Hi y’all! This is our family’s update from South Carolina. Has anyone else heard that bad things happen in threes? Well, if that’s true, we should be good for another little while. First, our bike tires were stolen (the front ones that are easy to take off–we locked our bikes up in our stairwell like they told us to but didn’t have enough chain to lock the tires). Then, Richard faints during class and gets taken by ambulance to the ER where they didn’t find anything at all. It was an insurance mess for me because we hadn’t received any information about our new coverage down here in South Carolina. Then, today when he was going to the hospital to pick up his blood test results, he gets rear-ended! He’s okay, but our car’s trunk is in pretty bad shape. So we’re figuring out how our car insurance works with car troubles, too. That hits just about all types–renter’s, medical, and auto. :-) Thank goodness for insurance! So we’ve had interesting times lately.

Of course, that doesn’t include the time a couple weeks ago when Lenora was here visiting (we had lots of fun checking out all the sites here in Charleston!), and we hadn’t gotten an oil change for too long, and hadn’t filled up with oil either. I found out that our car has some kind of automatic shutdown mechanism when the oil runs out. Smart engineers! Unfortunately, I found that out while on the freeway. Amazing blessings: traffic was stop-and-go anyway; I was able, thanks to Lenora’s muscles, to get to the shoulder pretty quickly; I had some extra oil in the trunk (we’d bought it over six months ago); we were off again in 10 minutes, which was very good because Samuel wouldn’t have lasted very long in a hot car. We made it home and to get an oil change the next morning. Yeah!!

However, lest you think that everything that happens ’round here is awful and scary, let me assure you that it’s not. Samuel is growing so fast, and he’s loving to kick anything and everything his foot comes in contact with (including, but not limited to, mommy, daddy, little rubber duckies in the bathtub, and air). He’s also started reaching out for things and loves to stare at necklaces, pictures, and reflections of amazingly cute babies in mirrors. I sometimes have let him sleep on my chest--it's one of the surest ways to make sure he gets a nap, and comes with the added bonus of my getting a nap too. Lately, though, he's been more and more interested in looking around than in going to sleep. Yesterday when I laid down and put him on my chest, he kept twisting his neck around and looking straight up at me and giving me this big old smile!! It was so stinkin' cute! I kept telling him he needed to go to sleep, but he somehow knew there was no way I could get mad at him.

Richard is doing wonderfully well at the nuclear school, with great grades on every test so far–they have one or two every week. And I’m just kicking along, trying to keep ants out of our kitchen and my baby boy on a schedule. Life is good, especially when we’re all safe. :-)