Starting to blog again after

Starting
to blog again after not blogging is like bumping into that person you promised
to call back and never did... a little embarrassing, a little fumbling. So, I
thought three weeks was a hiatus? What do I call three months? I know! A
mini-sabbatical...right? We went back east for a visit with family and to attend
R's 20th High School reunion. Now, really, in trying to pack for six people for
a ten day trip, I really, truthfully, forgot to pack anything for the reunion. I
remembered somewhere past Denver at about three in the morning. We stopped in
Junction City, Kansas to visit with my mother. She is a nurse in the Army
Reserves and was deployed in January of this year. So, we stopped there and
stayed overnight. My brother drove up from Stillwater and met us there. While my
mother and R took the children to a park, my brother an dI took some film to the
one-hour photo lab at the "local discount store" (hmmm, wonder which one that
is?). He is trying to work out all his stuff with our mother. You know, that
place we all reach when we start analyzing their parenting and trying to
empathize and mix it with who they really are as people and how that got mixed
up into their parenting? We drove on the next day to Missouri to stay with R's
parents. They have recently moved and so the house was new to us. They moved to
better accommodate R's dad who had a hemorrhagic stroke on Father's Day of 2002.
I never realized until we stayed with them how hard it is for me that this has
happened to him and he's not even my dad. He just sits in his chair most of the
day. Conversation is very limited and he's lost his sense of adventure. He
wouldn't even sit out on the sun porch to have lunch with us. It was all very
strange and difficult to process. This has made him more of a spectator than a
player, something he never was before. We used to go shopping together- he loved
a good deal. We talked frequently on the phone. He was a sort of renaissance man
before it's time. I am sometimes overwhelmed with sadness that K will not know
him like the other children have. Other times I am so angry that this happened
because the care of him has so monopolized my mil's time that she can't travel
to see us or take the children for any extended period of time.