Thank God she is home! It’s not that we cannot handle things here without her, it’s that Ben can’t. Having a 2 year old give you 100% all the time makes it hard to get anything done. But when Amanda is home he concentrates about 85% upon her!

All kidding aside, they miss each other, and once together they just tune out the world! It is really fun to see too. It is a real treat to see that kind of devotion…..even when you are not included!

Tonight (and then tomorrow) the Fall indoor lacrosse leagues finish up. Scotty played tonight in the tournament. They won the first game, but lost the second. And after the girls play tomorrow night we will get to take a break! There will be no more lacrosse for at least a few weeks!!

Anyway, it is good to have things back to at least OUR NORMAL. I am sure Ben will be sleeping with us…..with his head snuggled next to his mom and his feet on me. That’s his normal sleeping position. But I will love it and am just thankful for the opportunity. It’s just good to all be home. I sleep a lot better knowing we are all together!

Goodnight my friends and God Bless!

Tommy+

WOW…it is cold, icy, and windy here……not the kind of weather you want to fly in, but that’s exactly what Amanda did this morning. She flew to Pennsylvania. The wind storm is following her, along with the cold and the ice. She will fly back in it tomorrow.

In the meantime, the kids and I have full reign here in the house. We are not making a mess or anything like that, but we are having blast. We spent some time tonight trying to get Ben out of “cartoon mode,” particualrly “Toy Story.” He cannot walk two feet without cowboy boots on, and everything he puts in his hand, and I mean everything, he holds over his head and shouts “to infinity and beyond!” It was a real attention getter tonight at the restaurant with his crayons. And, it will make a great story when he is an adult.

Amanda will be home tomorrow and things will return to normal here. We are all looking forward to it too, especially Ben. After all, we are mainly his audience……but his mom is just his!

Goodnight my friends and God Bless! Stay warm!!

Tommy+

Amanda leaves fro Pennsylvania for a couple of days for work in the morning, but in her wake she leaves a path of incredible Christmas decoration evidence. There are now snowmen looking at me from every part of the house, which I find rather creepy, and other strange Kansas-based traditions that have me worried. After all, most deranged criminal-types come from there, and it quite possibly has to do with snowmen and other oddities. One can never be too careful.

If there were just a few things it would be no big deal. I would just start handing them to Ben for him to accidentally break on purpose while she is gone. But there must 100 different things, and they are multiplying. We now even have a “snowman tree” where apparently the worst of our snowmen are hung. I cannot think of any other reason to have such a thing. I am just happy she seems to be pleased with me!

Anyway the decorating, though still in mid-stream, is much farther along than last night and may even be done by the weekend. I hope so too. The sooner it is done the longer I have until we take it down. Frosty needs to get back up in the attic!

Goodnight my friends and God Bless.

Tommy+

Yep, tonight we engaged in an annual family tradition. Scott and I moved furniture and the kids helped get the Christmas stuff out of the attic, and now Steph and Amanda are setting up the Christmas tree and decorate it. Of course Scott, Ben, and I will be allowed to put on some obligatory ornaments, though we are expecting, as always that they will be relocated later then to their proper place on the tree.

The good part of it all is that the boys now can enjoy themselves not doing the “decorating” while the girls get their time doing just that….decorating! To me it is a win win, and for it I am thankful.

Of course after all the decorations are put out our boy time will change again. It will be time to store the boxes and containers until we bring them back out to store this stuff all over again….in just a few short weeks. It is an endless cycle and gives just a little bit of credibility to those guys who leave the Christmas lights on their houses all year long.

Anyway, I am thankful for the system we do have here. I do not mind the “man”ual labor…..it is far better than the decorating. And in all honesty, Steph and Amanda don’t just enjoy it, but they do a great job. It’s really a fun night upon which we all contribute that produces a great result. We all feel very blessed!

Anyway, I am going to go try and put on an ornament incorrectly so I get kicked out of the area. It works every time, and for that I am thankful as well.

