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The online Gentlewood Cottage, anyway.
I will no longer be posting here on WordPress. Instead – please come visit Gentlewood Cottage at my NEW location!
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Photo by – BrittneyBush
Things around here have been phenomenally crazy for the last few weeks. I can’t believe that it’s been nearly two whole weeks since I last posted.
We have so far:
Visited with my brother (Caleb) and his girlfriend, Alison who came home for a week.
Visited with my brother (Jared) who came home from college two times during the last couple of weeks.
Visited with my sister (Anna) and her family, who came home to participate in all the visiting (see above) and celebrate our mom’s and Bessie’s (my niece, Anna’s daughter) birthdays – (see below).
Started raising cockatiels with my brother (Zion).
Met my uncle from Chicago at a local(ish) campground.
Camped.
Hiked.
Fished. (Okay, only a little, but as my uncle says… “Fishing requires patience, but fishing with children requires the patience of an angel).
Uploaded and edited roughly 1400 photographs.
Celebrated my mom’s 49th birthday.
Celebrated my sister-in-law’s 46th birthday.
Celebrated my niece’s 3rd birthday.
Celebrated Easter Sunday.
Changed 224 diapers.
Had/have a bad cold and a case of hives (mine!).
Attended a play.
Prepared roughly 42 meals.
Washed around 746 loads of laundry.
Washed 300 loads of dishes in the dishwasher.
Had a picnic.
Did major grocery shopping twice.
Took a mass family picture involving 20 individual and wiggly people.
Played at the park.
Juggled three fussy babies.
Figured taxes. Repeatedly.
Bought two cars.
Cleaned up approximately 29 spills.
Visited the Science Center.
Put out four oven fires.
Had two tires repaired.
Potty trained a two year old.
Mopped the floor. Once.
Learned of two separate and potentially serious car accidents involving my parents and my brother.
Photographed most of the above.
“It is hard to have patience with people who say ‘There is no death’ or ‘Death doesn’t matter.’ There is death. And whatever is matters. And whatever happens has consequences, and they are irrevocable and irreversible. You might as well say that birth doesn’t matter.”
- C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed
Rachel and I have had so very much in common this fall, as we have both prepared to host our families for Thanksgiving, while at the same being concerned about our maternal Grandfathers, who both went in to the ICU around the same time, shortly before Thanksgiving. My Grandpa came home the day after Thanksgiving. Rachel’s grandpa joined our Heavenly Father this morning.
Today, Dan and I spent the day with my grandparents, driving Grandpa to the hospital because his open wounds from his bypass surgery haven’t been healing well. When we arrived back home, I learned that Rachel had spent the day grieving for the loss of her grandpa.
Being with Grandpa today, Dan and I were shocked to see how weak he is now. The Grandpa who spent the long summer days gardening and walking around our little town, now has to use a walker to get from the car to the door. His hands are like balloons, barely recognizable as human hands due to the weakness of his heart. We were struck with the fragility of life, and at the same time, the importance of it.
The universe will truly never be the same, on the day that my sweet, grumpy old grandpa leaves it.
The universe will never be the same without Rachel’s Grandpa Tice.
photo credit: coyotos
We’ve been taking advantage of Caleb’s impromptu visit while we wait for news about Grandpa’s recovery…
We’ve played several rounds of poker and bluff, and Caleb introduced up to Cranium…
Sleep has been a little hard to come by lately, so we all grab it when and where we can.
The upcoming week promises to be as busy and hectic as the proceeding ones.
Will be having a mini-Thanksgiving dinner with Caleb and my family on Tuesday evening before he leaves on Wednesday morning. I hope to visit Grandpa in the hospital again on Wednesday, depending on who is taking Caleb back to the airport.
We’re celebrating Thanksgiving with the my family, my sister and her family, Dan’s brother and his family and my aunt and her family at our house on Thursday.
On Friday, we are eagerly anticipating the arrival of Dan’s niece, Rachel, along with her husband and their roly-poly son, Teddy.
(isn’t he a handsome fella?)
We expect to celebrate Thanksgiving (and Life in general) with them on Saturday, along with another young couple from our church, and the Lonesome Hill gang.
Grandpa should be out of the hospital on Friday, and I’m anxious to have them back. It seems strange to know that they’re not just down the road…
When we were kids, I remember wondering what impact our lives would have on the world around us. All of my friends and I knew we wanted to be wives and mothers above everything else, but what else?
As we all began to get married, start school, graduate, start careers, start families, we began to lose touch with each other. Amy ended up married to a guy who I had never even met, and living in a state that I had never visited. I still remember crying at her wedding… One friend, Rachel had gotten married several years before any of the rest of us, and we had gotten used to the idea by then. But, at the time of Amy’s wedding to Brandon, I had just begun a courtship with my future husband, and I saw huge changes on the horizon for all of us.
Amy and Brandon had a sweet, cherubic little baby boy named Gary, and moved back to Missouri. I was excited at the prospect of being able to get to know each other again, as the families that we had become.
They hadn’t been back for very long, when they received devastating news. On July 2, 2006 Amy was diagnosed with Acute Myelogenous Leukemia.
