New Life, Great Time of Year

It's spring (of course, I'm in Florida where it is spring, not Cadyville where we skip that season entirely) and all kinds of new growth is appearing, including a little auburn-haired girl named Courtney. She's Emily's second daughter; Kaitlyn was turning 27 months old when Courtney was born on Feb. 21. And where Kaitlyn was pretty much bald from birth to 18 months or so, Courtney has straight, deep red hair. I'm not sure if it'll look quite so red once her little pink skin isn't visible anymore, but for now, it is red. She looks a bit like Katie did at birth but I'll have to compare pictures, and I can't add any here right now because I don't have the proper software for uploading them from my camera to the Macs in this house. Drat.

It's been a tough winter. I've been a working "mom" to all four of my daughters, mine and "the steps" too. Their plans have fallen through, jobs aren't working out, hormones took them hostage, neurochemistry tried to sabotage their lives. I believe I earned my Counseling degree this semester because I did my required internship spending many hours thinking about their situations and trying to offer sound ideas ... without running anyone's life. What a balancing act. I feel so good that they can talk to me, and actually often want to. But it is really exhausting. One half-hour phone conversation can wipe me out emotionally for hours, and I get physically very tired too. Wow. It's sort of "fun," in a very non-laughing sense of that word, to do this work, but boy do I feel the lack of education and training in that area. You know how you worry when the kids are tiny that every action of yours will somehow lead to their therapy couch later? Well, now I'm scared it really could! So I'm careful to not give anything but practical ideas.

(I just had to interrupt myself to feed Courtney. It is so ... what? wonderful isn't quite right ... to hold a tiny baby who's just getting her eyes to focus, and then she looks at you, unafraid, a completely blank slate. Anyway.....

I haven't been writing here at all, obviously. Facebook is nice for the Hi-how-are-you kind of stuff and I enjoy it, but I really have missed doing this. Nobody's fault but mine. I guess
I've kind of thought I haven't had much to say. And now you're saying, "You? You with nothing to say? Could someone check the temperature in hell? It must be freezing." But my life, apart from my work on that Counseling degree, has been pretty quiet.

Bruce and I have been sharing our hatred of the weather this year. I've taken a couple of bone-rattling falls and am convinced that my osteopenia must be better because if I had it badly or, god help us, full-blown osteoporosis, I would have broken something. And the first one gave me, I think, a very mild concussion or an almost-concussion, if there is such a thing. I hit my head without knowing it--saw my earmuffs an arms's length away and they had been on my ears--and got an instant headache, a bad one. I wound up taking Advil pretty much all day and woke up with whiplash. Man! I can only imagine what a car crash would do. This was a flat on my back legs and arms out smack onto sheet ice that was covered by snow at the end of my driveway. In addition to feeling like an untrained circus performer I felt like the village idiot: I'd walked on that same ice in my outside clogs to get the paper in my bathrobe about 2 hrs. before the fall. DUH. And about 2 weeks later I almost fell again, same spot, same idiocy.

-------Certainly lost my train of thought--it's 2 days later. Guess I'll post this and come back another time. That baby needs feeding again!