April, May, June 2008

Sorry to be so behind on updates to this. Very sadly and surprisingly, Dave's father died at the end of May. Not having the words for that has made it hard for me to spend time on this. It's been a tough few months, particularly for Dave. On top of losing his father, he's had an excessive amount of travel for work... ironically and fortunately, he traveled to the U.S. for work on the day his dad was hospitalized, so he was able to spend much of 3 weeks with him and his mom. But it's been, for lack of better words, very surreal....unbelievable. Bill was amazing and nothing we could write could describe how amazing, but he's left a big hole in our family and we'll miss him terribly. All the cards, letters, calls, condolences have been very appreciated.

Given that, proceeding with petty talk of other things we have done feels kind of disrespectful and meaningless, but I have lots of requests for pictures. So, I'm putting in some information from April, May and June, just for the record.

In April, me and the girls made a trip home to Atlanta at the beginning of the month to attend a wedding and visit family and friends. Dave's parents drove up to see us and none of us knew how valuable our time was with Bill during that visit. On their first day with us, we had family photos taken of the girls and all of their grandparents. I hesitated to do it since Dave didn't come with us, but thank God, we went ahead with it. Those are invaluable now. At the end of April, my parents visited us in Switzerland to operate the infirmary in our house...almost all of us were sick, so we didn't get them to Germany as planned. But, the 2 days before they left, we all recovered and had some nice weather, so we took drives to Lausanne and Chamonix before they flew out. Anyway, there are a bunch of pictures from our visits with everyone in April.

In May, just before leaving for the U.S., Dave had a holiday weekend, so we took a train to Locarno for 2 nights. The day after we returned from that, Dave's left for the U.S. for work. Bill was hospitalized that day and was in the hospital for most of the month ... Dave was fortunately in Florida for much of that time. The girls and I stayed in Switzerland, where on May 21, Sam Billington was born, so Charlie is a big brother and Cambelle has a boyfriend...he is the second baby born from the families who moved over here. Anyway, Dave returned to Switzerland on the 24th thinking his father was recovering, but very sadly, he passed away on the 27th. So, we all travelled back to Florida to spend time with Dave's mom at the end of May and into the beginning of June...and we saw Uncle Dave and Amy briefly while we were there.

In June, Dave flew back to Switzerland to go to Berlin for work. The girls and I stayed in Atlanta a few days to visit my grandfather, who had a major surgery in mid-May and was in a rehabilitative nursing home (he's scheduled to come home Thursday, July 17th, but will continue rehab). We returned to Switzerland a day after Dave returned from Berlin and two days before he left for Turkey. Two days after Dave left again, Jeanne-Marie, Robert and Mike arrived to visit us. We had a fun week with them... they biked and hiked all day, then cooked and cleaned for us all evening, then made us stay up late watching the Euro2008 soccer tournament. Soon after they left, Dave had to go back to Berlin.

And I'll get to July in the next post...hopefully this will get me caught up enough that I can be more timely with the next updates. And,I'll get a video up of Cambelle crawling soon.

MAY

JUNE