Dad and The Bee

I bet you already know which one won the fight.  Yesterday Dad had to respond to a call from Mother Nature while he was out and about.  It seems that a local bee found the inside of his upper right leg a perfect place to land.  Unfortunately for the bee and Dad, the bee was still resting when he pulled up his pants.

I have never seen such a reaction.  Dad did not come right home, but when he did, he asked if I would please remove the stinger.  Well, it looked like he had about 5 stingers, but one was more prominent that the others, so I girded up my loins and scraped across it with a credit card.  We had read that if you use tweezers, the stinger may break.

  What should have been a big red lump was actually a 3 inch circle with 15-20 blisters inside a 7 or 8 inch larger red circle.  It looked so bad.  I wanted to take him to the emergency room, but you all know your dad well enough to know that he was not about to go for just a little old bee sting.  

  He poured on the Lavender and several other oils, then sat in the tub.  I kept checking to make sure he was still breathing.  Even after prayers and he actually went to bed, I kept listening and touching him, so he would move and I could be sure he was okay.

  Today the smaller circle is still full of blisters that look like they are healing well, but the larger red circle is still there with considerable swelling, but does your dad complain, of course not.   It makes me cry sometimes when I see how much he endures.  I will be eternally grateful for him and the example he has set.  I can see how he lives with pain every waking minute, but he puts a smile on his face and goes about like he was 25 instead of 66.

  He is always saying that he would rather wear out instead of rust out.  It would truly be a death sentence to become a couch potato, but I am grateful each day he comes home, takes his long soak in the tub, says his prayers and crawls into bed.   We use to laugh when his parents went to bed at 7, but guess who is becoming his dad.  :o} It's 7:40 and Dad has been asleep for almost an hour.

  We always laugh when we come to visit and the time to leave approaches.  He looks at me and says, should we pull a mom and dad and leave at 4 or 5 in the morning.  DeRell and Marie would do that quite often.  We laughed a lot over that, but now that we are maturing, we understand better why they did that.

  I hope everyone is praying for good weather, bad weather would be the only thing that would stop us from coming.  Sister Stevens mentioned last night about a multiple car pile up somewhere up there, due to the weather.  I tried not to freak out.  The Justice family has 2 sons coming from Rexburg for Thanksgiving.

  We do need to check out phones while we are there and I would like to go to the Temple.

  We have our Stake Temple Trip on Dec 6, but if we go while we are there it would save us the 7 hours travel time to Snowflake.

  Well it is almost 8, bed time right LOL.  

  I like to crawl in about 10, but have learned 9 isn't so bad and being up and on the go by 4 insures that I will have uninterrupted time for scriptures and breakfast.

  Although every day isn't always great, we know that God has everything in hand and that we just need to trust Him and know that things will work out.

  We are very proud of each of you and thank Heavenly Father for the privilege of being your earthly parents.  We are grateful for the memories.

Love,

Mom