Home again, home again, jiggety-jig.

It has been almost six months since my last post. We have experienced a hiatus on this blog while we went through some things. Things that I was not ready to talk about here, and I did not know how to write without talking about it. And because life is a sequence of beautiful and awful events, things are still going down over here. It's almost time to talk about some of them. I have to figure out the appropriate way to talk about others. I'm going to talk about all of it, because the stories are good, because writing them is cathartic, because one day I want my boys to read them and know the hard things we have done.

Also, while I'm still thinking about how to talk to the Internets again, I'm going to give the blog a facelift. When I bring it back, you will know what the hiatus was for, and we will start to discuss it, slowly, in pieces, then.

Until then, enjoy these.

Aunt Cydney told me they could not wear their matching pajamas to school, so we made athletic pants work.

Will anybody be surprised if I tell you that Jake Allbritton does not respond well to change of any kind? In an effort to help him, we changed some of his medicines. Then we spent eight weeks of the boy being bat. shit. crazy. before we figured out it was the medicine. So we changed the medicine, and we started having a lot of difficult conversations. But now, we are terrific, complete with a gold star from the psychologist. This picture was taken before pajama day at school last week. Someone looked at this picture and told me that she has not seen Jake look this happy and this healthy ever, and that is a very big deal to me. The progress report he brought home on Wednesday had A's on it for the first time all year. Thank you, Baby Jesus.

This happened. It was super easy and super smooth. It was final the day the world was supposed to end because the Mayans stopped making calendars, but I started a whole new life that day. I heard a psychic on the radio say that December 21st was not about the end of the world, but was for us as individuals, the end of the life we have been leading, and the start of the new life we are supposed to have. I did not wake up on December 21st the same person I was when I went to sleep the night before. I am legit, a real live mom, and not just by virtue of being married to their dad.

We took this when we got back from court, still in our fancy clothes. This was joy, and Merry Christmas to us. It has turned Landen into a bit of a mama's boy. His favorite place to be is here with me, doing whatever I am doing, once his video game time is over. Last week he watched "Oprah's Next Chapter" and a show Lisa Ling did about obese children, because that's what I was watching. It's lovely.

I am simultaneously changing almost everything about myself. The journey is slow and not all of it is mapped out. It's going to take me a minute to share with you the pieces that I can. When my sister went to London, she brought back a gift for me that was an illustration from a vintage book, with a woman who looks like a pilgrim sauntering through a creek. The page says "Steady then! Slowly--slowly--Nell neared her goal."

It's the first thing I see when I sit up in my bed in the mornings. I'm getting there.