The last ten days have been incidental (in my vocabulary at the moment, that means, full of incident) in our countdown to boarding our plane.
For example: E developed a cyst on his chest which was not responding to some fairly heavy-duty antibiotics, so on Thursday 15 April E and H found themselves in the A&E department of the SAN; then were whisked upstairs to a room in the Children’s Ward for the next two days. E had a minor procedure and two days of I.V. antibiotics. H’s phone died completely and she slept on a bed made of rocks covered in blue plastic. Don’t forget (we certainly can’t) that this was the weekend we had set aside to move the rest of our furniture out of our house prior to painters coming in… so R spent two days torn between: moving; working; visiting E and H, and not sleeping. Yup, it’s been a wee bit busy of late.
Once discharged, we had a Bootes family farewell on the Saturday night, a church goodbye on the Sunday, and then six lovely days with R’s mum. A Graham family farewell was a nice dinner out on Wednesday – spreading the hardest goodbyes out over a couple of days.
In the midst of all this we’ve been: cleaning, visiting, packing and re-packing our suitcases and enjoying some perfect Sydney weather.
We jumped on the plane on Saturday afternoon, not really certain of how we would go on the flight – but thankful to have a short (eight and a half hour) flight to Singapore and two rest days before the final (thirteen hour) flight to the UK.
On the whole, the flight was good: a bassinette for E to sleep in (which he eventually did); a family in the same row with an 11 month-old, so we were all in the same boat together; enough patience to let E do his thing (for an almost interminable amount of time); films we hadn’t seen and wanted to and a blanket of prayer from back home that covered us far more securely than any in-flight blanket could.
Thank you for all your thoughts and prayers – we greatly appreciate them.
allthingstendingtowardtheeternal 