Feeling good

Josh is feeling good. And that makes me and the rest of the family feel good. Nice to have him very positive and chipper and raring to go. But we sometimes realize that it's not all like it was before. He can't do all that he used to do...yet.

This past weekend, with Ethan and Kate home sick (again! twice in two weeks), Josh, Julia and I went out to help with the city of Murphy's Trash Off in which groups spend time picking up trash in the community. We picked a strip of land surrounding the railroad and set off with 3 large garbage sacks each, bright orange safety vests, and pick-up-sticks (PVC pipe with a screw in the bottom).



We started out spanning the area on one side of the railroad tracks in three parallel lines. We quickly found the pick-up-sticks difficult to use because you had to take the extra step to get the trash off the end of the stick (versus a grabber that you could just drop the contents into the trash bag). So, ditching those, we proceeded with lots of bending over and stooping. Within about 30 minutes, my back started to hurt, and as a relatively healthy and in-shape person, I was getting quite tired.

And clearly, Josh found that he had reached his limit, too. He was feeling dizzy and his legs (particularly his hamstrings) were quite weak. He sat for a while and watched and then went to the van to rest and wait for us to finish.



As good as Josh is feeling, he's still limited in what he can do physically. Oftentimes it's easy to forget this with how good he looks and acts.

Side note 1: Part way through our clean up, Julia found a treasure. Wrapped in a deteriorated sweater, she found a wallet full of credit cards, gift cards, $4 in cash, etc., along with an XM radio unit and some other electronic device. We took these to the police station and the reporting officer said that he had taken the call about the stolen wallet nearly a year ago. As we drove home, we watched him drive right to the woman's house (in Murphy) to deliver the find. We drove by on the way back home and waved. Nice good deed done, Julia!

Side note 2: Ethan's sickness has turned out to be strep throat - so bad that he can't bend his neck more than a couple of inches in any direction because of swollen lymph nodes. Fun, fun. But nothing that some antibiotics shouldn't be able to knock out.