#ShannonStrong2020

This weekend was great! Austin and Katie were in town and Austin spent it with us while Katie was hanging out with her fam across the lake. It was so good to have him home and with Shannon. It’s been a hard road for all three of them (for all of us), and having time together is such a blessing. This was the first time Austin has been with Shannon since the car crash. Reunions these days are a little rough, but we are tackling this as a family and I can see so many ways that we are becoming stronger and closer because of it.  We also celebrated another birthday this weekend. When you have 8 kids (plus some spouses) and 5 grandkids, there are a lot of birthdays to squeeze into the crazy.  In other news- no therapies for Shannon this week. So she’s living the luxury life. Well- as luxury as it can be when you live at our house. Sleeping in until noon.....watching movies all day......and night. People making your food. ‘Farm boy, fetch me that pitcher’ ‘as you wish.....’.  Sh...

Today is four months. Four months since the car crash. It's hard to believe. Even less believable because it seems so far away, and just yesterday at the same time. I'm not sure how that works. This past weekend was eventful. We all went to the birthday party of our oldest grandson. Super fun! He's a one-man-show. If you take the energy of the entire circus and smash it all into one small human-you've got HIM. Daring feats, acrobatics, animals, juggling, clowns, *IT ALL*. Plus, he travels. On his balance bike. And now, on Aunt Shannon's super cool lap that is attached to an awesome wheelchair with a motor. So TRAVELING CIRCUS. And if that's not enough, he has two twin brother side kicks, and they try to steal the show. So there is nothing boring going on at that house. After that- **I** went on an adventure! Rachael (the great) and Lancer decided to kick me out of the house. It was THE BEST! Lancer and I checked into a local hotel where I proceeded to tak...

Something fantastic happened today! (July 7) Something so fantastic that we were told about it over two weeks ago. On that fateful day, over two weeks ago, I was on a call inquiring about Shannon's shower chair- or lack thereof. At the end of the call I got some news. SUCH news, that I had to tell Shannon about it right away. She was minding her own art business in the dining room, I walked in and said "SHANNON!!! ARE YOU SITTING DOWN??!!!" She gave me an 'I'm in a wheelchair, so clearly that was a rhetorical question', look. (It was.) She then turned off what I was saying next. CLICK. Not listening. I said "Shannon, I was just talking to the wheelchair vendor about your shower chair and guess what they told me!!!!!" She responded automatically, with mock enthusiasm in her monotone voice: "WHAT did they tell you, MOM!?" I said "your wheelchair won't be done in 2-3 months, it will be done in 2-3 WEEKS!" She looked up to giv...

There’s a lot of good stuff to share, so I’ll get right to it! Shannon got something in the mail she’s always wanted (just not for legitimate reasons). There are a couple of perks to having a Spinal Cord Injury. This is one of them:   And Rachael decided it needed eyes....so.... We went on an adventure one evening to the lake! Scott and I took Shannon down and we just sat on the shore and people watched for a while. There were SO MANY PEOPLE on the water for a Wednesday night. We watched the ranger give some tickets, some salty guy taking social distancing to the extreme (he wasn’t happy we were sitting on the bank where he needed to pull out his kayak- I guess he needed more than 20 feet of space) and a lady and her daughter trying and almost failing to load her giant two person kayak into her truck. (First time out on her own and her husband ‘said I can’t do it alone- so thanks for helping me load it up’) Your secret is safe with me.  ...