“And each of us himself when no man was his own.”

O suns and skies and clouds of June,
And flowers of June together,
Ye cannot rival for one hour
October’s bright blue weather.

Well, our lengthy hospital adventure is over at last and things are beginning to return to something approximating normalcy. Eli is doing better and better and our faith and hope is that she is home for good this time. While we’re not quite ready for a return to the rollicking posts, patterned after the venerable models of Fielding and Smollett (though more sanitized than these masters), that marked our blogs of yore, we did want to present our faithful readers with a brief installment of our illustrious Review in anticipation of such a return.

Monday (9/25): Lia and Eli came home!!! But there has already been a post about this, so we need say no more here.

Tuesday (9/26): Lia celebrated her return home with an unbounded embrace of all things domestic—she made bread and did laundry and gave considerable thought to the prospect of cleaning before wisely abandoning this last project for another day. In the morning Nin took Julia to our ward’s play group. Julia was pleased beyond measure to see Callie LaDuke, but both girls ultimately had to flee before the menacing presence of the playgroup bully. But they still had fun. When Lia’s self-imposed domestic regime, she enjoyed an ebullient reunion with Billy Blanks, bidding defiance to three weeks of hospital inertia with a rousing session of Tae-bo. In the evening, we did our best to rescue Eli’s coiffure from the appalling asymmetry inflicted by neurosurgeons who had shaved only those areas of her head coincident to their own area of operational interest. In short, we gave her a buzz. Or tried to at least, but by an unfortunate historical anomaly, it was Justin who held the sheers and, in an excess of caution, did something of a hatchet job. But she’s still “cute as a bug,” as Nin noted in a felicitous Kentucky colloquialism.

Wednesday (9/27): We all wept and wailed and gnashed our teeth (gums, in Eli’s case) as Nin wound her way back to the New Haven airport for her flight(s) back to Utah. We were as sad to see her go as she was happy to be returning to her own family. We simply cannot say enough by way of gratitude for how much she helped us during Eli’s and Lia’s hospital stay. We can only say that we could not have done it without her.

Thursday (9/28): In the evening Lia and Eli went to our ward’s Relief Society book club while Justin stayed home with Julia and Callie. Daunted at first by the prospect of eighty minutes with two fiery toddler females, Justin soon learned the grand secret that two balls of fire are more easily managed than one. Pairing Julia with a beloved friend was something like completing the outer electron circle of an unstable element. The two ladies entertained one another while their ostensible chaperone looked in vain for something with which to keep himself busy. He finally settled on spoiling the girls, hosting a picnic in Julia’s room, complete with special saucers of animal crackers, and slipping each girl a cube of Lindt chocolate on the sly.

Friday (9/29): This day marked a momentous epoch in the history of our family, in the history of these United States, in the history of Western civilization, and in the history of this and adjoining galaxy clusters. Julia woke up with proverbially bright eyes and a legendarily bushy tail, blissfully divested herself of a cumbersome diaper, donned her shiniest pair of Elmo panties, and thundered to the expectant masses (i.e. her parents and kid sister) that she would be treated like a child no more: she was ready to be potty-trained. Lia breathed a sigh of relief and made preparations for the long awaited process of domesticating our firstborn. It was a disaster. Flouting the emphatic refrain of the much-viewed internet classic, “Elmo’s Potty Time,” that “If you feel the need to go, just stop what you are doing and go; otherwise you might have an accident,” Julia had FIVE accidents during the course of the day, distributing them methodically throughout the apartment. She did successfully irrigate her potty chair twice and was awarded each time with a jelly bean. It was a frustrating day for a young mother, an amusing one for a young father (though he dared not laugh in his sweetheart’s hearing), and we all went to bed—after a pleasant viewing of Twelve Angry Men (we’re trying to heighten our literacy in legally-themed movies, though we plead that none of our readers suggest Legally Blonde or its sequel)—with high hopes for the morrow.

Saturday (9/30): And those high hopes were not in vain, as Julia’s tragic ratio of two successes to five accidents on Friday improved dramatically to the healthier tally of three to one. Amid the wild cheering and generous distribution of jelly beans, we tried to watch sessions of General Conference on the internet. We loved what we heard, and we heard a lot, the competitive cries of our two little angels notwithstanding.

Sunday (10/1): Julia’s overall output increased magnificently today, but with ill omens initially for the PTP (CIA code for the “Potty-Training Project”): by noon she’d had two successes against four accidents. But then the fates and an antique timer came to the rescue and Julia closed the day with a heroic series of successes, finishing on top by a margin of 6 to 4. Who knows what lofty successes we may report next week? And who knows what other transcendent themes might mould the weekly familial chronicle of life in the heady environs of the Ivy League?