A few things going on this week. Wednesday was the last FCC Kids of the year, so my Wednesday nights are free again. We had a carnival of sorts for the finale, so I was mostly watching things and eating pizza. Putting up the bounce house is much easier than taking it down and putting it away…..I’ve sold the trampoline. None of the kids have really used it much in a long time, so it was just taking up space. Natalie would lie out in the sun on it but nobody jumped on it any more. So, I put an ad on Craigslist a few days ago and got several responses pretty quickly. Maybe I undervalued it; the guy who bought it paid the $75 without a counteroffer. But I mostly wanted it gone. He said he had a 12 year old and a 6 year old who are really excited to have a trampoline, so I’m glad he will have it and it’s out of my backyard…..Trey and I ran the National Day of Prayer 5k in Columbia City (Julie from work was organizing it) on Saturday. There were not a whole lot of runners, maybe 30 or so, so Trey was the overall winner and I came in 5th with a time of 27:22. I also won my age group, but I don’t think there were a whole lot of 45-49 year old men in the race…..after the race, we all went to see “Avengers: Endgame.” I have never seen such a crowd at the theater here in Warsaw. I don’t think there was an empty seat. Quite a show, but time travel always invites plot holes…..after the movie, Alex was at work, and Natalie was in her room, so I took advantage of the space to paint the ceiling. I’d decided that I had done enough plastering the dips and valleys and I just wanted it done. It went surprisingly easily actually, and I got the whole living room/dining room/entryway ceiling painted a bright white (instead of the dull yellowish off-white it always has been) in just a couple hours. It needs another coat, though…..

Easter Sunday. We didn’t do a whole lot for Easter, but I did go visit Mom. She was lying in her bed again, awake, but not responsive to me. She just looked around a bit, didn’t say anything. I sat there talking to her for an hour or so but there was no recognition evident. Every time, it gets worse, and I wonder how much longer she’ll be here…..after I got home from FW we all went out to dinner with Mary Jane to the new Texas Road House. It was ok, but expensive and nothing that special, so I doubt we’ll be there much….. Friday Beth and Missy went up to Michigan for a birthday party for Julia.

Rough week overall. Nat was at the behavioral health center all week until Friday. The good news was the doctors thought she was doing pretty well, although she self-identifies with her diagnosis quite a bit. We visited a few times during the week or called, and we had a family session on Wednesday with the social worker. We had been told she would be there 6-10 days but in the end she was out in 5, with some meds changes. She called me Friday afternoon and told me they told her she could go home, but neither Beth nor I had heard that yet so we wondered if she’d got her story straight. It’s going to be tough to get her caught up again in school, though. We’re going to have to get with the teachers….Friday I took the van in to Ab & Tom’s due to the roaring noise it made all the way to NC and back. Turns out that a rear wheel hub had gone bad, and the brakes on the other side were grinding. So I got both fixed for about $600….Beth and I did have some kid-free time on Saturday, because Nat went to spend the night at her sister’s, Alex was at a sleepover birthday party, and Missy went to a youth group event at the Harrison’s church. She wasn’t back until 9, so it was like a date evening….Sunday we all went out to see “Shazam” which everyone liked a lot, although Alex and Missy got heated about whether it was better than “Captain Marvel.” Only a couple weeks until “Avengers: Endgame…”

We have returned from our spring break vacation, and must rank this one among the not so greats. We went to Beaufort, North Carolina at Judy's suggestion, but it kinda turned into a long way to go for what it was. Anyway. We left last Saturday, having lined up Mary Jane to feed the cats and rabbit, and drove as far as Asheville. We got there maybe around 8:00 after a good 10 hour drive and stayed in a motel there. Sunday we went to tour the Biltmore mansion. We weren't sure we were actually going to do that, because we hadn't realized at first how crazy expensive it was, but we'd already made the motel reservations and figured that since we were going to Asheville and had a spare day to spend there we might as well go. The mansion is incredible beautiful and huge, and we can see why the Vanderbilts referred to the Breakers as their "cottage" after seeing it. There wasn't much else to do though, after 2 or 3 hours at the mansion so we wound up chilling in the motel room rather than find some other expensive tourist trap thing to do. But then I did get to see MSU beat Duke to make the final four. Wrecked my bracket, though. We headed out the next morning, made it in about 8 more hours (would have been 7, but somehow we wasted an hour looking for a Chick-fil-a that turned out to be inside the student union at UNC). Tuesday was pretty limited; I went for a run in the morning and didn't make it home before the rain started, and the rain kept up all day. We went to the NC Nautical Museum in town but that was largely it, besides walking around town in the evening after the rain had finally stopped. Wednesday was nicer but cold, and we visited the NC Aquarium and later on Fort Macon (another cool old civil war-era fort with lots to explore, unfortunately a lot of it was also still closed since the hurricane last fall hit it pretty hard). Alex also ripped his pants wide open around lunchtime so we had to do some shopping. Thursday was a beautiful day. Beth and Judy and the girls went out walking around the town and shopping most of the morning and afternoon, Alex stayed at the house and I went walking all around town geocaching. Not very successfully, though. I walked a couple miles overall and didn't find anything, until the phone app was pointing me to the middle of someone's yard so I went back to the house and got the GPS. Then I managed to find a couple that had eluded me. At lunchtime we met the girls at a restaurant but Natalie was feeling panicky so I walked her home. Alex and I did some more geocaching after lunch but the final stage of a multi was almost 2 miles from the penultimate stage, so we went home and I got the last stage on a bike. Later on that evening Nat told Beth and me that she had been feeling suicidal again, so we struggled with what to do about that for a while, but ultimately there wasn't much we could do: either head home days early, or take her to a hospital in NC and have her there indefinitely 900 miles from home. So, in the end we kept the meds hidden and keep a close watch on her. Friday we were going to go on boat excursion out to one of the barrier islands to go wild horse watching and shelling (both girls were really looking forward to this), but the weather kept threatening to get bad so the boats weren't running. They kept asking us to check the weather and call back later to see if we could go, but in the end the captain said he wasn't going to go and they finally definitively cancelled it. So instead we headed out to Morehead City (which has an open ocean beach) to do some shelling there. The beach was nice looking but deserted, and as we got there the rain started up. It was drizzling pretty hard by the time we left. The shelling wasn't great either, but there were some small ones and some cool fragments. And going to the beach was Natalie's favorite part of the whole vacation. In the interest of time and money, we decided to drive straight home Saturday instead of going halfway and staying overnight. That made for a long day, around 15 hours, but we made it. And we also stopped in Beckley WV at Tudor's Biscuit World to pick up a dozen biscuits for small group tonight. We didn't go to church today (since we got in so late last night) and it became apparent that Natalie needed to get some care so we checked her in at Michiana Behavioral Health in Plymouth (don't want to go back to Parkview after her meds got so messed up last time). We're expecting her to be there for 6-10 days. In other news tonight we had small group, including the biscuits we got on the road trip. They were a huge hit, especially with Gary. He couldn't believe what he was seeing. He was so excited when he saw that the big biscuit box we brought actually had biscuits in it.