Goodnight my friends and God Bless!

Tommy+

Tonight we launched our second Fellowship, Holy Spirit in Brownsburg. Fellowships are smaller gatherings that we work to develop into full missions. But planting a Fellowship allows us to get started earlier rather than waiting for all the things we need to see before planting a mission. Regardless of the details, it was a great day! I am ever so pleased to have been a part!

But it is now a little after 9:00 pm and I am exhausted, so with that great news I will call it a night (and a day)! I know when I have had enough, and that confession I could have made an hour ago!

I hope your day was just as blessed as mine.

So a quick goodnight to you all my friends and God Bless! Thanks for checking in!

Tommy+

Yep, she made it. Stephanie turned 18 and it has been an eventful day. Her sleepover ended with breakfast this morning. Amanda had worked a long time on a quilt she was making Stephanie, and she gave it to her at the breakfast. It was a pretty great way to start the day.

Then, Stephanie, Scott, and I went to see my mom in the nursing home. She was incredibly depressed. It was the afternoon, but she was still in bed crying. She has Alzheimer’s and needs to be there, but she is certainly with it enough to know she doesn’t want to be. Her birthday was yesterday and she turned 70. She did not know it was her birthday and it depressed her even more to know she was 70. Visiting her is almost always hard and full of guilt. I always feel especially sorry for Stephanie. It’s always quite the contrast from celebrating her birthday. But the kids do great, and understand. I just hope they never have to deal with something like that with anyone else.

We ended the afternoon with a birthday dinner at Red Robin. There were 8 of us there and we enjoyed our time together. But now is just her time. Next year she will be away at school and there is perhaps the possibility that every year from now on we may just be making a call to her for the day.

But I cannot help but think what a wonderful daughter I have and how I have enjoyed the last 19 December fifths. Life changes and this is a big one. I am blessed to have had the opportunity to be in her life and she in mine. What a wonderful day!

Goodnight my friends and God Bless.

Tommy+

Yep, tomorrow my daughter turns 18, and though I am oh so very proud of her, it is killing me. It is but yet another marker of my ever-changing life, and though I am quite ready for Ben to be potty-trained, I am not too sure about this one! She is technically an adult at midnight!

Of course tonight at lacrosse didn’t help things. We were playing Carmel and one of our captains had a diamond stud through the side of her nose! I asked her about it. All the players loved it, and Stephanie asked, “Daddy, do you think I should get one?” And I said, just like I always do, “You cannot do anything like that at all until you are 18!” It’s actually a law here in Indiana too! Katie, the one who had the diamond just laughed and said, “that’s exactly what my mom said!” Of course she just turned 18 herself!

So the rest of that conversation went downhill. They teasingly said they were going to get someones ID and get it done before midnight…..but I doubted that very much. I still have quite a bit of pull since I can still bench them.

Anyway, tomorrow is the big day and I am certain I will have a lot to report….I mean if I survive the night!

Keep me in your prayers. My daughter will confess that I am the real life version of the character that Steve Martin played in “The Father of the Bride.” I hope to make it that far!

Goodnight my friends and God Bless.

Tommy+

There’s a ride in one of the theme parks I went to as a kid called “Disaster Transport.” Somehow I feel as if I have been riding it all night too.

We have a room downstairs that needs to be drywalled and floored. I am pretty handy most days, and wanted to get a lot of it done this evening, seeing as Stephanie will be having some friends over to stay the night tomorrow night for her birthday (it’s on Saturday). We have the drywall and the flooring in the finished part of the basement though, in the same part they will all be sleeping tomorrow.

Not a hard job, eh? No, not usually. BUT tonight it was! I nicked a pipe in a wall, which though irritating, is really no big deal. I have all the equipment and knowledge to cut pipe, solder, and repair any trouble I can get into. But the nick was too close to the ceiling, so I had to rip out some of that…yep, that I had already finished! And THEN, to make matters all the worse, our main shut off for the water would not turn the supply all the way off. I had to go to the meter out by the street, just to get the lines clear to cut.

