nichtszusagen

April, 1986. Landstuhl, Germany. Dagny was 8 months old. We'd bought her a dirndl for her Easter dress. Seriously adorable, though the pix of the time (they're in the States, or I'd post some) have steri-strips on her cheeks, because this is also the month when she had surgery to remove the skin tags she'd been born with (she had a relatively mild form of Goldenhar syndrome). Pretty darn stressful to take your 8-month-old in for surgery, and then to have it last for 3 hours instead of the projected 30 minutes because there was more cartilage than expected. Her personality was pretty evident, though, when we were told that the anesthesia would probably make her sleep the rest of the day, and she didn't sleep at all.

This was also the only year we went to church for Easter, the same church where I was an assistant aerobics teacher.

10 years ago:

April 1996. Grafenwöhr Seybothenreuth, Germany. Dagny's 10, Curran's 5, Camden's 18 months. Carl's been in Bosnia for 4 months. I'm a wee bit stressed. We live in a teeny village in northern Bavaria 22 miles from post. I drive in to post twice a week to collect mail and do shopping (teeny village, remember? the only store was a post office/convenience store), and every time we make the trip, Camden throws up in his car seat. Except for the one memorable time he waited until he was in the backpack, on my back, and we were inside the commissary, then he threw up in my hair and down my back. That was fun. On the plus side, Carl being a commander meant he had a phone. I didn't sleep a whole lot, what with the 2-hour phone calls every night.

But the hospital commander's wife was a goddess, and arranged a spouses' trip to Budapest. Overnight bus trip, and we met in the lobby of the Budapest Hilton. O. M. G. Yes, we'd been married for nearly 12 years at this point, but I was literally shaking. We missed the hotel breakfast both mornings, made some interesting videos, though we only got a couple shots of the city.

5 years ago:

April, 2001. San Antonio, Texas. I'm in the middle of the round of doctor's appointments that eventually tell me I've got chronic fatigue syndrome. In April, I think I saw the cardiologist and the neurologist. Maybe the rheumatologist as well. Lots of appointments--it got to be a bit of a blur. In the meanwhile, from the worry and the lack of any inkling of how to handle it, the CFS was the worst it's ever been. Carl gets promoted to lieutenant colonel and 15-year-old Dagny stands in for me because I can't attend. My friend Karen drives down from Dallas, bringing me autographed books because I've announced that I won't be able to make it to TTP this year.

1 year ago:

1 month ago:

Well, Camden finally got his soda-drinking hat (known to most people as a beer-drinking hat, but even though we're in Germany, we don't encourage this for 11-year-olds) at the Auto-Technik museum, and was promptly disillusioned, despite having wanted one for years. A cold and a stomach bug in March plopped me back into a relapse, so I didn't do much last month.

Yesterday:

Tomorrow:

With any luck, I'll be the excessively organized person I try to be whenever Carl's gone, so nothing falls through the cracks. Wish me luck.

In the next minute I am tagging . . .