Moving On...

At Drumheller-Royal Tyrell Dinosaur Museum

Fun at Calaway Park

A bunch of us after mom's service

Mom's coworkers did a cancer relay in her honor

It's so hard to move on. To leave Regina is going to be difficult, because this is the last trip that we'll ever make up here where mom was here too, at least for part of it. We came and she was here, tho not doing well, but in leaving I know that every other trip up here will be different. Already we've seen how different it is up here with mom gone, in so many ways life is just not as easy as it was when mom was here with us. She would organize our days, make plans for fun things to do with the kids, watch them at home so the adult kids could go to dinner and a movie, sit and drink coffee with us in the mornings even while entertaining a couple grandbabies at the same time. Even more than that we miss how she reminded us of what was important in life, of relationships and people, instead of upset over little differences and struggles we had. 5 grown kids, with 3 spouses and a boyfriend, all together, makes for lots of challenges. Then add in 7 grandbabies and life is just that much more challenging, but she always made sure it worked just fine when we were all together. It's been somewhat more stressful this time without her, but we're figuring things out. One of the things she said to me recently was that she'd put enough of herself into each of us that we'd know just what she would say in a situation, even when she isn't here with us.

We're leaving to go home on Monday morning. We'll drive to the Ozarks and stay a couple nights there, then leave on Friday and go to my in-laws place for the weekend. We have a lot of stuff there that we need to go through and determine what needs to be stored and what needs to be kept with us. Sunday sometime we'll go to Tom and Connie's place to "move in," which is where we'll be staying until we find a house. You can pray for that to happen soon, because while it's been good up here and will be good with Pflederers, our family needs our own place to live. We still haven't seen much that we've really liked online, so we're praying that we can come up with something soon.

I'll leave with a saying that each of us Bailey men has taken as a part of us, by Saint Julien of Norwich. "All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well." Mom loved this quote and gave it to each of us when cancer first entered our lives, and we know she's well again now...