Gentle Years

Eva got her casts off yesterday.  On November 1 she will be having surgery because we've achieved as much correction as possible with the casts alone.  The surgery will be tendon release and possibly some wedging at the same time.  The doctor said there will be at least two or three other surgeries down the road.  She is happy to be "free", and when we got home she had a surprise package from Wu Yi, her sister in Idaho, which just made her night! 

Aidan and I are going to get haircuts today.  At the start of school he refused to let me cut his or make an appointment, then within two weeks he told me he needed a cut!  Sorry about the drips on his shirt-we had just had Chinese food and he ended up wearing some :)

Where has the time gone?  Everyone is back at school.  Kids are doing well.  

Eva is on her third set of casts and gets the fourth set on tomorrow.  They are soft casts which means that I can take them off a few days before the next set is scheduled to go on.  These are corrective, to try to see how much can be achieved through casting alone.  In October she'll have a set put on under anesthesia so her tendons can be released at the same time.

Aidan is loving his new teacher, I think.  It is important to him that I help him do his spelling enrichment each night even though he does his homework at homework club.  Today he asked why he needed to spend time with "that teacher" like Eva, since he already knows English.  He's referring to the ELL teacher, and I'm sure he'll be done with her services this year.

When I'm not busy with family and school, I'm negotiating with the union as school board vice-chair in my own district, attending incredibly long meetings for the same board, working at getting cable expanded in our town, serving on our state's social studies council as president-elect, or writing.  I have now sold four manuscripts since last fall.  My real joys are writing and being outside.  We have a piece of land that we will someday build a new home on and I went there every weekday this summer while the kids were in summer school to cut brush, cut trees, haul both, plant things, etc.  I'm that person who walks acreage every day and knows every. single. plant. in my walk. 

On a sour note, migraines are just about killing me.  I don't know if my lyme disease is active again or if it's something else, but I've found the doctors almost useless.  The Migraine Brain says that if one lasts more than 72 hours you should be in the hospital getting i.v. drugs because you are dehydrated even if you are drinking.  You would think that after 26 years of them someone might have mentioned that, especially since mine can go on for three weeks at a time.  Anyway, the main cause of progressively worsening migraines is poor sleep so next Wednesday I have a consult for a sleep study.  I have no trouble falling asleep, just trouble staying asleep.  For the last week I've also been clenching my jaw in my sleep so much that I can't turn my head on the pillow in the morning without the help of my hands because the pain in my head/neck/shoulders is so extreme.  This could, again, be all related to lyme or it could just all be related to migraines.  I think that colonial doctors were onto something when they used to drill people's skulls to let out the evil spirits because there are days when I think that might just bring relief!