What's Going On

Here is the short(ish) version of a long story.

I left on August 15 with all five children, in a fully packed vehicle with a carrier thing on top, hours of audio books and 3 new DVDs.  We arrived at Olivia's college 13.5 hours later.  What a trip!

We spent the night in a hotel, and moved Olivia's things into her dorm room that Saturday morning.  I was greeted with a wonderful surprise and a most unexpected blessing--Olivia's roommate and her mother had moved all of their things (Olivia's too) out of storage and into the dorm room.  It was all there.  Waiting for us to unpack.  I cannot express what a delight that was!  Olivia is in the same dorm room with the same roommate, but they had to move every single thing out of the room for the summer.  We stored most of it in a climate controlled basement storage area of a nearby dorm.

I stayed for 3 more nights there, and spent the time unpacking Olivia, buying her some groceries and a few items from Target, and then, one by one, all of the children except Leah came down with strep throat!  Olivia was first, and her case was the worst, because it was two days after her throat began hurting until she began treatment.  I found a Walgreens walk-in health clinic, and she was seen by the nicest nurse practitioner.  Next was Sam, then Julie, and on the Wednesday we arrived home, Clay.  So far, neither Leah nor I have a sore throat and Jimmy was here at home the whole time working…..I figure that if we were going to get it, we already would have.

Since Olivia was feeling so badly, and since she was contagious, I bought her school books for her and ran all of her errands.  She was beginning to feel somewhat better when we left for home on Tuesday afternoon.  We took her to an Indian restaurant for lunch before we left.  Yum.

We drove halfway, and stopped for the night in a hotel.  Then on Wednesday morning we got on the road early and arrived home about 2:00 PM.

We were so glad to be home, but we are already missing Olivia terribly!

We did school Thursday and Friday, and then Friday afternoon we traveled to Jackson to attend Jimmy's 20th year medical school class reunion.  We met my daddy along the way, and he took the children to my parents' house.  Jimmy and I joined them later Friday night after his reception.
We spent the night, ate lunch with them today, and then came back home this afternoon.  Home again!

We will get back to school next week!  I had budgeted these days for travel when I made my original home school year calendar.  So it's all good.

Except that we miss Olivia.