Soffit!

 The weather is getting pretty decent here in Minnesota, and Matt and I got a chance to go out (between a public health nurse meeting and a client meeting!) and start putting up the soffit material on the overhang over the new main entry!

I am very useful as the holding end on the second ladder.

Once we got to the shorter pieces, Matt's all good on his own.

And by the time supper rolled around, he'd gotten the last board up. One small part done.

Leah's track meet

Leah's running on the track team this year (as a senior, having never done it before, but close to 70% of the senior class decided to join track to get one last hurrah together!) and it just happened that the one meet closest to our house also happened to be the most gorgeous day, so we *all* went. (Even Owen showed up at the beginning and overlapped with some of us, though had to leave before Leah ran.)

Krassi does NOT look thrilled at this moment, but in general he was having a pretty good time and enjoyed the cheering. Mira is next to him, shaded from the sun by the bag we have her suction machine in. Bobbi was there only because Matt had to run mid-way to pick her up from work, but she stayed in the van...

Leah's by no means a track star, but she did run a personal best in the 800 meter with us all there cheering her on! 

Getting the whole crew out for any event is daunting, but days like this make it so worth while, and I know it means a lot to Leah to have the whole family there. :)

A bunch of us with my cousin, who's the coach for one of the other teams. (Dad and Bobbi hadn't arrived yet, and Mira and Krassi are still behind the wall.)

Easter afternoon

 While Krassimir's favorite place to spend his time is the floor, it did make me laugh to see 50 % of the children all laying on the living room floor Easter afternoon! Leah's napping, Rinnah's dozing, Gloria's reading a book, and Ebs just thinks he might as well join the pile!

God's provision

 So, every February our church has a retreat at our church camp in Iowa. It's a very well-attended event, with often roughly a hundred people from our church attending! Getting half of the congregation together for 48 straight hours is quite a feat!

We've been so grateful to the camp for letting us use the staff dining room as our bedroom. The dining hall itself is the central gathering place for the weekend, obviously for meals three times a day, but all of our worship and teaching sessions are also held there, as well as various board games, a silent auction, the Saturday night variety show, and the constant coming and going of people. So, for us to be able to set up "camp" in this central location makes a trip like this possible (whereas having to hike across gravel drives in February cold weather with Grandma, Mira (whose temperature tanks any time you take her outside), Krassimir, Bobbi, AND Reuben would be enough to keep us home!) Even Owen joins us for the weekend (though he stays with the single guys, and Leah and the girls stay in their own room in the main sleeping lodge as well.)

We really enjoy these concentrated times to spend with our favorite people, both in conversation *and* in playing together. Problem was Saturday morning *this* year, while playing "Awesome Ball" in the gym...Matt twisted his foot, and a visit to the tiny ER half an hour away revealed that he broke his foot!!

Yikes!!

(Note that last year one of the other dads ruptured his Achilles playing Awesome Ball. Fun.)

But Matt was in good company this year, as it wasn't just the old guys breaking stuff; Gavin (who helped on the garage last fall), broke* his foot, too, playing volleyball later in the day! *turns out it may not have been a break, but he also left the weekend on crutches.

My favorite photo from the weekend

ANYWAY, what does this have to do with God's provision? Well, I can tell you that as we were driving home (after many of the other men helping us to load all of our things and people into Thunder) Leah and I were both very grateful that, after the snow, we were driving up into a covered garage and that there was a ramp we could use to push people up into the house and that there was a flush entry to get from the new addition into the rest of the house! The timing of the completion of the functional part of the garage and of Matt's injury could not have coordinated at a better time. 

Rinnah and Mira

 Rinnah's preferred location for practicing her cello is right next to Mira's bed. Yes, Mira's deaf, but those deep, rich tones are produced by a deep, rich vibration, and her hope is that Mira can *feel* the music.

Teen girls

So, Mira's doing her Mira thing, and decided she was ready for another trip downtown to the hospital. Her respiratory state was rough enough that Matt brough Leah along to sit by Mira and suction as necessary for the drive. It was good for our first daughter, having recently been accepted to the Nursing School at the U to add just a little bit more hands-on experience in an emergency department to her long list of medical experiences throughout her life. Leah was three when Reuben was diagnosed with epilepsy. Medical settings are very familiar and comfortable places for her. Apparently very comfortable, as you see how she's zonked out with her head and shoulders in Mira's chair! 😆

So, not surprisingly, Mira got admitted to the hospital a few days before Christmas. So we ended up with another Christmas photo sans Mira. It happens. What you can't see in this photo is that Leah doesn't feel good. She made it through the end of the semester at school, and then went downhill. Sick with a cough, no energy, a fever here and there...

And, believe it or not (I still can't quite believe it!) Leah herself ended up hospitalized! After her own trip to the ER with Dad and being sent home with antibiotics for pneumonia, she kept getting worse and worse. (Is it a good thing or not that we had a pulse-oximeter handy here at home that was readily available since Mira was in the hospital? We were using it for spot checks. And her fever wasn't going away and her O2 sats were slowly getting worse...) So back to the ER and she got admitted on the same day that Mira came home! Seriously - these big girls of ours!

After two nights in the hospital on IV antibiotics of a different variety, Leah was well enough to come back home and spend the rest of her winter break from school recovering.

We have an interesting health insurance situation. Being self-employed, we do not have any employer through whom to get health coverage, so for close to twenty years, we've just purchased our own directly from the insurance company. We have a high deductible plan, and, with now four family members who qualify for Medical Assistance as a secondary insurance due to their disabilities, we can easily meet our deductible in a few weeks with medical expenses that are covered by the secondary, and we have a running joke around here that no one else is allowed to get sick or need a doctor for the first six weeks of the year. Because after six weeks, the rest of us can go and it's covered 100% because our family deductible has already been met! But then LEAH had to go and be hospitalized on January 2nd!!! Seriously, girl! Haven't you been paying attention to the family rules?? 😁

But in true seriousness, what an amazing thing it is to be able to take her to the hospital. To be able to get her the medicine she needs to kick this pneumonia that she was NOT kicking on her own. That even though we have to pay the high deductible for her, that we CAN do that and we get to keep both of these girls for a while longer! 

Bobbi's hair

 Guess who's been growing out her lovely, dark, curly hair to be long enough to donate? BOBBI! My crazy girl who, eight years ago in the hotel in Bulgaria was asking me, via google translate, how soon she could get a SHORT hair cut when we got to the US! :) She's been wearing it all tucked up in back so it doesn't look that long, but it is!

This photo is from back in mid November...

Her hair is so thick - she's been only growing out the top, keeping the bottom half shaved/trimmed, but there was still enough to pull off four nice braids' worth of hair when we went in to get her hair cut today!

Pretty neat to be able to grow hair that beautiful and to be able to give it away for someone else to enjoy!