Counting Sheep

Our third service of the series went well this morning, and you can see here that Pastor Lance has been calling out various cast members to assist him with the message portion - this weekend, Madison and her fellow sheep went out to help.  As for the part of the ongoing drama, Madison played her part in that as well, along with Mr. Potato Head, Rex, Bo Peep, Wheezy and a few others.

It was a great morning, although it was sad to see Ba-Ba and Nana leave today after such a short visit.  The reason is all logistics, and flies in the face of everything you would think of with an approaching category five hurricane:  they're going in the opposite direction of hundreds of thousands of other people.  In fact, driving back to Daytona, they said they were some of the only ones going in that direction, moving alongside all the emergency vehicles going down to help with power issues or more.  But they arrived safely.  The reason they are going down is a super important meeting with an oncologist.  Since the VA has been terribly slow, the last thing anyone wants to do is postpone or miss this appointment on Thursday.  Unfortunately, the hurricane is currently projected to move up the Florida coast on Wednesday.  That means the grandparents can't actually return home on Wednesday, not driving down in the middle of a hurricane.  So in order to make this meeting, they'll drive down to Daytona today, and then leave right away - evacuating a second time - to go to a hotel in central Florida, somewhere closer to the oncologist office.  It's a mess.

Mommy's heart has been heavy throughout all of this, as it has for Daddy too.  It's a literal and metaphorical storm.  Tonight our prayers were concentrating on all of this, on the people even now enduring the storm.  The people of the Bahamas are about to be tormented, and it looks pretty bad for them.  We were praying tonight, all three of us.

It's September, and we've decided that once this weekend is over with, it's time to put up the fall decorations.  Yes, we're impatient for the season to begin.  This includes our movies, which we're now starting about as early as we've ever done:  we began with the first "Goosebumps" movie, which we watched mainly because we got "Goosebumps 2" from the library and need to watch it in order to return it!  So tonight, we sat and watched that with some popcorn, and had no worries about what time we have to wake up tomorrow.  It's Labor Day, and none of that matters, right?

We read for a while - we're still in this long second book of the "Heir to the Empire" series.  Mara Jade is currently out to find Luke Skywalker, and perhaps out to rescue him, despite her mixed feelings about him.  I love getting to introduce Mara Jade to Madison.  I think the character is growing on her.

Of course, we also read from our devotional.  It was a pretty relaxed day after church, and we were glad to hear of the safe arrival home by the grandparents.  They didn't know there is a mandatory evacuation of the barrier island tomorrow at 10:00 am, not until we told them.  We're watching social media from Daytona, and also watching their local news channels live online - the internet is an amazing place.  We've had Florida news on and off throughout the day, looking for updates and local news down there.

Anyway, soon enough, we were all off to sleep tonight, counting sheep.  Yes, there are three below here if you want to count those before drifting off yourself: