September 28th
Some of you know that today is the one year anniversary of the health care crisis that changed our family forever. September 28th fell on a Friday last year, so it feels kind of like the whole weekend marks the event. As the date approached, Nathan and Sheri both had some residual anxiety. Though we are grateful every single day for modern medicine, our supportive community, and Lucy's spunky fight against her illness, we are still very viscerally aware of how close we came to the unimaginable. We figured we needed to fill the weekend with fun things to take our minds off our anxiety while also kind of commemorating the date. At first we thought we should have a big party and invite everyone who helped us last year, then we scaled that back to having two families with toddlers over for dinner Saturday night. We planned to go to church Sunday, and fill in the gaps with lots of snuggle and play time with just the three of us. You know what they say about best laid plans...

Ironically, we had to call off the dinner party and church because Lucy was sick. Not horribly so, just typical toddler cold/cough/runny nose sick. Compared to what we were dealing with last year at this time, we'll take it. She remained fairly perky, but the grown ups were bummed that our plans got derailed.

We did manage to get out Saturday morning to the River City Roundup, and Lucy got to pet a baby chick, a bunny, a puppy, and a 1 day old piglet. We also walked through the area where the 4H kids wash and clip and blow dry their cows and goats and sheep. It was a window into a fascinating world we didn't really even know existed, and Lucy came home with a new hat. Then we went home and stayed indoors for the rest of the weekend. We told each other 200 times how lucky we are and Lucy got more kisses and snuggles than she wanted. So at least that part of the plan came to pass. And Sheri and Nathan are both sporting halloween tattoos, at Lucy's insistence (and she has four).

Maybe in 3 or 5 or 10 years, September 28th will pass unnoticed. We certainly have found a lot of normalcy in the past year that we never imagined on September 29th or 30th, 2007. Lucy, blissfully, doesn't share our memories. Her pediatrician is a bigger part of her life than she would have been otherwise, she goes to PT, and she has an "owie finger," but it's all just happy and normal life to her. One day we'll tell her the whole story, and she'll probably shrug it off and think it's no big deal. And THAT, my friends, is something to really be grateful about.