Holiday.

Holiday.

Oliver and I leave first thing in the morning for England. We'll be back in early August. Erik will follow us on Sunday. We're going with my family, to visit more of my family and attend my cousin's wedding.

Four bags. Plus a carseat. Plus an umbrella stroller. Plus a Beco carrier. And that's just for Ollie and I. One suitcase is entirely diapers. On that note, tomorrow morning will officially break Ollie's streak of being exclusively cloth diapered. *tiny violins*. It's going to be several days before we arrive at the cottage in the Lake District (with washer! and dryer!), so there's absolutely no way we could deal with cloth in the mean time. Well, of course there's a way, but for the love of pete.

We're staying in Cockermouth, the delightful birth place of William Wordsworth and home to a killer vegetarian restaurant. Cockermouth is just inside of the actual lake-y Lake District, as opposed to the coastal developed parts where I grew up. Not that it's at all far away. But 20 miles is a long 20 miles on those roads.

I'm really looking forward to it. It has been a long, long time since I've taken a vacation without worrying about my work load (or even homework load) when I return, or that my coworkers were discovering my absolute lack of organization in my office files, or maybe someone tapped into my internet history. It's going to be very nice. Very nice.

I can't wait to see Oliver run around in the beautiful wild places, the Peter Rabbit landscapes, the secret river banks, the vast tree-flanked lakes, the vibrant green sloped rocky fells (peppered charmingly with "sheep balls," as we so fondly used to refer to sheep poop). I can't wait to take him to Thornhill to walk down our old dirt road past the abandoned railroad and through the fields to the beck. I remember we used to pick wildflowers and tiptoe past cow poo to try to get the cows to smell our little grubby bouquets (they were rarely interested). Maybe we'll just watch the cows from afar instead. "MMMMM"s, as Ollie knows them.

Sign. I'm going home. Or as the cumbrians would say: As ga'an yam.

Michele.

Michele.

Today, I found out that my friend and former LLS coworker Michele Larson has passed away. I told you about her a while ago, when it was totally unfair that she had developed a secondary cancer, leukemia, as a result of her treatment for her original lymphoma. Since that post, she has had not one, but two additional battles with cancer. Four total. Four. My heart and my stomach ache thinking about the struggles her body knew.

Here is a video of Michele (embedded below), interviewed for a program called "Understanding Cancer."



Maybe in that short clip you might be able to begin to see how beautiful, strong, calm, inspiring, remarkable, and creative she was. She's the kind of person that you would interrupt mid-conversation to tell them how great and cute they are. I had seen this video quite a few months ago when it was first published, and watching it again just now as I posted the video was really hard. Her family members used Michele's email account to send out the details for the services, and a simple "Michele" and this video link were still in her old signature file, along with a quote about faith and impossibleness. That too, was really hard to see.

But, god, you're supposed to be ready for these things, right? When someone is in her fourth battle with something that could very well have killed her the first time around (and almost did), shouldn't you expect her to lose her fight at some point? Shouldn't you be relieved and peaceful that her body is no longer feeling or sourcing her pain? I don't know, I just don't know. All bets are off when you're as young as Michele. All bets are off when you're my friend.

I just sat here for about 10 minutes staring at the screen trying to think of something moving and well-written to write here about Michele, but then it just made me feel so sick to my stomach, like I would be getting some artistic jollies off of her tragedy so I'm just going to leave it alone.

I am so sad. I miss her.

The only two clean things they played with all weekend.

The only two clean things they played with all weekend.

Here's a video Lorien took of Ollie and Lucca playing together on our camping trip this weekend.

At they end, they start signing "squirrel" by the way.