Hook 'em, Horns!

Okay, I confess, I have been woefully remiss in keeping up this blog. Partly that's because I've been doing a fairly admirable job of living in denial and finding other things to fill up my thoughts so that I don't dwell on the fact that Aidan will be leaving home in four months!

What has filled my time? Well, my fictional blog has taken up a lot of it. Pain and suffering have taken up some. And just the general day-to-day stuff we all get busy with when we're living our lives.

Of course, the reminders that college is coming have been there, sometimes taking over our lives so strongly that I just think, "Can we please just get this over with and go on with life???"

We recently came through the Making a Decision wars. Don't ask me to go into details, it's been pretty rugged, especially once the financial aid offers came back from both U Chicago and UT and were both spectacularly lame. The lack of a free-ride offer or any other remotely decent help freaked Bjorn out, so we had a week of panicked scrambling while he tried to see if there were other schools Aidan could apply to, preferably that had National Merit scholarships available (since Aidan qualifies). It got complicated and nasty.

Blessedly, God prevailed and guided Aidan to an answer -- and we are now the proud parents of a future University of Texas Longhorn!! Still have no idea how we'll pay for it all, but I am definitely trusting God to make a way.

We have SOOOOOO much relief since that decision! Now I can relax a bit knowing Aidan won't be way off in the Midwest, but just down the road close enough to come home on a whim if he wants to. On his own, and yet not so far off that he can't get pretty immediate help if he needs it. And he's really excited, too. He'll be in the Liberal Arts Honors College -- hoping to get into one of their two dorms. He's been calculating how many hours he can test out of (at one point he said he thought he could test out of 15 semester hours!).

He does need to be working a little harder at getting private scholarships. That's not easy, as so many of them have qualfiers he doesn't fit (things like having to have attended a certain middle school, or be majoring in specific subjects, or whatever). We fall into the all-too-common crack of making too much money to qualify for most financial aid, and yet we really don't have the amount the F. Aid people think we do to spend on school (did they not look at our bills and expenses?). Aidan is willing to take on loans (I can feel Dave Ramsey shuddering now), but we're hoping to keep that kind of thing at a minimum. And, of course, he's willing to get a job to help out.

So now we can concentrate on just enjoying graduation and this special, heartwrenching-yet-exciting transition in all our lives!

Okay, that's not entirely true. First I'll be concentrating on having neck surgery, a three-level fusion operation that will hopefully eradicate -- or at least greatly reduce -- the pain I've been having. I've got all kinds of stuff going on in my neck -- degenerative disk disease, bone spurs, compromised spinal cord, kyphosis (instead of being shaped like a shallow backwards "C" my neck is almost straight, with actually a tiny bit of forward curve) -- and it's causing a lot of pain, so the doc is going to remove three disks, replace them with bone grafts to open up the space in there for my spinal cord, screw on some stabilizing plates and remove the bone spur that is likely to cause some issues in the near future. It may happen as early as tomorrow (I'm supposed to find out in a half hour or so), or it may not be until next Friday (April 15), but either way, I am praying for God's timing. I had to postpone it once (it was supposed to be April 8) because I had a bout of diverticulitis, of all things!

If I do have to postpone it again, I will just put it off until after graduation -- I don't want to still be in Recent Recovery mode, I want to be able to enjoy it. I will have to wear a neck brace for up to six months, but I don't mind so much having that on during the ceremony, I just want to not be feeling rotten and have no energy. At Aidan's school, it being super small (11 kids in his graduating class!), the parents take part in the ceremony, so it's very important to me to be able to do that. This is why I really hope I can get the surgery done this week -- that gives me over a month to get over the immediate post-recover stuff, plus I won't have to fear getting one of the Please Kill Me Now killer "neck-graines" I can get. (Had one this week, lasted for three days, still have some residual pain from it, so, yeah, DO NOT want that to be a possibility for graduation week!)

So ... now we have our direction. God has been teaching me a lot about trusting for each day alone, not trying to get everything all worried-up and solved for tomorrow. Mostly I'm learning. Sometimes I lapse, but He's going to get me through all of this, I have faith in that!

Onward to the Empty Nest ...