I Laugh Every Time I Go To The Bathroom

And NO, it is not what you are thinking....  A while back, I decided to redo my bathroom and wanted to have a mountain cabin / outdoor theme.  It has always been a yellow or light blue and I just wanted something different. 

I found the perfect shower curtain at WalMart - it was a dark sky blue, green, brown and tan plaid.  While I was there I purchased some green towels to match it and a few other items.

I then took the shower curtain to Home Depot to have them match some paint to the green color in the curtain.  Everything was set to start the redecoration of the bathroom. 

Becca came over and helped me paint the walls, we put all the accessories out and then stepped back to see how it all looked.  I must admit that I was a little taken aback.  Standing there staring at the shower curtain with all the green accents around it, we both realized that there was absolutely no green in it whatsoever.  We were amazed.... to say the least.

After laughing hysterically for a few minutes, we could only assume that the halogen lighting in WalMart and Home Depot made some of the tan appear to be green.  Hence the reason that I laugh every time I go to the bathroom....

And don't ever tell me God doesn't have a sense of humor!

That Helpless Feeling

I think that the worst time of my life was when I was told that Becca would need open heart surgery to repair a heart murmur. We knew she had a heart murmur when she was born, but it had been gradually closing up over the years. During the first part of 1994 I realized that I could hear her murmur without a stethoscope. When I asked her pediatrician about it, he said that sometimes when they are closing up they get really loud and this was normal. Several months went by and the next time we went in he decided to send her to a cardiologist for an echo cardiogram. The heart had been building up pockets of muscle around the hole trying to make another valve out of it. At the time it was not giving her any problems, but the doctor assured me that at some point in the future it would start to obstruct the flow of blood through the heart. She was five and had just started kindergarten when we got the news.

I grew up in a time when open heart surgery meant that you went to see the patient before the operation to say your goodbyes. Patients did not usually survive the trauma of open heart surgery and if they did, it was a long slow recovery process. My mind immediately thought of the worse case scenario when the doctor told me and for the first time in a long time, I cried like a baby. Luckily the nurse had taken Steve and Becca to the waiting room to play with the toys so they didn’t see how upset I got. And thank goodness, modern medicine had come a long way and the chances of her not surviving were less than 5%.

Surgery was scheduled for the Tuesday after Thanksgiving at Egleston Children’s Hospital, with us going in on that Monday for all the pre-op work. To keep Becca from being scared and to keep my mind off of what was about to happen, I decided to keep a diary of all the events surrounding her surgery. I took pictures of everything that happened to her and kept notes about the times and what was going on. I knew that when she was older she wouldn’t remember anything about the surgery and would want to know what had happened.

I had decided that when they took her to surgery, I would finally be able to have a nice cry, but when the time came – Bobby and everybody else was crying, so, trying to be a good mom, I got a stiff upper lip and held it together.

The surgery went well and I continued to occupy myself by working on the diary. I stayed at the hospital the whole week because I couldn’t bear to leave my baby there. They had a nice shower area for the family and sofas in the waiting room that slept better than our bed at home.

When Becca came out of surgery, Bobby and I were the first to go into ICU to see her. We knew what to expect about all the tubes and bandages, so that wasn’t much of a surprise. She was still out of it so all we got to do was watch her. Bobby was so pitiful, all he could do was cry. I had been so strong through the whole ordeal because everyone around me was falling apart and I still had to be strong when all I wanted to do was cry for my poor baby.

The second time we got to go in, my mother-in-law went with me. Becca was awake but her hands were strapped down to keep her from pulling out any lines and she still had a breathing tube down her throat. My heart broke – she kept trying to say mama and to reach out to me, but she couldn’t do either one and I couldn’t even hold her. Well, that was my moment – I had to turn away so that she wouldn’t see me cry and I only cried for a few seconds, but it was enough to scare everybody in the room. When I left the ICU, the staff had a nurse and a counselor waiting to make sure that I was OK. I think I must have scared them half to death when I cried.

The next day when it was decided that Becca should be put in a regular room and they started removing all the drainage tubes, cath lines, etc, she would scream every time they pulled on the heart catheter. The cardiologist decided that rather than taking a chance on doing some damage, they would take her back to surgery to find out what was wrong. My poor baby had to go through a second surgery. Luckily it turned out that the catheter was hung on a loop of suture and there was no damage done so the surgery took just a few hours.

