Okay so I feel off the face of the earth… completely… AGAIN.

To be honest I wasn’t going to write again. But I felt guilty. Katia reads faithfully and always drops me a line when I disappear like this. I expect there are other friends out there who silently wondered where in the world I disappeared to as well. All is fine. I was just a little overwhelmed and a lot tired and didn’t feel like writing. Life continues to trundle along. The kids are good and are growing like all good kids. Daniel and I are still happily married. Really things are boringly banal. You want details of boringly banal? Let’s start with Kamryn – cause she’s the easiest! She’s trundling along just fine, coming out of her shell and really quite a delightful little kid. Those of you who have had the pleasure of meeting Kamryn would laugh at the coming out of her shell part but in all seriousness this has been a worry. Kamryn is ebullient, funny and friendly but she is horribly insecure. She doesn’t want to stand out in ANY way. She's happy as long as she’s in the background and she works very hard to stay in the background. As you might expect this is a bit of a problem at school where it took the teacher two months to get Kamryn to smile and much longer to get her to talk. We’ve worked so hard at boosting her self-esteem and her confidence levels and trying to show her that being different is not only common but good! Slowly we’re making progress. Piano has really helped there – much to my shock because as an adult I still have a horrible time performing where others might hear me. Even hidden away inside a band I get horrible performance anxiety. Kamryn flounces onto the stage and plays without any visible nervousness whatsoever. I will keep encouraging and hope that she stays that calm for years to come. This January she took up hockey. Her choice. She’s a late starter (because she begged and begged and it took her parents forever to cave). Other kid’s her age have been in hockey initiation programs for two years now. They skate twice a week and are leaps and bounds ahead of where she is. So we have some catch-up to do. But she is working hard and catching up well (IMHO). We make sure to get out to the rink as a family once a week and we also have her in a class that meets once a week. The class ranges in ages from 6 – 12 so her skills probably are a bit more advanced than they seem as she’s being compared to kids who are in some cases years older than her. We will see what starting late really means when she has tryouts in September for a real team. She will be assigned to either A, B, or C division depending on her skills. Daniel is pretty certain she will be a C. I’m hoping that she makes B – not because I want her to be the next Hailey Wickenhauser (I was actually hoping she would hate it and quit – it’s REALLY expensive) but rather because I want her to be challenged a little bit and being in the middle division would contribute to that. C catches the dregs, everyone from the kid who isn’t all that good (Kamryn) to the kid who put skates on for the first time a week ago and has problems even standing on the ice. As I mentioned, Kamryn isn’t aggressive, on a team where she isn’t being pushed she won’t advance. No matter, wherever she ends up she seems to love it and is always excited to strap on the equipment. The only problem we’re having with her is it seems her health. She has missed so much school this year. Nothing serious just a little thing here and a little thing there. Eventually it adds up. Our latest problem has me doing the should we call the doctor or not dance. She had a virus (flu virus maybe?) about three weeks ago. High temp (102/103). Off school for the week. It resolved and she returned to school. By Friday her temp was up again and she was complaining of her ear hurting. I dragged her in to an urgent care clinic – likely prematurely. The doctor showed me how her ear canal was red and inflamed but cautioned that he didn’t think this was they type of infection that needed to be treated with antibiotics. He gave me a script but suggested I didn’t fill it. I didn’t and just like he predicted by Tuesday her temp was again normal and her ear was on the mend. On Saturday, her temp was up again (just at the 100 mark). So it’s been a month of her running alternately a high fever or a low-grade temp. She’s muddling through but I worry that there may be something underlying all this that is making her so susceptible to EVERYTHING going. This isn’t helped much by the fact that her little brother is NEVER ill. He’s yet to miss a day of school in this, his first year of school, and first year of exposure to real germs. Boggles the mind. Okay more on us to come … as the spirit (and thus the cursor) moves.