I don’t know when the last time I went almost a month without posting anything was.  Not sure exactly what the next step in this process is going to be, but for anyone that is still visiting or happens to stumble upon this site I will say that i am not done done yet! So please don’t lose complete faith in me. I will be back!

Not supposed to look like that!

When I was younger it seemed like I had many more instances of foot failures. Broken feet are few and far between now days and I am thankful for that, so when they happen now it seems  to catch me of guard. You go through so many emotions in a very short amount of time. Like in the case of yesterday morning, I experienced curiosity, surprise, anger, and acceptance in the matter of about 10 minutes.  I was getting ready for work and I walked in the bathroom and heard a slight clicking noise coming from my foot. I thought that sounds weird, maybe I should check it out! I took my leg off to investigate what I thought was probably a loose foot cover. When I pulled on the foot cover half of a screw fell out of my leg. That’s not supposed to be like that! I figured out where the screw came from and realized that I had a somewhat major issue. I set about crawling through the house to find my spare leg and it was now where to be found. My wife went on an excursion to our storage unit thinking it might be there, but no luck. And very shortly after I came to grips with the fact that I would be using crutches to get to the prothetist to get said screw replaced.

Thankfully my wife is a champ when it comes to putting up with me because anger was high on the list of emotions I was going through. It always sucks to break a leg or foot, even though it’s a very familiar feeling when it happens it’s always such a shock to have to deal with. I had to live by my own words that it could always be worse. Luckily it was just a screw that broke and it was a fairly easy fix thanks to my awesome prothetist and it was covered under warranty so that’s always good. Not to mention the fact that we had been out of town over the weekend hours from home running around out in the woods which would have made it much worse had it happened then. Overall it was a pretty exciting Monday morning and the silver lining was i got to spend a little extra time with my favorite person. Speaking of, please remind me before we take another trip to find my spare leg :)

I hope I am not jinxing myself by starting this! Did I mention that I started a part time job? I have been driving at night in addition to working a full time day job. I realized a couple of days ago that I have completely neglected this blog and kept thinking I should explain why. The last few weeks have included many nights that I didn’t get home until almost time to get up an go back to work. I sat down last night and logged into wordpress and started typing the title of this post and the phone rang. That was about 9:00 pm, it was about 4:30 am when I pulled back into the drive way. Time has flown by and all of a sudden I think “hey, I haven’t blogged in like 3 three weeks…I should probably do something about that”. So consider this short post a jump start, and hopefully my battery stays charged for a little bit.

I had a very good friend that followed my blog before he passed away. He was always the first one to message me and give me a hard time about things I wrote about. He called me one night and told me that he had just spent the last couple of hours reading my blog from start to finish and he was mad. He said he read every entry because in a few of them I talked about stories that I had or started something and never finished it. He said he kept reading thinking he would catch up and I would fill in the blanks but there were stories that never came. It became a running joke between me and him. Sometimes I would mention things in my blog and leave out details or say I would finish a story in my next post just to see if he would text me and complain about it. I miss that, and this post is just for him.

In my last post I mentioned being very aware at times of people staring. I also mentioned that I had a story about being oblivious to being stared at. For Thanksgiving lunch my wife and I went to the school cafeteria and ate lunch with our boy. The lunch room was packed with third and fourth grade students and parents. We were one of the last ones to get through the line and found a table without a lot of other people. We had a very enjoyable lunch and tried to take advantage of that time to talk about his school routines and how things were going with him. If you know kids at all then you know kids are the wild card. Adults are fairly predictable for the most part, but you never know about kids. Kids that age still haven’t developed the filter between the brain and the mouth( my wife would probably tell you that I still haven’t developed one) that most adults have. Normally when I am around that many kids I am very aware of staring because it isn’t too hard to notice. Kids are usually not very stealthy when it comes to that sort of thing. On this particular day I was completely oblivious to everything else except the three of us and our lunch room turkey.

A couple of weeks after our lunch at the school the three of us were eating at the local Mexican food joint and our 10 year old says “I need to tall y’all something”. When he starts out like that we are all ears because with the lack of filter you just never know what is going to come out. He says “remember when y’all had lunch at school with me? Some of the kids in my class were laughing at you and talking about your hands”, is most concerned 10 year old voice. He is very defensive when it comes to things like that and my first reaction was to chuckle, because I thought it was a little funny. He thought it was the opposite of funny. Unlike me, he hasn’t had to deal with that a whole lot so when it does happen and he notices he gets very upset. I love that he is compassionate and worries about other peoples feelings, but it makes it a little harder to talk him down when he is very upset and I think it’s funny. We gave him the usual ” we can’t control what other people do, only how we react to it” pep talk and tried to use it as one of those “teachable moments”.

It’s times like those that make me very thankful for my parents and how they raised me, and I feel like it’s a huge responsibility to pass that one. I just hope I do as good as they did!

Thanks to one of my wife’s awesome family members we enjoyed a free meal at Olive Garden a few weeks ago. Before I tell you about that let em go back a bit. I think I have talked about being stared at on here before. There are times when I am very aware of people around me and catch people staring constantly, and there are times when I am completely oblivious. I will tell you about a some of the times I was oblivious a little later, but this time I was  paying attention. Our waitress hadn’t been back to our table for a bit and my glass was getting a little on the half empty side. The waiter tending to the people at the table next to ours kept  looking our way, and I noticed him staring at my hands before he noticed me noticing him. I love those times when you catch someone obviously staring, but oblivious to the fact that you are waiting to bust them. He finally notices that I am watching him and he tried his best to save it by asking me what I was drinking. I told him and he said let me go get you a refill. He never came back to fill my glass. It amused me a little, and I gave him credit for the save attempt.

I have another story about me being oblivious to staring, but it’s late and I have a funny feeling I am going to get a call to go work tonight so I am going to call it good with this one.

Sitting in the prosthetists office waiting on some changes. It’s a very different feeling just sitting there with my leg off. Not something I make a habit of doing in public.

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