Family

First of all, Esther, update...She is hanging in there. She had labs drawn again last week and her BUN and Cr. had decreased (for those of you who don't know...these labs used to evaluate kidney function). They are still very high, but her baseline has always been high so it's difficult to interpret the true significance of the numbers. This makes it really hard to give a prognosis for her, so we are loving her and spoiling her and taking it one day at a time. I am giving her half a liter of fluids subcutaneously twice a day. She is also on oral antibiotics on the off chance that all of this was brought on by Lyme's disease or leptospirosis. She is on a predominately canned food diet, but the food isn't always her favorite and getting her to eat is the most important thing right now, so it's a balancing act. All that being said, she looks good and acts predominately normal so it is really hard to judge the situation.

Moving on...This weekend my cousin got married in Chicago. We had originally planned to leave on Friday night so we could maximize our time with family. As it turned out I signed up for my first call shift. I was scheduled from 8 am to 8 pm so we decided to wait to leave until early Sat. morning. In the end I didn't get home until about 1 in the morning because I stayed over with a laboring patient. I ended up with a few births and I was completely exhausted.

The wedding was an evening wedding so we opted to try to sleep in a little Sat. morning. I say try because I'm still fighting a cough that increases in severity in correlation to my attempts to sleep. In other words, I barely slept. We ended up arriving at my aunt and uncles house at about 2:30pm.

My aunt and uncle are basically the coolest people ever and they decided that since they were staying at a hotel closer to the wedding my parents, my brothers, my sister-in-law, nieces, nephew, and all of us could have their house for the weekend. It was really nice because it gave all of us time to catch up and yet, all of us had space to spread out.

The wedding itself was a lot of fun too. Ok, actually, we missed the wedding. We got stuck in traffic and we feel like total schmucks. We walked in just as it finished and the reception began. I'm not sure if my brother in his family made it in time, but I know my parents missed pretty much everything too, so I don't feel quite as bad...So what I meant to say was the reception was a lot of fun!

All of my aunts and uncles and cousins were there. My grandparents were there and I have to share a cute little story about them...At some point in the evening there was an anniversary dance where all the married couples were supposed to dance. I'm pretty sure all the married couples except Geoff and I were dancing. We were excused because we were busy with two overtired and overstimulated munchkins. Eventually we decided we should join in too but just as we got up to join the dj started to "vote off" couples by marriage length. We hesitated for a moment too long and suddenly the 5-10 year group was told to sit down. We both sighed and sat back down. Anyway, this continued
for a bit until the only people left on the dance floor were married 45+ years. The two couples were my parents and my grandparents. Then my parents were kicked out too. My grandparents have been married 71 years. 71 years. Really! They are adorable and even though the motivation for this blog makes it seem unlikely that I have a chance at 71 years of marriage, I hope to live up to their legacy.

A picture of the anniversary dance taken before it was just my parents and grandparents left (My dad is wearing the navy sport coat and grey pants and my grandparents are the cute couple in the middle front)

Ella making an exception to dance with Grandpa

 Our kids had a great time too...though they didn't always coordinate with each other or us. Ella wanted to dance the entire time. Literally...I think my aunt summed it up best by saying something along the lines of Ella should "sleep until next Tuesday." Ephraim on the other hand wanted to dance with Ella, but she was not having any of it. She wanted to do her own thing. He also wanted cake and to take photos in the photo booth, but only if he got to be an astronaut. I'll share those pictures another day.

This morning, all of us packed up and got ready to go home. It was special because it was also Father's Day.

Ella going to dance with Grandpa and Grandma.

My nephew and nieces

We spent most of the morning together and then we all headed our separate ways. Somewhat literally in the case of my little family. Per my oldest brother's suggestion (he is a train nut who generally enables E's passion for all things trains) Geoff and the kids took the commuter train out of Chicago. This trip was meant as something special for E, but since it was Father's Day it only made sense that Geoff got have the fun ride, so I plugged the destination info into my smart phone and headed off to Libertyville, IL (about 20 minutes away) in the car to meet up with them. E was basically glowing and Ella told me at least three times that she had fun. Geoff looked like he had a pretty good time himself.

I won't lie, this worked for me as well. There is a huge tack shop (horse stuff) in Libertyville that I got to have a little time to putz in after picking them up. Then all of us headed home where we spend most of the rest of the day playing in the backyard.