I have been meaning to say this for awhile, but I simply haven’t gotten around to it yet, Adriana. I love Republic of Heaven. It is a fabulous album. I left reviews on CD Baby and Amazon. After much listening (and I do mean much) I think that my favorites are Pentecost and Huntington, but I do really like all of them. However, they lyrics and the arrangement of Pentecost is so beautiful and intimate that it usually makes me tear up. Honestly. Thank you for creating it. Thank you Aunt Kathy for gifting it to us.

On a different note, over the weekend all the members of the Co-op House, except the lady we have been having problems with, met (twice) to hash out the best way to get her out, but in such a way that we could still see each at say the grocery store and not avoid each other. This lady, we’ll call her Jean, has been getting progressively worse and having personal run-ins with another mom in the group. So we decided to just put it all in front of her that her philosophy was ultimately different than everyone else’s and the personal issues going on in the background have made the atmosphere strained and several families have considered dropping out. Our co-chair’s task was to call her on Sunday night before our Monday morning weekly meeting and let her know that we would be discussing these issues directly relating to Jean and wanted to give her a heads up to prepare. At that point Jean said that she thought it would be better if she didn’t go and they just dropped out altogether. She did however have to get the last word in and ask that we make notes in the meeting of issues so that she could work on them even though she never has these problems with any of the many other groups that she is in and that the Co-op needs to learn how to communicate better and figure out how we will avoid this problem in the future. The co-chair couldn’t think of anything to say other than, you would have been screened out if we had a screening process at that point rather than us being in the position of starting up and opening membership to anyone in our current homeschool group. She didn’t say that because she felt it would make the situation better in any way, but was a little surprised that Jean still felt the need to get the last say. We all felt really re-energized at our meeting yesterday and ready to make a kind of fresh start.

On yet a different note, Maddy fell in the basement (concrete floor of course) on Friday night and broke off half of one of her front teeth. After taking some Tylenol and getting over the shock of it actually happening, she was really okay. She ate normally most of the weekend and didn’t take any Tylenol after the first dose. We got into the dentist yesterday and found that the break had very narrowly missed the nerve and she has a fracture about 1/8″ of an inch above the break that she believes is in the enamel only, so Maddy will go in for bonding on Wednesday and we will pray for the best and hopefully the nerve will stay alive despite the trauma. We would love to avoid the discomfort and cost of a root canal and crown in the future. We would also love Maddy to pay more attention when she is awake!

Finally, we are getting so much more rain than normal. All the rivers are at flood stage and there is a civil emergency warning for debris flows (i.e. landslides, mudslides, rockslides). We are not in much danger as our house wouldn’t flood, it is mostly roads and riverside houses and very low lying areas in danger and of course mudslides would be on hilly areas. It is just too much water. We are getting tired of it. We are used to winter rains but not like we have been getting. Last night it was very stormy and the fear of trees falling increases tremendously when the soil is so saturated.

Oh, and please pray for our community. We have had an outbreak of meningococal. It is not terribly contagious but it is so fast moving and deadly. Two babies got it in our local area initially, then they were hospitalized in time and are expected to recover fully, then a man got it who was related to them. He got a very mild case. However, an 18 year old boy who had ties to those three was feeling a little under the weather on Thursday and then started feeling better and all his friends saw him at the local skate shop Thursday night and he was feeling fine. His mom tried to wake him at 8 am on Friday for school and she couldn’t rouse him. He was dead by the time the paramedics came. The really scary thing with this boy is that he didn’t show any signs of the purple rash that is the final stage of meningococal. They couldn’t even say for sure that’s what it was until after an autopsy and blood test. We have some friends that are connected to him so they are of course very worried and very sad and really everybody is shocked that a young, healthy boy could be taken so quickly. His family has had a rough year. His older brother was on a mission to Sumatra last year when the tsunami hit the area and he escaped. I’m so sorry for them.