Welcome to Ohio

Well, Ohio has given us quite the spring greeting.  In Venezuela, it was warm.  Always.  Sometimes just plain hot.  We longed for winter.  We rarely got sick, or at least the kids rarely got sick.  We only had 1 doctor visit, only out of necessity.

Here though.  Ohio is bipolar.  60 degrees one day, snow the next.  It's no wonder everyone gets sick.  Well, we jumped on the sickness boat.  Everyone in our family has either had a fever, vomiting, snot and congestion, or some form of all of them.  Oh Ohio.  Being in the bipolar weather and around a lot of kids, it was bound to happen.

We can say that we're really grateful for the lack of sickness we experienced in Venezuela.  The fact that we only went to the doctor once because Leah had a UTI was huge for us.  Our goal was to not go to the doctor at all, but that's ok.  We're so thankful for the lack of sickness we experienced.

So the past few days have not been "productive."  It's been a lot of cuddling on the couch with one sick child one day and then cuddling with the other one the next day.  Luckily it seems like the fever runs for only about 24 hours.  Cleaning up vomit and other accidents hasn't been fun, but we're pushing through.

We leave for Indy on Monday.  There we'll have a couple days of debrief.  It will hopefully be a good time of some closure for us to process through our time in Venezuela.  Miami was more designed to be a crisis debrief, so we're looking forward to having a debrief for our entire time overseas.

We've had to do a fair amount of grieving over the past couple of weeks.  As we've tried to invite people into the process, it's been hard to know how to grieve well, what to grieve and what to be excited about.  It seems like time and a lot of processing will heal the wounds we've experienced.  It's a slow process and there doesn't seem to be a right or wrong.  So we just do what we can.

Would you continue to pray for us?  For our health, for rest in the midst of sickness.  For our continued processing.  For our kids to continue to be flexible with our lack of housing.  We continue to rest in the only consistent thing we have right now, each other and the Lord.