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Can it really be the last day of October?  I don’t want to see it go.  I have barely posted this month, besides my faithful yarn along posts, which is probably more interesting to me than to most of my readers.  Dear reader, I’m sorry!

My little corner of the world has been spinning rather wildly, and this month has been busy.  The first two weeks of it, my older brother was in town with his son, and I tried to squeeze in as much time with them as I could.  The kids and I have been outside as much as we can be.  They’ve started this new rhythm since the weather has cooled and the mosquitoes have died down, running to play outside as soon as they are done breakfast until Phoebe and I start school.  They are out most of the rest of the day if we are home.  Phoebe and Noah and I have been reading Island of the Blue Dolphins for our chapter book, which has inspired much of their play.  Coincidentally, someone gave us a tee-pee also, so Phoebe has been busy playing that she is Karana gathering abalones and watching out for the Aleuts.

I just can’t get enough of the color and the beauty of this season.  During a walk one day to our neighborhood park, Phoebe exclaimed: “the leaves are like a quilt!”  I’m so thankful for the perspective of a child!  School has been going so well with Phoebe, I really love doing it.  It is taking up a decent amount of my time and energy, thus my lack of blogging this month.   We really love Phoebe’s co-op as well, the community we are all finding there, and I’m always amazed at how much she is learning and retaining.  She has started a bit of music theory and learning to play a tin whistle, which she loves.  Brandon and I are beginning to talk about Christimas/birthday gifts for them, as their birthdays are quickly approaching.  I’m knitting each of them a sweater, which I really think I will feasibly have done in time.  We’ve talked about giving each of them a musical instrument as well for their birthdays.  Noah is dying for a drum, Phoebe has wanted a violin for some time.  But we are still undecided.

We continue to hope for more improvement in Phoebe’s health, her diet, her growth, her eating habits.  This month has been hard for me in that department.  I realize my frailty, my weariness, my weakness.  The pastor at our church yesterday was speaking about running the race (of faith) with endurance, and that part of what gives us strength for the race is the hope of Heaven.  I was thinking about how my heart hurts and gets weary over this journey with Phoebe, and realized yes, this is part of it.  This is not something that seems to be resolving easily with her, or quickly, and we wear out.  We long for an end in sight, something we can fix our eyes on and run toward.  Yet this is more ambiguous, uncertain.  Our medical team is beginning to recommend more testing.  She will go to Brenner  Children’s Hospital in Wake Forest next month to see a pediatric specialist in Celiacs.  I’m hopeful that we will have more help from there, steps we can take, things we can try, something.

We can’t trick-or-treat and don’t want to deal with having to rifle through the kids candy and pull out what isn’t gluten-free.  I’ve just planned some simple and fun activities for us here at home, and found candy and chocolate that the kids can have from a local health store.  We carved our pumpkin over the weekend and maybe will let the kids dress up and just walk around our quiet, mostly-old-folks neighborhood.

Anyway, so thats a bit of what our October was like, the best month of the year, and why I have been pretty absent in the blogosphere.  I want to not miss these days, these moments.  I want to capture it all, to write it down, to hang onto the glory of these days, each falling like golden leaves, slipping to the ground.  Now, behind us, underfoot, all stretched out like a mosaic, like a quilt.