Catching Up...

Once again I find myself trying to catch up from the previous week! Work has been crazy-busy with some really difficult issues to help my patients deal with. One that really affected me is a 54 year old with end-stage rectal cancer who is actively dying. When I last saw him about a week and a half ago, he was sitting up and laughing with me about the craziness of life and now I go see him Tuesday and he's hallucinating from the morphine he's on every 4 hours. His wife is barely holding it together emotionally and trying to take complete care of him, including setting up IV hydration! I never fails to amaze how strong the human spirit can be. I know that if any of us were in that position we would do the same. What makes the situation even more difficult is that they have never discussed end-of-life issues like hospice, pain management, going back to the hospital, or resuscitation. Needless to say, after that visit, I was in a funk for the rest of the week that just didn't seem to go away.

I had yesterday (Friday) off because my daycare lady closed for a three-day weekend. Tucker and I met Andrew and his mommy (and of course, Emily) at a playground to play and have lunch. We then went for ice cream at a new place-yummy!
We then got a "sneak peek" at the school. Tucker's school, where Tracy teaches fourth grade, has been under major reconstruction all summer and the teachers have just finally gotten in to do their classrooms on Thursday. So we got a peek at Tracy's new room, the new traffic re-configuration, and most importantly to Tucker, he got to play on the new playscape! Always exciting to be first! The school looks great and Tucker is excited to start on Tuesday (at least that's what he says!) We then dropped off my paperwork for the week at work and stopped to rent "Nim's Island". Tucker had seen it at Angela's and really liked it. It was really cute and of course, I love anything Jodie Foster is in!

Today we did our usual Saturday activities (library and Target). we got Tucker a new lunchbox for school; Spiderman again because the other choices for boys were Hulk, Cars, and Speedracer-none of which he's really into. As usual, there were a million choices for girls including pastel camo which I would have gone for if it was regular camo. When we came home, tucker put in some time in his cons ruction site(the dirt area around his playscape) which is all MUD because it has been raining off and on all day as we deal with the end of Fay (thankfully nothing like what my friend Julie contended with in FL!!!) then of course, it was in to the bath tub with the dirty, muddy boy. He actually ended up taking a shower once we realized he was just sitting muddy water and he hadn't even really begun to clean off! So now he's in his pajamas which he will usually change into anyway once we're done going out for the day.

Now we're watching "Shrek 3"--pretty much a staple in our home. right now it's the scene where Prince Charming is in the bar with all the villains and trying to get them to revolt against Shrek and all that is good. In the background, some one's singing "I've been to paradise" by Charlene. It's from the 80's and I swear I still know every word, including the spoken part: "hey do you know where paradise is? it's a lie, a fantasy recreated by people and places as we liked them to be. But do you know what truth is, it's that little baby you're holding, it's the man that you fought with this morning, the same one that you'll make love with tonight, that's true, that's love"...how scary is that?! I've added it to my songlist because I can't get it out of my head...

I wanted to post some pictures from Michael's party last Sunday. Before we had cake and presents, Michael tried to join Tucker on his boat which as you can see didn't work out that well!
Here Tucker helps Michael blow out the candle. In case, you're wondering about Michael's fancy hat, my friend Joan gave us the hat after we had Tucker to start a "new tradition" so everyone gets to wear the hat on their birthday (and Tucker usually wears it too!)
And finally, just to show off Michael's age (and mine too!), here he is trying to understand how to use Cassandra's iphone. (We are not the most technologically-savvy people!)
Plans for the rest of the weekend include finding some letterboxes here in Montville-there's actually quite a few (that would be tomorrow-Sunday). And hopefully just relaxing on Monday.