Early Morning Phone calls

6 a.m. phone calls are rarely good news. When you've been expecting it, it's really only necessary for the phone to ring for you to know what's happened. I was up already, feeding a grumpy Risanna when the call came through that Grandma Renaud had died.

The second call came in at 8:30, just after I'd finished passing the news along to Deborah—sleep is precious in this house; you don't wake anyone unless you have to. We now had a date and time for the funeral, and all the "what if" conversations we'd been having over the last few days swung into action.

By late afternoon, I'd dropped two weeks' pay on plane tickets for Deborah to fly up to New Hampshire. Paul would be driving up, and picking up May and her belongings on the way. (In this sense, the timing was perfect: May just finished her 2-year term at YWAM, and would have needed to pack up and return home then anyway.)

It feels good to be doing something, to have a plan in place. I'm still working out what I'm going to be doing Saturday through Tuesday, given that I'll be home with the kids, and, in the absence of the usual kid-watchers, unable to work. There's still things like Fiona's school, choir practice, and piano lessons, but the rest of the time is wide-open, which means that I'll be going nuts unless I figure out a plan, both for the daytime, and when I'm the lone conscious soul in the house. Anyone with kids in the Warsaw area up for a play date? Anyone want to come over for a game night or a movie after the kids are in bed? The more the merrier....

* * *

My little bit of whining here also makes me realize how much I respect I have for the grandmother Deborah whose funeral Deborah is going to. An orphan since a very young age, a widow for some fifty years, she still managed to raise five kids. In her 80s, she was the go-to person in her area if you wanted a nanny to take care of triplets and quadruplets. Sheesh, what kind of wuss am I, to dread a whole weekend unsupported?