She went back to the step down unit of the ICU and on Friday night was put into a regular room. At this point she had not had any food since early Monday evening. The cafeteria was closed but the nurses were so great – one went down and managed to bring Becca back some mashed potatoes and popsicles so Becca was in hog heaven! On Saturday they actually let her go home and I figured that I would have some time to get all of the Christmas gifts wrapped and do some decorating while she was recovering. Well, Becca had other ideas. Once she figured out that she didn’t hurt she was up and running and hasn’t stopped yet!

Watching your child go through something like this is one of the hardest things you ever have to do, you want so bad to take away their pain and make them better but you can’t. You have to trust that God has given you the best doctors and nurses to make them well again and that he will hold your child in his arms until he can place them back in yours.

Tuesday morning came around and the whole family was there to wish her well. After they had given her the “happy juice” (a type of anesthesia) Steve knelt beside the bed to kiss her bye and she was so sweet, stroking his face and loving on him and then before we knew it, she drew back and hit him, knocking him to the floor then just laughed and laughed. I thought for a minute that Steve would probably take care of the surgery problem by just killing her on the spot, but being the sweet little boy that he was, he just got up and went back over and gave her a kiss. It was the greatest of Kodak moments and I was so in shock that I forgot to take a picture of it….. go figure!

Making Lemonade out of Lemons

Now for a serious blog (you probably won't see too many of these from me)....

The last year has been a really strange year.  It's had lots of ups and downs, some worse than others, some better, but despite it all, I've managed to make some lemonade.  I've always been a relatively happy person (except when I was going through menopause, but that's a whole other blog!).  This year has challenged my happiness on many levels.  I found myself falling into a depression that I could not seem to recover from.  

I am a Christian and I know that whatever I turn over to God will turn out well.  My problem was that I am also human and I had a hard time really turning it ALL over to God.  Therein lay my biggest problem.  When I finally did let go, things began to look up and a huge weight was lifted from my shoulders, literally.

I can feel myself getting back to normal as each day passes and it makes my soul sing with a joyful noise.  There is power in prayer and faith, even when it is being tested to what you think is your limit.

Just remember that and then try to make lemonade out of those lemons that life drops on your head along the way.  It really tastes pretty good.

The Wonders of Nature

Many years ago Bobby, Steve and I went on a mission trip to Breckenridge, Colorado with about 80 of our friends from church (Becca was at home going to GA Camp). Having never been out west and most especially to the Rockies, I had no idea of just how magnificent it was.

It was the first week of June and when we stepped off of the plane we could see snow capped mountains in the distance. The sky was the brightest blue I have ever seen (evidently there is no smog anywhere in the state!) and it smelled so clean and the mountains were absolutely breathtaking.

One of the members of the church we were working on owned a house that had 5 very large bedrooms and a great room that was bigger than the house I live in now. Our family, 3 other families, 3 single men and all the teenagers stayed in our house. The 3 house “moms” cooked for everyone and we ate breakfast and dinner together at the house each day. After dinner was a sort of free time and we could do whatever we wanted to.

The kids were particularly fond of going out on the deck and watching the night sky (this deck was the largest I have ever seen – it went all the way around the house). I didn’t realize what the attraction was until I went out on the deck with them one night (I had avoided this because the temperature dropped into the 30’s at night). I sat there for maybe a minute or two and then I knew what they were so excited about…. there were shooting stars every couple of minutes and sometimes several at a time. Someone later told me it was because of the altitude and the fact that the air is so thin and clean that you can see so many of them. It was like being in the middle of a constant meteor shower. It was so awesome that I could hardly catch my breath.

The church we were working on had a little mountain stream

behind it where the church had dug out a baptismal pool for having their baptisms. The water in this stream was about 33° (OK, maybe a little warmer, but not much) and all I can say is that you had to really love God to get baptized in that stream. I stuck my foot in and thought it would freeze solid before I could get it out!

Working on this mission trip was such a blessing – you woke up in the mornings to some of the most beautiful scenery that you can imagine and went to sleep at night under a sky with billions of stars (because of city lights and other things, we only see a tiny fraction of the stars that you could see out there). Each day I’d see the beauty of God’s creation and couldn’t help but wonder how it is that someone can say there is no God. You’ll never convince me that all this beauty “just happened”.

I am so thankful that God has given me the opportunities to see the wonders that He has created. Colorado was a beautiful state, but I was still glad to get home and see the wonders that we have here in Georgia. Every place that I have ever been privileged to visit has been wonderful in its own way, but there is no beauty like what you find at home.