It's Been a Week!
This week Jordan and I have been at the National Institute of Health in Bethesda, Maryland. This is now an annual trip for us, thankfully, as it used to be a quarterly visit. This visit is everything you’d expect a medical trip to be. Appointments from 8 am to 3pm everyday, endless needless, poking, prodding and tests. A lot of discussing Jordan’s condition and talking about all the ways it’s progressing.
It’s a difficult week filled with lots of emotions, but if you know us, you know there is no way this week is all bad. It’s also filled with a fun travel day, yummy coffees, ordering Amazon items we can’t get in Canada, visiting with people we haven’t seen in a year and meeting new families. There’s also time for bingo, checking Jordan’s mailbox daily, arts and crafts, field trips, sightseeing (when we’re lucky), yummy takeout we don’t usually get and quality time with just Jordan and I.
Last week as we prepared for this trip, I woke up from a dream where not only did my brakes not work and I couldn’t stop my van, but I also had my front tooth just fall out!
Have you ever had these dreams? As far as google tells me, these two dreams mean a sense of loss, or control. They can indicate an increase in anxiety and stress. I’ve dreamn’t these dreams many times in my life but never together in the same dream….. I guess my subconscious was really feeling some strong feelings leading up to this trip.
It’s really not surprising these emotions come up, there have been some major life events that we’ve experienced in this place.
We were here when Jordan had her Gene therapy, we lived here away from the boys, family and friends for 4 months alone just the 2 of us, the airline lost our passports here just as Covid shut the world down, and the hardest one; my mom passed while I was here, 4000 miles away.
It’s impossible and unrealistic to not remember and feel it all leading up to this trip. I wish I had some magic solution that I could share with you and then do myself, but life just isn’t like that, is it? We carry the past with us for a reason, it teaches us and reminds us of how far we’ve come. What we can do though is take one of the very valuable lessons Jordan teaches me everyday, and that’s to be in the moment. To fully surrender to what is currently happening, and to let the moments of joy linger and not rush through them. To take a couple extra minutes to sit in the enjoyment of that first sip of Coffee and to sit with that person who is making you laugh for 5 more minutes, because little by little those new joyful moments when given enough focus will start to create new memories.
If you’d like to see us infusing a little more joy into this trip check out this weeks videos here:
