from an article originally posted July 5, 2014….

We are home from a lovely adventure in Westcliff. I swallowed the last pills and have a week off from the stomaching of pills...well, chemo pills. We are washing clothes, making lists, and getting the big girls ready to run away to Eagle Lake Camp. Each week we have sought and found life, big life in the little and big moments together.

I spent the last two nights sleeping with Story on a twin mattress. She wakes in the night, pulls me close, and kisses me all over. It’s as though she remembers in the night she is getting to sleep beside her favorite, and as she tosses, she wants me to know how much she loves confined spaces with me. I love the exhausting nights that meet me with this little love. I treasure these quiet moments with each of my children and know they will be forever cherished. Even if I ask my little loves in the morning if they remember my kisses and they don’t, something of my love remains. Love always remains. I have enjoyed bedtime wrestling and love with each of my children.

I just looked out the window and noticed a soccer ball rolling down the hill with a neighbor running after it. I have these moments, these moments that feel normal. But then in the next minute I’m making a wicked funny joke about cancer. Jason and I haven’t figured how to settle into this new routine. He flitters about me, anxious to help me manage my yuck, but this yuck will have to learn to be managed as this medicine is forever. Or forever until forever is over. So we wrestle these feelings, these unknown moments, these fearful feelings. We wrestle each moment with so many thoughts and over thinking we are tired.

God has been gracious to us. We don’t know what each moment holds, but we hold one another in the moments. We press through our suffocating grief, and we turn on the grill and make our little people dinner. We pack bags for the girls to run away and learn the best of Jesus and childhood. We simply move into the next thing. And sometimes our tears fall into the grill, sometimes they don’t.