base (MCCS) and Jake’s Daddy arranged for us to have a tour of the emergency center there. We were able to tour the station, see where the emergency crew slept, made their food and hung out while they are on shift. The also showed us the trucks and all the tools, and they did a emergency drill for us. The kids were so impressed with how fast they were running to the trucks and changing in to their gear and rushing off to the fire. They even gave us a water show! The kids got to play in the truck and push buttons, the horn startled them! Then last they took us up to the control tower and we could see the entire air strip. It was a great fieldtrip, we made a stop to Dunkin Donuts for hot chocolate to warm up…it was cold!

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The next week we went to see some cotton fields that were near New Bern. It was really neat. I think the adults were more impressed with it than the kids. The kids were more impressed with enormous grain silo that was next to the fields. Sophia told the kids the process of how the cotton becomes our clothing. Taryn, our only girl at preschool, very dramatically insisted that “MY clothes are NOT made out of that!!!” We had a lot of fun, we also went to Creekside Park to have a picnic and play!

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The last week was Halloween and we had a great party. They did a bat craft, played Halloween bowling, musical monsters, pin the stem on the pumpkin – this one was hilarious, the kids kept cheating and using both hands to feel the wall so we kept telling them to put one hand behind their back, well Xander didn’t put either hand out and walked SMACK into the wall! He was a good sport about it and laughed with us! The favorite game was the donut eating contest! We ate yummy food too, severed fingers, spider punch, wormy pudding, PBJ’s (Lenette is great a throwing parties!) We had a fun, fun time!

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Wow!!! September just flew by. We have been very busy with school, soccer, swim lessons, piano, horse riding, and of course church activities. Whew…it seems like every night we are rushing off to something. We are having our 3 week break and it has been wonderful sleeping in and hanging out together all day, staying up late watching movies or reading. I think Susie and Becca are averaging a 1 am bedtime!!! Crazy!!! I really love the year round schedule. I also tried to get the girls to do a bit of art…

The nerdy glasses are from a skit that Susie did for the ward cookout…I caught her wearing them while reading Calvin and Hobbes, couldn’t resist taking a picture…she will strangle me if she realized I put it on here!!! And the other photo’s are some I did of Susie and when Jason saw them his reaction was…”What are you doing to our daughter???” Daddy’s not too happy about his little girl lookin’ so hot! (can you believe that she is only 13!!!) And the last photo’s are her fencing. She really enjoys it. She is a very busy girl. Her month has been filled with soccer practice everyday after school. Monday nights fencing, Wednesday nights voice lessons and YW, and Saturday mornings horse riding…

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Becca is loving soccer, she and her friend Brooke have such a great time, they get pretty crazy and silly together…Here are some soccer photo’s and a few of Becca and Xander together, they did a little gardening together and she attempted to teach him to ride his bike without training wheels but gave up and rode the bike herself…those long legs make her look a bit like a grasshopper! I am so jealous of her long legs…she definitely didn’t get them from me!!! There is also a portrait that Becca did of Katie.

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Katie has been counting down the days until her roadtrip with Daddy. She has been so excited. I am sure we will post lots of pictures from their trip when they get back. Here are a few of her this past month. After our trip to Aura to dig for fossils Katie and her friend Sophie had a grand idea of setting up a stand to sell the shark teeth they found. (Lemonade stands are too traditional for these two apparently!!!) They priced them out small size to large. They sold a few and got a few more donations, they were thrilled!!! Katie is still doing so great with piano, we are very proud of her.

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One night at prayer time we were all kneeling around our bed and of course it is always chaotic trying to get everyone to settle down. Well there was a pause in the noise and at that moment Xander said with a sigh “I need to shave!!!” We all busted up laughing, what a crack up!!! So Daddy helped Xander shave before he went to preschool, he even got to use aftershave! He just idolizes everything Jason does. It is so sweet! And Xander is obviously still really into Zorro. He loves to do pushups like Zorro, he has to have his shirt off and he even talked me into putting candles under him like Zorro had, he was very disappointed that I wouldn’t lite them!!! The last photo just made me laugh. I dropped Susie off at the barn for horse riding and she took Xander around for a few minutes to see the horses and dogs. When we left Xander asked me if when he grows up if he can work with Susie. I said sure! The moment we got home he went right to his room and cowboy’d up!!! He put on his plaid shirt, a vest, a bandanna, his boots and his hat and for the next 2 hours asked me if it was time to go pick up Susie yet??? When we finally arrived he made a grand entrance into the barn and got a great response about what a good lookin’ cowboy he was. They even let him feed the horse a carrot. He was one happy kid!