In Amy’s words:
I wholly believe my journey through leukemia began from the foundations of the earth. The Lord has had this fully written in His plan for my life. Though we will never know the exact moment a single cell of my DNA acquired a problem, the doctors feel my body has been under attack for months. As I look back, I see the many ways God has been preparing us for this — He has truly gone before, and for that I must be grateful.
Amy fought so bravely! She kept up with two blogs, one for the “public” with a lot of medical details, and one on her Bebo page, which was full of the details how this disease was affecting her, and her family in very real ways. Both were heartbreaking to read. She was so humorous and encouraging. Every time she wrote, I felt like she was the one encouraging all of us, and that I, for one, had nothing to offer her back.
On her Bebo blog, she wrote blog posts entitles things like: “Goin’ bald in style”, “Hey from A Cute Leukemia Patient”, and “Doctors are from Mars…Patients are from Venus”.
She happily shared all the ironic little details surrounding chemo, like the fact that, though the chemo had removed every hair from her head, including eyebrows, it kindly left the leg hair, so that she could still have the joy of shaving her legs.
She also let us in on facts that we had apparently been deceived about all of our lives.
…But the best example is probably crust. This new almost Vegan diet has me eating a lot of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, lunch of choice for oncologist Dr. Doll, who is wholeheartedly Vegan. (Hey, if the cancer doctors are doing it, they probably have a reason.) Anyway, I stared at the sandwich and declared, “There isn’t any benefit to eating crust. It’s made out of the same stuff as the rest of the bread. It’s just darker because it was exposed to more heat in the oven. I’ve been lied to all my life.
The kicker? I said it in front of my mother. Yup, I am free as a bird these days and full of honesty. She admitted to lying to me all my life just to keep me from wasting food. End result? Crusts went in the trash and I stepped a little lighter the rest of the day.”
Of course there were many, many days spent fighting in the valleys, as the Wilhoite and Martin families struggled for Amy’s life. On those days, Amy and Brandon were just as encouraging. They never lost sight of the ultimate goal, or lost faith that God would see them through.
…So we ask for prayer. Prayer that the Lord might bring her once again back from death’s doorstep. Prayer that should God deem this the time to bring her ultimate healing and call her home that she will pass quickly and peacefully. Prayer that as the doctors keep asking me what to do that I’ll have the wisdom to make the right decisions. Prayer for the doctors as they come up with ideas to care for dear Amy.
On September 10th 2007, Amy was finally healed.
In Brandon’s words:
My dear beloved Amy has gone home to meet her Lord. Shortly after 4:00 PM on this, September 10th, 2007, she took her last sweet breath. Moments before, she leaned up to me, and with much effort, told me she loved me – and gave me a kiss through her oxygen mask.
As someone else said on another blog when their dear one passed away, I never knew one could be at so much peace and have such a broken heart at the same time.
I miss Amy today, but I am so grateful for the testimony that was her life here. I pray that when God sees fit to take me from this life, I would be able to leave it with the grace that Amy did.
I’m thinking and praying for Brandon, and his tiny, motherless little boy, as well as for Amy’s family, the Martin family. Surely they must miss their wife, mother and daughter terribly, but surely they are also confident that they will soon be with her again.
Me dear friend Rachel was the elegant hostess for this lovely and relaxing evening. Dinner was served in the twilight, as the crickets chirped and the stars began to twinkle in the evening sky. We were surrounded by the gentle glow of white string lights and candles.
Tom and Rachel’s children, Hosanna and Caleb, made a pinata with the help of Tom. I think it began it’s life as “Winnie the Pooh”, but by the time it was ready to be presented, it had switched identities and become “Gooby“, instead.
After dinner, there were sparklers for all the children. In the process of helping the girls not burn themselves, I managed to splash hot candle wax across my hand. I’ve always been so very graceful.
Thank you, Tom and Rachel, for such a lovely respite in a busy month!
I love this PlayFoam stuff. Papa and Mama gave me some for my birthday last year, and I love it. I’ve kept it hidden away from children, not wanting to share my toys, so their first experience with the stuff was at Silver Dollar City.
Another huge hit for the kids…
They took this task very seriously – apparently believing that is was their duty to see to it that every ball was put into those little ball vacuum things, thereby clearing off the floor.
This was definitely the best part of the trip. The kids enjoyed themselves immensely. It was nearly closing time, and they essentially had the fountain to themselves.
Life looks so different, when you’re tiny.
Sophie took a while to get up the nerve to actually get in and get wet.
She and Drew sort of emboldened each other.
Kinsley on the other hand, dove right in and embraced the adventure.
We also noticed that Caleb was as thrilled and pleased with this, as he had been to go on some of the bigger, wetter rides. He seems to be at the optimum age for this sort of thing, being equally thrilled by attractions designed for smaller kids and those designed for the adventurous adults.
Sophie tried to discover the source of the water…
And was continually shocked (and pleased) to get wet…
Kinsley has a rule that she must ingest as much water from every source as she can possibly manage. And we wonder why she got sick when we arrived home.
Ahh… if only I could be so carefree!
