It's time to catch up again
This last week has been eventful with both good news and bad. First the good news. The fashion-plate baby at the right is Connor Michael Nelson, my grandson, who was born on Sunday, May 1st, at 1:13 pm as the previous post indicates. He and his mother came home from the hospital on Monday evening and they are both doing well. I've posted some short videos of him in the hospital so you can see him enduring his first interactions outside the womb and voicing his displeasure with all of that attention. His lungs and vocal cords seem to work well. Everyone in the family is very happy with his presence and we all rejoice in his current innocence and the long road ahead of him to learning and full participation in life. We'll do what we can to guide him well and to help him learn.

Despite the joy at the Connor's birth, our family also learned that his grandmother, Carole Green, who is my ex-wife as most of you know, has detected a mass in her breast that investigation has found to be cancerous. She is scheduled to have a lumpectomy on May 11th to have that mass removed along with some lymph nodes. This initial surgery may prove to be all that is required, which is our fondest hope of course, but if other treatment is required, she will undergo it too. Just as I ask for your best wishes for Connor as he begins his life, I would also appreciate your prayers and most positive thoughts channeled toward Carole as she begins her course of treatment for the breast cancer.

Just like this post, life is a mixture of joyous good news and worrisome bad news. It is a rose that has beautiful blooms and prickly thorns. It seems you can't have just the blooms without having to also encounter the thorns. So you must just rejoice at "the whole package" and appreciate how wonderful it is, despite the fact that even under the best of circumstances, it is all too brief.

- posted by Perry @ 7:07 AM