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We are doing a homeschool preschool swap. There are 4 families involved and we take turns at each others homes to provide a preschool experience. So far it has been great. We spend Monday and Wednesday in the home and then on Friday we all go on a fieldtrip together. It has been really fun.  We have done 3 fieldtrips so far, one a visit a retirement center: the kids had made cards for their new elderly friends and we sang lots and lots of songs to them. Our sweet kids brought so much joy into these people’s lives. It was really neat. We played at kidsville too. The next trip was a tour of the local grocery store. Our theme for the week was apples. They got to pick out a apple, decorate cookies, play with bread dough, play in the huge fridge and freezers and even check out items at the check out stand. They had so much fun (other than the silly hair nets!!!), then we made homemade applesauce…yum! The last one was going to the beach-yes it’s Oct. and we can still swim at the beach…I love it!!! We experimented with making molds and casts with plaster stuff (Susie was like the plaster queen, she was awesome!) We did the kids footprints and some molds like turtles, starfish etc. We are having alot of fun with preschool. Xander loves it! The first photo’s are of Xander’s first day and how after coming home he crashed big time!!!

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September 22, 2009

We be very tired and untethered. My Mother died Saturday morning at the Life Care Center of Bothell.  It was a long and painful process. She was very brave and uncomplaining; my brother and I have the comfort of knowing we did all we could to make her last months and days comfortable

So many of you wrote with kind words based on your own experiences with a mother’s death. Thank you. I saved them and read them often. My friend Maril actually sent me my own words of encouragement, words I had sent to her when her Mom died 25 years ago. I was so touched.

Dave has been my rock, doing whatever he could, and doing without a lot of the time since we got here in late June. I saw Mother every day up until the last week, when we were able to move her into a private room, where I had a place to sleep overnight. I held her hand as she died.

The 90 days she was in the skilled nursing facility, the goal was pain management. We never achieved that goal. When we finally got Hospice to help, we still had to deal with three shift nurses trying to “make her better.” In the last half hour of Mother’s life, the nurse was upset about a failing oxygen saturation. “She’s on two liters but fading–should I give her three liters?” It haunts me that there was so little respect for the dying process that last night.

I’m trying to remember the good parts: the little nurse who gave her butterfly kisses, the gentleness of the men who helped her in the bathroom. A beautiful young aide from Cameroon was Mother’s favorite. Chrystelle touched her and cooed to her. After Mother died Chrystelle asked if she could wash her body. When Steve and I came back, Chrystelle had washed and wrapped Mother in a clean sheet and the terrible smells of dying were replaced with a room full of “Oscar,” Mother’s fragrance. Chrystelle had found her body lotion.

When I packed up all of Mother’s clothes, cleaning out her apartment, I took her many handkerchiefs. We both like using hankies, and she had a lot of them. When I packed a bag for Friday night, and headed up to relieve Steve, I had grabbed a couple of Mother’s hankies.

As Steve and I walked behind her body to the funeral home car, I unwrapped a hankie. Looking for a dry spot I realized it was embroidered. It said “Today is a very special day.”

Love to you all,
Sam

August 31, 2009

I hardly know where July went, and now August is gone, too. Wuh.

We have been parked at Dave’s nephew’s (Kurt’s) for the last six weeks. Kurt has been extremely generous and helped us a lot. Davey has the use of Kurt’s garage shop and is still checking things off his list. I visit my mother once a day and seem to putter and flap away the rest of the day.

We went to Black Diamond, WA for a week to do a park at Lake Sawyer. We have done this park for two years, it’s a good park for us, but this year it was a total dud. We lost 10 of the 12 loyal advertisers we had and couldn’t get any interest from cold calls. So we left after a week and came back to Kurt’s. I’m still working the phones on that job, but I’m not real hopeful. Fortunately, the park has only used half the maps we made for them last year.

