I am currently sitting in a hotel room in Raleigh, NC. Brett has a job here and it is right on the way to Maryland so we combined business and pleasure. Tomorrow the plan is to continue driving up to Maryland to visit my folks for a good long while. My long-time dear friend Kathryn is getting married next weekend!!!!! I am very much looking forward to seeing everyone and to her wedding.
Nate is thrilled at the prospect of going to Nana and Papa B's house. He remembers jumping on the trampoline and the abundance of toy trucks.
The children have enjoyed staying in a hotel room so far. I vividly remember the few times we stayed in a hotel growing up, thinking it was great fun. The nostalgia has even carried over a bit for me now. I still view it as an adventure.
Yesterday I had to be creative because Brett took the car with him to the job and we were stranded here. One of the beds became a slide, with the top mattress partially hanging off the bottom one. It doubled as a fort because the children could climb underneath too. That entertained them for a while. We also went outside and sat on the very, very steep hill outside the hotel. It was so steep that Nate's beloved monster truck would roll all the way down it, to the children's delight. The hill was grassy but also muddy so everyone's were covered in mud within 5 minutes. I thought, "This is why people who have nice looking clothes don't play outside".
Within about 5 minutes of arriving, I realized that the hotel borders a horse park that has a Morgan horse show running all weekend. Just walking around, looking at the horses and smelling the horse smell sounds like fun to me. I'm not sure how long the children will last there, though they do love horses. When they wake up from their nap I plan to walk over there.
This morning we went to an arboretum. Since we had been awake since 6:30, we arrived quite early and were almost literally the only people there, which felt a little strange, like we were intruding on someone's private garden. Despite the feeling, it was beautiful and inspired me to work more in my gardens. Flowers bring so much joy to my heart. I took lots of pictures of particularly interesting flowers but can't upload them right now. I decided that at some point in my life I want to have an all-white garden, a rose garden, and a garden big enough to have a path winding through it with an archway covered with roses and a bench to sit and be still. I am envisioning it right now at the back left corner of our yard.
Going to such a place always reminds me of how much mothering is laying down my life for another. Because I would have so dearly loved to spend hours in the arboretum, writing down the names of different unique flowers, laying in the grass reading a book, sitting on many of the lovely benches and watching the birds. Instead, we rushed through most of it, unless there was a fish pond or fountain. I was thankful that we emerged without anyone falling into any water. And it was so very hard not to throw rocks into the water...or coins, since Nate has recently learned about throwing coins into fountains.
At the end of the day though, I would not trade watching their faces light up when they see a tadpole or hearing Nate yell, "Goodbye Old McDonald!!!" to a tractor that was working off in the distance when we were leaving the gardens for all of the me-time in the world.
Surgery update...
Although I was not the one having surgery last week, I felt incredibly tired all weekend. So we had a very quiet couple of days. A quiet as possible with two toddlers anyway.
Brett's surgery on last Thursday went very well. At least that was what the surgeon told me. It will be a few weeks before Brett is able to tell if he is still leaking spinal fluid or not. The hole was apparently quite small, which is good.
We are pretty sure that this was caused many years ago when Brett was throwing a flexible rod back and forth with his brother, like a javelin. It was up in the air, lost in the sun, and came down right between Brett's nose and his eye. At the time, everyone was very thankful that he still had an eye. They did not realize that they should also be thankful that it stopped just short of going into his brain. A tiny piece of bone was actually pushed into his brain. Now that we know, we are even more properly thankful.
Brett has been tired, as I said, but he is doing very well. We are both very hopeful that when this heals that he will have much more energy than even before his meningitis, since replenishing spinal fluid is taxing on the body.
I am very thankful to have the surgery behind us and much visiting with family and friends ahead of us!!
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