Elena 
It’s been another interesting week. This is the last week of the swimming season which is a happy/sad event around our household. The kids are happy that swim practices are done, but sad to be leaving their swimming friends for a while. I am happy to not be carting them to the pool all the time, but sad that they won’t have a physical activity to burn off all that energy unless we finally get a break in this winter weather!
Calvin swims in the Jr. Championships tomorrow and I’m hoping he will have a good showing. I know he is doing the 200 IM, but I forget his other events. Since the swim club has “Mandatory Voluneerism,” Mr. Pete and I both are working the meet. What a way to spend a Saturday!
Unfortunately Sam is playing in a piano event tomorrow too. They call it the Ribbon Festival and basically each student appears in front of a judge with their music, and plays the piece from memory. Then Judge then adjudicates their playing. The nice thing about it is every participant gets a ribbon and I’ve been told the color, size, i.e. asthetic appeal of the ribbon concurs with how many years one has participated in the festival. Kind of an incentive to keep playing and keep coming back! So that will be a new experience. He will be spending the night at grandma’s tonight and she is going to take him to the festival which is actually working out well as she is the pianist in the family, so she will have a fuller appreciation of the judge’s comments.
These teen years are the time when you start to see if all of your seed sowing in your youngster has taken any root. My oldest has this little phone friend/girl friend. To Mr. Pete’s mind she is the perfect girlfriend because she lives 45 minutes away by car!! But they talk on the phone quite a bit which necessitated my changing phone plans. Anyway, she called to speak with Calvin this week because she was upset. Apparently a friend of hers killed herself. Wow, that would be hard to handle as an adult but at 15 years of age that’s really tough. I was very proud of how Calvin handled himself. He definitely is the “strong silent” type. He basically listened but then he shared his Catholic faith. He told his girlfriend that the church doesn’t teach any more that suicides automatically are damned to hell, and that in His mercy, if there is an instant of sorrow for the act, God can use that for salvation. And of course as Catholic we believe that our prayers can help the dead people we love in purgatory to achieve heaven. His friend found that to be very comforting and I was just astonished that Calvin remembered it! I guess not everything I say to him goes unheard!
On the homeschool front, I think my almost-7-year-old is a sight reader. He doesn’t appear to have many phonics skills at all, but once he learns a sight word he’s all set. He also can’t read a list of words, but he can open a beginning book and read that. The words have to be on a context… sigh… it’s always something.
My beauitful niece had her first fender bender which had her upset this week. Her mom and I got to tell her about the time I drove a car full of teenagers when I was 16 years old, and got into a big, big crash!!! Totalled my mom’s car, and a boy in the back seat bumped heads with my sister and got a concussion. My sister was fine. (I always loved that part -proving that hard heads do indeed run in the family.) Anyway my niece loved that story and I think it made her feel better about her own experience.
I’m always a bit wary of the medical system, although that’s how I make my living. My mom, a retired schoolteacher, has primo health insurance, so it always seems to me that her doctors are taking advantage of that to send her for tests and procedures. She’s been feeling down and tired since my dad died, so of course they drew blood, sent her for a bone scan and a bone marrow biopsy. Her bone scan was clean, her cystoscopy was fine, her mammogram was unchanged, so Mr. Pete and I were thinking she was going to be just fine and thought she should just skip the bone marrow biopsy. But she had it, and it came back positive for multiple myeloma. She is in the early stages and asymptomatic. The oncologist gave her antidepressants (duh) but nothing else and mom didn’t ask her any questions. Thank God for the internet! I’m going to be doing some research and going to my mom’s next appointment with her with a notebook full of questions!!
One thing that gives me some comfort, is that I am producing my own little stem cell maker right now! I definitely want to see if my umbilical cord stem cells could help my mom out! Maybe little Rosie can help her grandma out! That would be neat.
In my blogging life, I’m glad to see I’m averaging over 100 readers a day. Mr. Pete can’t believe it. I’m grateful.
I know a lot of readers started here when I was discussing early induction of pregnancy. I’m still interested in that issue among others and I’ll probably bring articles and things here to my blog as I find them on the topic. I will not be discussing this on the blog where the topic originated. I don’t have the time, energy or inclination. The articles I posted were documented and well thought out and representative of the Catholic Position on the matter. And as I re-read them I found them pretty straightforward and informational. I deliberately tried to keep the emotion out of it and present the facts ma’am, just the facts. Yet just putting those up brought the ire out in folks during a very emotional situation.
So I re-read my note about the Titus 2 woman and I think that’s where I’m going to stand on that one. I’ve lost a baby too, I’m a mother, I’ve explored the Catholic teaching and presented it with resources. Folks know where I live and how to reach me. I’m leaving it at that!
So I’m off to brace for the weekend, and figure out what the lifespan of a plasma cell!
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