laughter as well as tears

After the flu finishes taking its course through our home, maybe then we can grasp this new start,this new time in the life of our family.
Strange the way you don't see things coming.
Here we'd thought this year was so full already.
We hadn't figured in Lee's father dying.
Nor the long,long trips as we said our good-byes and laid him to rest.

And all the complex things of the soul and our family's story that are too private to put out there but have an effect on us, leaving us a little quieter than usual, mulling and praying and yet believing in our deepest parts that our Abba Father loves us and our story has good chapters ahead!
After the weeks of uncertainty, the waiting for the phone to ring, the last times at the bedside, the burying of ones spouse's last parent,the long trips with a packed minivan and a fussy baby it's all over.

And then we caught the flu when we returned home the last time.
It took some of us hard.
But I think it's a good thing perhaps,giving us extra days to process and then step back into everyday life the better for all of it.

Dragonbaby is nearing 3 months old now. I can't really remember anymore what it was like to have four children.  So I guess I am officially a mother of five children, a large family they say.
I have made it somehow through the rough first months.
Hurrah!
And though the baby seems to be starting the teething process and my hair is doing a post partum fallout in a big way it's mixed with good stuff like  a baby having its first real laughing fit over his big sister's dancing show.

And I rejoice in the tender mercies of Our Father.
He created laughter as well as tears.

~pilgrimama