Generations

Eliza and Luke with (from left) Great Uncle Mark, Great Nana, Great Papa, and Great Aunt Barbara. One for the album...

Eliza update 7/22

Dear family and friends,

We've been very busy having a leisurely summer around here! Taking full advantage of Sam's light summer schedule, we have in the last month spent ten days in Syracuse with our extended families and a long weekend in Atlanta with more of my family. For the former, we're grateful to have had a very different experience from last summer's visit, when Eliza ended up in the hospital with an infection at her feeding tube site; this trip, we were able to thoroughly enjoy the company of all our Syracuse family, Luke being especially thrilled to have had lots and lots of cousin-time, of course. And for the latter trip we're especially thankful that Luke (and Eliza) had a chance to spend some quality time with not only a great-aunt and great-uncle, but GREAT-GRANDPARENTS, too! (How many kids can say that?)

When we haven't been travelling, we've kept busy staying cool: Luke and I have spent as much time as possible underwater, as he has become a much more confident swimmer daily, it seems; and Sam and Eliza have taken advantage of the quiet, air conditioned house for reading and/or sleeping (sometimes both at once, in Sam's case!). If he's not underwater, Luke is usually reading, too. There's been plenty of soccer, bike riding, trampolining, baseball, swinging, scootering, etc, etc, etc...not to mention repainting, rearranging furniture...ahhh, summer.

As for Eliza, she's had a relatively long stretch of hard, sleepless nights, at one point going from Tuesday night to Sunday morning without anything more than an occasional catnap. As usual, these difficulties are unexplained, though a recent increase in one of her medications seems to be helping her get back to a more "normal" pattern. As always, these sleep difficulties bring significant frustrations (not to mention exhaustion) for us. I especially find myself struggling regularly to accept my inability to help Eliza in any significant way...but I continue to be grateful for the reminder to depend on God as Eliza so clearly does.

As most of you who know me well certainly know, I'm not usually one to talk of mystical things with much comfort, but recently, for the second time since Eliza was born, I was given a clear vision of God's intimate, personal care for Eliza: in the early morning hours after a particularly long, hard night of futile attempts to help Eliza sleep, I awoke to see what I thought was Sam, standing next to Eliza's crib (which is in our bedroom), stroking her hair, as he so often does when there seems to be nothing else to do to comfort her. As my vision (literal and figurative) cleared, though, I realized it wasn't Sam standing next to the crib, but Jesus. (Interestingly, in my vision, he looked a lot like he does in _The Shack_, a novel by William P. Young, which I had read recently--and if you've read it, you'll know what I mean). That momentary, imaginary glimpse of the very real, very present, very constant care that God provides for Eliza, even when we
can't, was such a gift to me: what is impossible for me is not impossible for God. When I can't stay up all night with her again and again, when I can't make her arms stop flailing so she can sleep, when I can't prevent seizure after seizure from waking her up, when I have to leave her alone in her crib, she's not alone. She's not without comfort or without someone to hover over her and watch her every move, every breath. For that matter, neither is Luke, asleep all alone all the way across the hall in his very big-boy loft bed. Thank God.

"From one man he made every nation of men, that they should inhabit the whole earth; and he determined the times set for them and the exact places where they should live. God did this so that men would seek him and perhaps reach out for him and find him, though he is not far from each one of us. For in him we live and move and have our being." Acts 17:26-28

"Our being": yours, mine, Eliza's.

Love,
Daniele for the dixie jax

P.S. Family photo taken by Sam's brother in Syracuse above. No, Eliza is not sleeping through being dangled over the side of a bridge; she just doesn't like to open her eyes in the sun!