Nothing to do with William!

Elijah and William being goofy during dinner.

It has been a very hard week. I hesitate to write this in fear that my friend Stebbs will think that it has to do with her son William being with us for some of the week while she and her hubby Ryan were attending an award ceremony in Germany. William came over around dinner time three days this week, spent the night, and then went to school and another friend's house every morning.

But truly. When you already have three kids, and two of them are boys, William's age, another kid, especially one as good as William, is really nothing. William was fantastic. Very easy. Totally go-with-the-flow-guy. Okay so yes, he got a stomach bug one evening that involved some "buggies in his tummy" as William calls them. (And some vomit, as I call it.) But otherwise, truly, William was a very low end of the issues in our house.

So where did the hardness come in?

It started with each of the kids getting sick. It came and went fast. A little here. A little there. One would be better. One would be worse. Another would be getting it. JB was finishing up a nasty two week cold that had travelled the Base here, and now I was starting to get it.

But as that finished up, and I got the same cold, I then found myself in the midst a two-day long migraine, and JB got some sort of new stomach bug. He couldn't stand up without feeling the need to throw-up. He couldn't work on Thursday or Friday. Very unusual for him.

We just felt totally and utterly beat down. The second night of my migraine, we actually had to choose. I pulled the short straw and had to take care of the kids since he couldn't stand up and I could. Ugh!

Add to that JB had to spend the night at the Clinic with a very sick patient, and we are starting the process to move across the world again, and well, we just weren't feeling at the top of our game.

Weary. Exhausted. Overwhelmed.

And yet in the midst of it, the Lord provides reminders, continual reminders, of his love for us. I am always amazed of how He is present in the little things.

A few examples:

• I had a friend skip Mass to take my boys to the park so that I could take a nap while Abigail was napping. I didn't ask her to. She just said she knew that she was where she was supposed to be. Amen to that.
• A sweet couple came over and made dinner and helped me get the kids to bed on the evening JB had to stay at the Clinic overnight.
• I had another friend let the boys play at her house one morning, so that, yet again, I could try to sleep off that migraine. She even took pictures and videos to share with me.
• I had numerous other friends email or call and just check in on us. Ask us what we needed. How could they help?
• The boys went over to a our back neighbor's fun backyard playland to give me some time to regroup in the house.
• Three different people brought us meals. One because JB was sick -- soup! One because the Lord told her to. And another because we had an extra child who wasn't feeling good (poor William) and she thought I could use an afternoon free of preparing a meal!
• Another woman I don't know that well, saw on the Incirlik Yardsale page that I was looking for transformers to handle our move to the Azores. (These are used in houses which don't have 110 voltage.) She offered to give me a bunch. When I asked for how much she just said, "Pay it forward."

God is so present in the little things. Thank you dear friends for being God's hands on Earth.