My mother is down below 90 lbs and her pain patch is up to 75 mg, plus oxycodone for break through pain. She sleeps most of the time but is alert when you wake her us. We go over old memories and laugh at the funny things we recall. Her voice has lost strength and her mind wanders, but she ordered her Christmas cards yesterday.

We have moved her things out of her apartment, a very difficult transition for us all. Life Care Center of Bothell is a very caring facility and Mother likes the staff. (Well, most of them. She hasn’t mellowed THAT much in her final days!)

We are struggling with this new condition of not knowing what we’re going to do next. We never know for sure what’s going to happen in our lifestyle, but this is different. Uncertainty is now a roman numeral in our outline of life, instead of an indented A.

We’ll stay in touch. Friends and family (Dave and Jacqueline) don’t give up on us. We’ll see you all before we go too far.

Love,
Sam and Dave

Just wanted to share some photo’s from the last couple of weeks…Xander is still really into dressing up. The one with the towel over his head is him being a Jedi Knight!!! He has recently become OBSESSED with Star Wars. Jason has been soooooo excited. He told Xander that he has been waiting his entire life for a Star Wars Buddy!!! The other crazy costume he put together I am not sure who he was trying to be…cowboy, explorer, superman, Michael Jackson, ET??? The last getup he put together today. He wanted a broken arm. He stapled papers together to create this arm sling. Pretty good!!! The photo’s of him playing in the puddle were from last week. We had lot’s of rain, lot’s of flooding around town. Our yard is always like this when it rains though so it wasn’t much different for us, we are at a low spot in the neighborhood and there is a drainage ditch that collects it all. Anyway he begged to play in the rain so we went for it!

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Katie was in charge of the treat for FHE last night and she invited her friend over to join us. Sophie helped Katie make this Mickey Mouse cookie. They had a great time making the dough and decorating the cookie. They were very proud of their creation!!!

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Xander was pretty mad that he couldn’t help Katie with the treat, I told him it was his turn next week and he could do it all by himself… Well he took that literally and started rattling off his recipe that he was going to make. Here it is…I dare any of you to make it!!!

Xander’s FHE recipe

8 Butter
6 Eggs
5 scoops of Jam
7 scoops of Sour Cream
7 scoops of Whip Cream
A whole thing of Peanut Butter
All of the Apple Sauce
Chocolate…all of it
1 Banana…we don’t need any apples!

Mix it up. Put water in it then mix it up again. Then put ice in it. Put it all in a bowl then warm it up in the microwave.

Becca is starting soccer today, she has been counting down the days! Very excited. I think I will officially declare Becca a preteen…she is into doing her hair now and buying her own skinny jeans and converse shoes because she “really really really wants them” I figured it was her money, she worked hard to earn it so there we have it…a preteen!!! Becca started this great water fight. They had a good time early on a Sat. morning…

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Susie has started singing lessons recently and enjoys it. She is in the school Chorus and loves to impress her classmates with her piano skills! She is a very talented girl… this is a drawing she did for Honey-Ma (her great grandma). She has two versions of it. The first one without the saying came first then the one with saying and blue sky came second because certain 8 year old was painting and squeezed the tube a bit too hard and we had an explosion of green paint that sprayed all over the kitchen: floor, counter’s, wall, microwave and Susie’s picture….after hollering at Katie she got creative and managed to fix it! Whew!!!

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For FHE last night we went to Kidsville in New Bern. It is a great playground that the kids love. We took some family photo’s and I thought since I have been such a slacker with our blog I would get these posted right away before I mentally add them to the other MONTHS I need to get caught up on!!!

Swan Family August 2009

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Just a short update on our family…we are still enjoying the East Coast and some of you may have heard that our 3 year plan has now extended to longer. Jason was accepted into the PhD program at NC State so he will continue working for DPA and do the PhD as well. I am hoping he is able to do it in 3 or 4 years and then we will hopefully move somewhere back West, closer to family.

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Susie Q has probably changed the most since we moved here…she is not our little girl anymore. It drives Jason bonkers when at age 13 she comes flying down the stairs looking so HOT!!! He does a double take and then gets his sad face on and sighs and shakes his head, I am a little worried about him when she turns 16. He’s probably going to be worse to deal with than she will be…:-) Susie is loving school, loves being the big bad 8th graders in the school. She has recently become involved in Horse Riding through a 4-H club and a local riding stable.  She is learning to work, caring for the horses and she gets to ride 2 Saturdays a month. She is thrilled, loves horses and dreams of her future life living on a ranch caring for her own horse someday!!!

