Summer day

I have a cuddly sleepy baby at my house this morning. He will be one month old tomorrow. He is currently making those grunty baby noises that so freaked me out when it was my own baby almost 17 years ago, but now just sound so sweet and lovey. To my defense, I was freaked out by a lot with my first baby because he had a stoke when he was three days old. Way back when we were told that 1/4 of his brain was (or might be) damaged. We really have no idea if this is true today or not. He seems to be doing pretty well with it regardless. This is on my mind lately because a baby whose mom I know just had half of her brain removed last week. She had a seizure condition that would have eventually damaged her whole brain if the bad part wasn't removed. The good half should be able to take over most of the responsibilities of the missing half and this baby has a great shot at a good life. Thanks to facebook (see how I slip facebook into every blog post these days) I'm getting many reports on this little girl and just days away from surgery, she seems to be doing really well. Interestingly enough, when I was in college, I knew a girl who had had this same sugery. She attended the afterschool program that I ran. She was 12 at the time and had had the surgery when she was 8. She was a walking miracle. I googled her and found her blog (but she hasn't updated it since 2009), she is on twitter, and has been mentioned in different books and magazine articles, but sadly is not on facebook! Actually she works (or volunteers) at the school in Connecticut where my aunt works, so I have another connection with her, but school is out for the summer and trying to find people through technology is kind of fun. This is not at all where I thought this blog post was going to go, see how baby Dawson's grunty noises got me all off track? Anyway, I came on here to remark about what a productive day I am having. I did a fair amount of clean out last week (Jonathan, Madi, and Mike were on their Catholic Heart Workcamp Mission Trip in Charlotte), so starting out with a relatively clean house, it's amazing what can be accomplished. I got my kids up, made sure they ate breakfast, packed their lunches, and got them off to the first day of theatre camp (since Amanda picked them up that wasn't too hard). I cuddled, fed, and changed Dawson, got two meals in the crockpot (one for us and one for another family), read the daily readings, finished the sudoku and jumble, and folded the caught up laundry. I say all this because this is probably the first time in 17 years that I've been this caught up. Also being this caught up it seemed like there was no excuse not to update my blog. There is so much updating I could do like about California, and our church's VBS that the big kids helped run, and Jake's amazing time at kids' college, and the mission trip, and the fun 'staycation' week Jake and I had, etc etc. I think the best shot at all of this is with a mega picture post, maybe a slideshow like the California one. I've been unable to upload Jake's kids' college video to facebook and I have grand plans to get all my videos onto youtube (then I think it'll be easier to get them posted other places too). I also have big plans to get Jonathan's transcript in order, as well as Jonathan and Madi's volunteer hours, but those are all plans for another day. Today I'm going to just revel in being caught up, and I'm going to cuddle Mr Grunty.