The past few weeks have been busy with good things.

• Mercy is closer to walking
• Taylor did a retreat last night
• went to Waco, TX to see Grandma Sue
• Looking forward to Mexico in less than 2 weeks

Mercy is (almost) walking

Its wild how two siblings can be so incredibly different. Rosie, at 1 year old, was all smiles and excited about people. Some could argue that she still is that way. Mercy is a bit more reserved. If you are not mom, dad, or her sister- she might have an eye of suspicion about you until she warms up.
She is almost 13 months, and just this week started walking with her toy walker. (Rosie was walking at about 11 months?). Here is a quick video from yesterday, she is so proud of herself!

Visit to Grandma Sue’s house

Grandma Sue has always been healthy. She grew up in the countryside, has always been active, and never had many health issues (at least, no health issues I have been made aware of).
Almost three years ago she moved to Texas after her third husband died. She was living in Myrtle Beach at the time, and decided that she didn’t have any reason to stay there, so she looked at her options: Move to Greensboro to be closer to our family, move to MO to be closer with Sherry, or move to Waco to be closer to Margie. She opted for the third choice since Margie is a hospice nurse, and now that Grandma Sue is 88, that kinda of thing is important.
Earlier this year, Grandma Sue had a big fall. It wasn’t noticed until Sherry called her one morning, and did not get a response from her usual daily check-ins. So, Sherry reached out to Margie, and told her something wasn’t right, she needed to go check on Grandma. Margie rushed over, and saw the most horrible site: Grandma slipped in the bathroom, hit her head, and there was blood everywhere. In the fall, she also suffered from a broken femur.
The past several months have been in rehab, learning to walk and manage around the house again.
After getting mostly better from that incident, she had a stroke that affected the right side of her body, and this is where I stepped up to make the trip to visit her. Not sure of what to expect, I found her fully capable and in great spirits.
My job at Levvel is remote, so I found a direct flight from Greensboro, and visited from lunchtime on Monday until lunchtime on Thursday.
During the trip, my mom had the idea to get a video of Grandma Sue sharing some of her life story. So I did: I prepared by buying a cheap tripod for my phone, and found a set of questions from a website that is all about this kind of thing. I am not a great film maker, and the video starts and stops at the wrong places, but here is the final result:

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What else?

Also, I passed my AWS certificate. This is a useful certificate stating that I know how to build web applications using Amazon’s web services (or, the Amazon cloud).

Taylor stayed the night st St. Francis retreat last night and is taking the day off of work today to do a personal retreat (along with a few ladies from her Bible study at work).

In less than 3 weeks, Taylor and I will be going to Mexico! We are beyond excited, as this will be our longest trip since our honeymoon. This is our delayed, 10 year anniversary trip- because our real 10 year anniversary trip was less than ideal: it was in the midst of a Covid lockdown, Taylor was VERY pregnant with Mercy, and we went to Blowing Rock for only 2 days.

We will be going to Mexico with two other couples- my best friends and their wives, who Taylor sees regularly.