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Becca Boo or Bex…a couple of months ago at dinner Becca made her grand entrance and said…and I quote…”Hey all you peoples…listen up here…I have an announcement to make…I am changing my name to Bex… that’s B E X Bex…with an X!!!” She is still as crazy as ever making us laugh every day! Becca was so excited to start Middle School. She was so cute when she got home the first day of school, she started giggling and told me her story of how she got lost in the school before the day had even begun!!! That is so typical of Becca, part of her charm…getting lost, playing practical jokes on us, tripping and falling on the stand when going up to bare her testimony, having a conversation with her and after a bit realizing it is one sided because she is engrossed in a book…you say “Becca” 3,4,5 times until she finally hears you and she innocently says “huh?” The best part about Becca is she laughs right along with us over the goofy things she does.

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Katie Bird is the volume in our home. She has not changed in that regard…in fact she has probably increased that certain characteristic…There is not one thing I can think of that she does quiet, even sleeping she has to have her radio on… She is either hollering out songs while taking a shower or using the bathroom or walking upstairs or into a room…she just randomly belts out whatever song is running through her head!!! Sometimes its not even a song…just noise. Or she has her music blaring from her room (a favorite thing to do when she is in trouble). Smacking whatever she has in her hands on the bar or table, rocking chairs back and forth. Whatever noise you can possibly think of she has already thought of it and done it or is doing it right now!!! Katie has found huge success in learning to play the piano, we are just amazed at the progress she has made in the time she has been playing. Katie is also enjoying school.

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Xander-Man is BORED with his sisters in school and his preschool not starting yet…just in the last week or two he has really been struggling with it. He used to be so happy to follow me around and help me with whatever I am working on, gardening, dishes, laundry etc. Now all he asks to do is watch movies or have a snack…very BORED!!! He will finish up his first swim lesson tonight. He has had loved his lessons and he is doing so much better in the water. He was pretty much a scaredy cat before this, clinging to me! The night before his lesson started he got real sad and worried and kept crying “I don’t want to drown!!!”  Poor kid. It only took 2 lessons before he trusted the teachers to not let him drown and then he was just fine, learned everything he was suppose to…

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July 13, 2009

Seems like I haven’t written in a long, long time. We be fine, although I am dealing with the slow death of a parent, which feels a lot like depression. It’s just hard to clear my mind and get up for much. Mother woke up one morning just before we got up here and had to call for help; she had so much back pain she couldn’t get up. Three days in the hospital and then on to a skilled nursing facility. She has been at this place before and likes it, but of course wants to go home. Her memory is so bad when she calls for pain medicine she can’t remember why she called when the nurse comes in. The pain was unremitting until we were finally able to have a meeting with the facility leaders. We agreed that pain management was the goal and they changed the medication from Oxycodone to a Fentanyl patch which delivers a constant, although fairly low dose. Huge difference. I don’t know why it took three weeks to reach this decision. And why did the family have to make it happen.And this is a GOOD facility. Also at the meeting I managed to convince them that nursing staff cannot take Mother’s word for anything. She will tell you whatever she thinks you want to hear in order to get home. That was a surprise to them because she’s so up-beat and witty.

So the last three weeks have passed in somewhat of a blur. Dave works around the bus here in the driveway at his nephew’s, while I go visit Mother. I’ve started to sew the last couple of days and that feels good. My brother also visits Mother, although we hope he will take some time off from parent duty. The last six months have been really hard.

Our tentative plan is to go to Eastern Washington the end of the month, to do one or two jobs. Then come back here and see how Mother is doing. She’s down to 98 lbs. but neither Steve or I doubt that she can live another year. Unless she falls, and that is a real possibility because being relatively pain free now, she is trying to get up by herself (to prove she’s strong enough to go home) and of course she has no strength. Argghhh!

I’m sure there are lessons here. I can’t tell whether I am resisting them or not. The best I can do right now is realizing this is all part of the journey, mine as well as my Mother’s, and I’m on the road I’m supposed to be on.

With love,

Sam