Oh sure, it gets worse! We had done so much work at Christ the King, that all my tools and supplies, like the plumbing ones, were back in their right place in the garage. I am glad that they were here, because they had not been here that long, BUT finding all the right parts and tools was pretty stressful. The good news is that the pipes are repaired, the room is all dried up (mostly) and I still have my religion.

The bad news is that I am way behind, my hands are bleeding, and I now have a ceiling to do too. It could be worse…..but certainly not too much!

But in truth, I love figuring things out, and when I need to think on my feet like tonight, I am happy to see I still can. Tomorrow will certainly be a challenge, but I will be up to it. No complaining, just looking ahead……all to finish a room that we will do nothing but store stuff in! Go figure!

Goodnight my friends and God Bless!

Tommy+

Yep, today represents my 500th post to this blog. It seems to me as if I just started, but 500 posts is a pretty good clip, particularly since there have been times I struggled to post.

For those of you who don’t know, I started this a few years ago to comment on quite a few different things, but mostly I wanted to talk about the happenings in the Church around the US and the world. April of 2008 however changed everything. My personal world was suddenly thrown into chaos as I worked to understand how a guy in great shape like I was could have a stroke, and more than that, how I could adjust to the effects of it.

My blog, this blog, became my therapy…..and in a very real sense it still is. At the beginning of my recovery my wife would read and help me edit before we would post. I often would just stare at the screen looking for words and trying to remember thoughts, and when I did get them, they often did not make too much sense. Paragraphs would be full of repeated words and sentences, and for a time seemed more of a testament to frustration than therapy.

What I could clearly see, amidst all the confusion, was that it may have been frustrating, but it was certainly not failure. If I were to do well, that was where my work was to be. And in some sense it is still often a barometer of how I am doing. My mind often still reels, and confusion still comes. Of course people tell me all the time they get confused too…..but in truth, and I am speaking quite sincerely here, the mind I lived with in March of 2008 and before is far different than the one that I deal with now. And the stark contrast is consuming.

What I do confess though is that it has been a gift from God. Does it bother me??? Sure it does, but the struggle I deal with has taken me deeper into life than I could have ever imagined. And though I stress to find my thoughts at times, I indeed have discovered that my life, my discovered thoughts and detours, and even my faith are far more meaningful, insightful, and rewarding than they were before. (yes, I know to not end a sentence with a preposition, but that is the way I talk)

Anyway, 500 with many more to go. Time flies when you are having fun, or when you are terminally confused…..I suppose I will happily admit to being a bit of both!

Goodnight my friends and God Bless!

Tommy+

Though I am clearly on the mend, occasionally my damaged brain catches up with me, and today was such a day. I was the Celebrant at a gathering of The Order of St. Luke this afternoon in Indianapolis. I was to do a sermon, celebrate the Eucharist, and then give a short teaching at the lunch that followed. And as that old Meatloaf song goes…..”two out of three ain’t bad!”

I am sure recovering from strep had a bit to do with it, but after getting through the sermon with that finish line in sight, I found myself lost and talking in circles much of the time. Deacon Dan, our eternal optimist, said it was not all that bad….but I bet I probably could have made more sense speaking Russian….and I don’t know a word of it!

Ironically, the topic I chose for my teaching was the idea of making sure you are healthy (in all aspects – mentally, physically, spiritually) as a foundation to your ministry of healing. If I were a more persuasive teacher I suppose I would have told myself “you have strep throat and are exhausted….maybe you should stay in bed.” But the truth is I live in a house where no one listens to me anyway, so I though, “why should I?” And the rest of course is history.

But the good news is that my day is done, and in a few short minutes I will be resting in my bed! It has been a doozy though. I hope to have a better time of things tomorrow.

Goodnight my friends and God Bless. Thanks for checking in.

Tommy+