Noelle seems to have turned into a full blown toddler over night. We are now starting to get past the “Aww, it’s such a little tiny person actually WALKING!” stage and moving on into the “Wow, the little tiny person sure does move fast and no! Noelle drop that/don’t eat that/put that down” stage. She seems to be into EVERY thing these days. It is so hard for me to wrap my head around the fact that she is going to be one in a couple of weeks.

We finally managed to complete the weaning process. Got her down from nursing once or twice a day to not at all. She still remembers enough to ask every so often but all in all I am very relieved that it went so well. Between my supply being all but gone and her being so easily entertained and distracted by other things it was really quite easy. A relief to me since I had anticipated it being a lot harder emotionally on her than it was!

Steve and I are talking about doing a complete water fast next week. I have had some health problems that we both really think from the reading/researching we have done will be significantly helped with a complete fast. He did one years ago in Russia and had some fantastic health results from it including his severe hypoglycemia disappearing. He has started to have some problems again that he thinks would benefit from a fast. To say I am dreading this would be an understatement. I loath going without food. It will be way easier if I have someone suffering through it with me though. Although Steve is such a rock I doubt there will be much suffering going on there. It’ll be more like this:

Me: “sniff sniff…I’ve been without food for TWELVE HOURS! I think I’m dying.”
Him: “Wow, 12 hours already? I thought we just started an hour ago.”

Me: “I am so weak and shaky. I don’t want to get out of bed.”
Him: I think I want to go for a little bit of a run today!”

Me: “I am having hallucinations about chocolate. It’s floating just in front of me I can even SMELL it.”
Him: “Huh, I haven’t even really missed food yet.”

It will be nice to do this during the week when we have so many people around to help out with Noelle so that if I do turn into the most pathetic thing around she will have some Mommy backups to play with.

I think I am going to go eat while I still can.

After a couple of days of anxiety on my part, mostly fueled by and the fault of a very hyper active imagination we finally picked John up from the airport! He has spent the last four weeks in Malawi, South Africa.

He looks to be 10 or more lbs lighter than he was when he left and about four shades darker in coloring. That African sun sure does give a fantastic tan! Overall he looks great. Suspect jet lag will hit him like a ton of bricks tomorrow but tonight he is up sharing some of his pictures and stories.

We are so thankful he made it back safe and sound. Our (Mostly mine, Steve pretty much makes it a policy not to worry about things until he needs to) concern was caused by the fact that we showed up at the airport on the appointed day for him to return with our copy of his flight itinerary. After watching the entire flight he was supposedly on disembark and pick up their luggage with no sign of John I went to the United Counter and proceeded to beg information. Strictly according to the law they were not allowed to get me any information but after spinning my tale of worry for little brother out of the country for the first time, sick with Malaria, no means of contacting us due to a dead cell phone etc they finally broke down and decided to help. After almost three hours we were told that he was either
A) In quarantine (interesting side note with that, if you are quarantined coming into the US you are not even allowed one phone call!) or
B) Still stuck in Africa or
C) In Dulles airport in DC. They paged him every half hour at Dulles with no response.

With visions of John lost in deepest darkest Africa flitting through my mind we reluctantly headed back home to resume the search the next day and praying he would contact us. As it turns out they did not get him to the Airport on time to make his scheduled flight out of Malawi so he ended up flying to Zimbabwe instead of Ethiopia where they informed him that they had no record of his flight. So he hung out there for a day or so until they could get him worked onto a flight. He couldn’t call us because guess what? Cingular doesn’t have service Zimbabwe in case anyone was wondering.

Anyway. We are super happy having him back safe! Hoping to arrange a get together for people to come and hear how his trip went from da man himself.