Monday, June 1 - Kelsey and Hunter pulled off a wedding, even though Coronavirus had messed with their plans off and on for weeks! They were still able to have the wedding outside at Cherry Glade, and the reception at their barn. It turned out to be a really beautiful day!
Putting up the archway just a few hours before the wedding! There was work up until the last minute! (The pillars were saved from Rich and Dort's old porch.)
The bride getting her hair done....
And the flower girls getting HER hair and nails done...
Born exactly 20 years apart to the day!
I tried to catch Dad singing in his bass voice. I should have recorded on the first verse when he knew all the words! 😆
Ben did the vows and pronouncement part. Hunter did a really awesome speech about the symbolism they used in their wedding.
Kelsey took a second to figure out which hand to put Hunter's ring on. Funny thing is that when Rich and Dort got married, Dort put the ring on Rich's wrong hand.😆
Grandma is the best at tying bows. :) This picture reminds me of a picture I have of Mom zipping up MY wedding dress.
Still hard to believe this barn got transformed in just 3 days!
Abby stood by the door and watched Kelsey and Hunter's first dance and the daddy-daughter dance VERY carefully!
I think Abby really wanted to dance, but there weren't enough people dancing to make her comfortable enough to get on the dance floor.
Funny story... when they first started dancing, everyone had to talk loudly over the music. Someone asked Dad if he wasn't going to get on the dance floor, and he said (very loudly) just as the music stopped so everyone heard, "I'm not going to make a fool out of myself!" 😂
In June, we FINALLY met in person for church.... we just kept it in our backyard! It could get a little toasty toward the end of the morning, but it was doable, and so good to be together again!
Doing communion as families...
Carrie and I were twinsies!
As of the beginning of June, I officially stepped down as the Foundatins & Essentials director at CC!! I packed up my van with all the CC supplies to take to the new director, Julie. I totally took out the backseats and the kids had to hold things. There was SO MUCH STUFF... I don't know how that all fit in my house!
Rough day... I got a call one day from a home health nurse who had stopped in my neighbor Jean's house. Jean had fallen and cut a huge gash in her thumb. She needed someone to take her to urgent care. So I sat at urgent care for 2.5 hours while they stitched Jean up!
I had just taken Jean home when I got a call from Holly that my Dad had been in an accident (got his legs caught under a moving silage wagon) and was being flown to the hospital. 😩 (More about that below.)
The kids and I worked on an art tutorial from YouTube:
Wes and Joyce were getting rid of this painting, so I showed up at Ben's office with it. :)
We went to a graduation party in a friend's backyard. This little girl, Aurora, took a BIG liking to Abby!
We finished out bathroom! Mike Zieber had to put the top on this vanity for us because it involved cutting into the wall a bit, and he fixed our "rocking" toilet for us... but the rest was us!
Before:
After
Before:
After:
We went to a community worship/prayer time in memory of George Floyd, an African-American man unfairly killed by the police man arresting him.
We finally were able to have a "field day" for CC! It was actually just an evening picnic, waterslide, and water balloons. It was so fun to be around so many of them again!
They said the pavement was nice and warm. 😆
Another art project, this time with just Abby and I:
We took a quick 24-hour trip to Greer to see the Buchers. The Ziebers came too! It was so fun!
Isaac turned 3 earlier that week, so we had a little cake and ice cream for him:
On the wall in the kitchen, a bunch of cards were taped up to help with the timeline of movie that the Bucher's housemate Scotland is writing. 😂
The property has a REALLY great wooded area where the Bucher's set up a camping spot, treehouse, etc. Lots of trails and fun stuff back there! Micah, however, rode his bike through a blackberry patch and really scraped up his legs.😬
Karl asked us to bring the Nord (keyboard) with us so he could play it again. Of course, everyone else had to bring their guitars then! And Lindsey played her really pretty low whistle.
Mom sent some of these pictures from the hospital. Because of Coronavirus, she was the only one allowed in the hospital with him, and she could only be there from 10 am-6 pm. Poor Dad was there for a week and got SO BORED.
The story of what happened: Dad was helping haul loads of grass silage on June 9 (exactly a week after we got back from Maryland) when a full silage wagon started rolling. He tried to stop it by turning the tongue and was knocked down. His legs acted as a wedge and he stopped that full wagon which drug him about three feet. Davis saw the whole thing. He got in a tractor, backed it up, hooked up the wagon, and unpinned grandpa. Then he called his dad.
Amazingly, there were no broken bones, just very severe bruising/internal bleeding in his legs. For several days, they couldn't get Dad's oxygen to regulate (probably just because of shock/trauma to the body) and he ended up in the ICU for a bit. We had a tiny scare where they thought he might need emergency open-heart surgery, but it turns out what they thought they saw on an ultrasound was not actually what they thought it was, so that was cleared! They said his heart actually looks good!
After a little over a week, he got to come home, BUT his first evening home, Kenton and Davis stopped in to say hi, and when they woke Dad up, they realized something wasn't right... he was slurring speech, his face was drooping, his left side wasn't working right. SO another ambulance trip to the hospital MUCH to Dad's frustration! Turns out, he had a small stroke, probably because of a blood clot from the accident. He only had to stay in the hospital two days (STILL too long in Dad's estimation!) By early July, all the physical signs of the stroke seem to be mostly resolved (all feeling back on his left side, no more slurred/drawn out speech, or funny mannerisms, etc.) He still required in-home therapy for several weeks, more to help him with his injured legs and regaining balance, etc.
Other stuff from June:
We found out from our adoption agency that, while the "matching committee" actually met in Haiti, they gave the two little boys we were soft-matched with to a different family. :( So we continue to wait! Abby is sure that means she will get a sister after all. Our agency worker said that orphanages in Haiti are having a really hard time getting paperwork done for the kids who need adopted (because of COVID/last year's rioting, court closings, etc.)... especially for sibling pairs, they age out of our range (up to 5 years old) before they get their paperwork done. So if we get a referral anytime soon, it would more likely be for just one child. We have "won the award" for the longest-waiting family our agency has ever seen! 😩
