Chicks, Children, College, Choas and Life

It is very hard to recap when I have not blogged in so long. I think I will try the scatter approach. I will just throw things out and you catch what you will.

Our latest adventure was having to do a full day of attachment evaluations up in Charlottesville. We were feeling very reluctant to do this evaluation, in part because our son, Luke, has had so many evaluations that he felt he could tell us the whole process before we even went. Another good reason is that we have felt that things are going so well, there was no need. Most importantly though, attachments take time, and five months is a fairly short time when you are a six year old who has been through so much. SS eventually threatened us to the point where we felt we had no choice but to do this now. In hindsight, we are very glad that we have done it. Not so much because of what the therapist can help us with now that he has this information, but because the evaluators were so pleased with Luke's progress in healing and attaching that the report to SS should relieve a lot of their concern and a lot of pressure on us.

To summerize the chaos of the week for you: We had me sick with a bad cold, maybe even the flu Thursay during a morning visit from our SS person, a visit with Luke's SS person to which I had to drive 45 minutes in the afternoon, a visit with a new therapist on Friday morning, which Tim came home for though I did manage to drag myself out of bed for it. A busy and sick weekend for most of us, followed by a late-evening, three-hour drive to a hotel where Tim and I crammed into a double bed for a fittful night before a gruelling day of having our every move video-taped and evaluated. Hmm... I wonder why Luke seemed so emotionally unstable yesterday. Do you think things will mello with Tim and Whitney having left for a father daughter get-away and a five day absense? I bet not.

I have been very encouraged by the way that Luke is handling the stress though. Instead of shutting me off and pulling away, as he has in the past after SS visits, he has been whiny and teary and sad. He tried to be naughty and get himself in trouble, but since I have been keeping him right by my side, I was able to avert disaster.

I mentioned that Tim and Whitney have left for a few days. They left at about 5:30 this morning and will drive to GA for a lovely visit with friends and a father/daughter retreat put on by Vision Forum. Whitney was definately looking forward to this trip with her dad. I pray their time together is truly blessed and they come home with bags full of memories they made together.

Luke was so excited to have baby chicks arrive in the mail on the same day that we began incubating 15 eggs that we recieved in the mail the previous day. He enjoyed the chicks so much that I ended up leaving them in the house much longer than I had intended. Our eggs will hopefully hatch around the first of April, if I haven't managed to mess them up with uneven temperatures and a turner that is inconsistant. I have never had such challenges with incubating eggs and I have never paid so much for a dozen eggs either. These dozen Buff Orpington hatching eggs cost about $30. Yikes!!!

Nathaniel was excited to start classes at the local community college a week ago. Since it is the end of the spring semester, he was only able to get into two classes, but we thought that was a good start. As soon as he started classes though, his work he does with a friend in Williamsburg took off, as has his own business. He seems to get fairly steady, though not often enough, calls for his lawn business. He is working to upgrade his equipment and is hoping to get a vehicle to help him with his work. He hires David to work for him as often as it is convenient. David likes the income and it is good for him to learn how to work hard for a full day.

Whitney has slowed down recently on her studies as she has been doing so much ministry to other families and her own that she has had little time to devote to study. She recently spent two days with five children under six, while their mother worked to set up a consignment business. Besides helping with children, she has been volunteering her time up in Williamsburg cataloging, organizing, and barcoding books for a lady that has a huge library of books that are out of print and/or purged from libraries due to their Christian worldviews.

David continues to be frustrated over his desire to do computer programming and his lack of a computer that works properly. He has been fighting for months now to get a computer that was given to him to function properly in spite of being reformatted, or perhaps, because of it. He is just beginning a new adventure into Physics and is enjoying it very much at this point, though he gets a little hung up on the math occasionally. I hope he will become a great engineer one day. I think he would really enjoy that field of work. He is such a thinker.

I think this has gotten long enough. That about sums up all that has been happening around here of late anyway. I wish I could sit down to a long chat and time of catch-up on all of you. Thanks for listening. Have a blessed day!