Woodstone Prairie

I haven’t had time to blog, there’s been just too much going on here…

Some families spread their events…. graduations, weddings, etc… out over a period of years.

But in our family we save time and just do everything at once!

K’s (dd#3) graduation party was last Saturday and it was a wonderful party… We had mostly just family over, but Dh’s family is so big that the house was full to overflowing!

After lots of congratulations, conversation, and eating (way too much), we all ended up outside for some wild and mostly rule-less volleyball…. Players routinely switched teams, we were seldom sure whose serve it was so whoever had the ball just served it, we implemented the “once bounce rule” since so few of us could hit the ball before it bounced (at times the game looked more like four square then volleyball!), and we had to be very careful not to hit the hall too hard because just a few feet past the out of bounds line was the steep slope down into the dry lake bed. (This was not a problem for me however, since I would had to have actually hit the ball before risking hitting it down the hill… There are benefits to being hopeless at any activity requiring eye/hand coordination!) Several times the game had to stop while someone scrambled down the hill to get the ball. It was a wild game, but fun… and we were all worn out afterwards.

 So… that was Saturday.

On Sunday, Dh went down to our oldest daughter’s house to babysit so she and J (fiance) could go out for dinner. While they were gone, she called here… asking what I was doing this weekend. I told her I was busy and that’s when she sprung the news that she and J had decided to get married sooner rather than later.

Sooner… as in next week!

Oh, and they aren’t going to get married here in Colorado… they’re going to  Las Vegas… could we come too?

Needless to say we said yes… only later thinking about the logistics of getting us all there.

The past week has been a blur…

See, E’s not planning a typical quick Las Vegas wedding…  She’s planning a traditional wedding, with all the bells and whistles, and she’s putting it all together in one week!

I’ve booked our flight, found someone to housesit and take care of the animals, gone with E to shop for her dress, and shopped for wedding clothes for M and R.

It doesn’t sound like much, I know… but while I was doing those things I was also patching up Blaze (who evidently got tangled up in a cattle panel I had stored behind the barn, and ended up with cuts on three legs and his chest!), nursing a sick dog, having an intake done with our county mental health organization for M, and then taking him for a second opinion consult appointment with one of their pdocs. Today I’m driving 90 miles north to help K, (dd#3) move into a new apartment…

It’s been a wild week.

Adding to the excitement… the decrease in haldol seems to have finally caught up with M. (Or probably more accurately, the decrease combined with the loss of structure and added excitement of getting ready for the wedding has caught up with him.) He’s destabilized… making everything we are doing so much harder. He’s not handling car drives at all well, and is having almost daily meltdowns… during some of them he’s disconnecting and becoming paranoid.

I’m not sure just how I’m going to get M through this trip to Las Vegas (probably lots of prayer and medication!), but it’s going to happen…

So anyway… things are incredibly busy here right now but it’s mostly a good kind of busy, it’s so amazing to be celebrating these milestones with our “big girls”.

Here’s the happy couple…

And their three beautiful children…