Womens retreat was awesome - and Carla is home!

This past weekend - our church held it's annual Women's Retreat at the Circle Lake Retreat in Pinehurst Texas - beautiful place!!! It was amazing and God showed up! The speakers were incredible, the place was magnificent and the food was AWESOME (of course, I could be biased since my parents were the cooks!)....LOL. 2.5 days of relaxing (ok - not much relaxing - more like slumber parties!) and having great services. It was awesome - every church should do a ladies retreat! We even saw a lady get up out of her wheel chair!!!!!!! AWESOME! God is good.

Carla was discharged from the hospital last Saturday - August 22nd. She spent the night with my sister Paulette and then my sister Deniese, picked her up and brought her to my house - where she will stay for about a month. She is very weak - unable to stay by herself until she is back up and in full swing. She is still very anemic and they have her on a bunch of steroids right now trying to get her liver and her blood back to functioning properly. She has been diagnosed with rare blood disorder and they are working to get her back up and running (so to speak). She will be seeing these doctors for at least the next two years and they try to get her body back to normal. Please pray for her as she is very uncomfortable with the medicines and doesn't want any side effects. She is very swollen due to the steroids and her liver and spleen are also still trying to recover. She is very weak and not able to move around very much.

My father in law is recovering quite nicely. He has pretty much recovered from double pneumonia - he is heading back to the doctor next week for a colonoscopy to try and figure out why he was bleeding during his stay at the hospital.....we are believing that it is nothing serious. His pacemaker may also be acting up - so we are just covering him in prayer. His name is Alvin.

Mark's mom doesn't drive - so I will act as their driver until everything with him is cleared up. He can drive around his area (grocery, walmart) but I will drive to doctors, medical center, etc.

Jake started school again!!! He doesn't even seem to mind that he is back in Kindergarten. He loves his new teacher and I'm excited for the year. I will be much more active this year in his school year as I learned alot last year........as a mom of a special child - I realize that I'm going to have to be very active in his school in order to make sure that he is learning at his level and not getting passed over because he is in full ed vs. special ed. God is good - Jake is going to grow up and be an unbelievable musician or whatever else he is determined to be - I just have to get him there!!! LOL..........I cracked up because his first day - he came home and told me his teacher said no "drumming on the tables and no humming".......he is so ADHD - not sure that he will be able to accomplish that - but ok - we're going to try!!! LOL

Will continue to keep you posted on Carla. She returns to the doctor on Monday and we are hoping they will be able to take her off of some of the steroids and be able to give her medication for her anemia - the anemia is what is making her so weak - so we really need some medication for that.

Love to all
Karen