This weekend Mom, Dad, and Anna return from Europe. Anna started saving up for the trip last year as a post-graduation extravaganza and I’m SO glad she (and Mom and Dad) ventured forth. She totally deserves her first time “abroad.” 🙂

This trip was a big step for all of us since Ivan and I haven’t been solo since last August. Honestly, it probably wasn’t safe for us to even think about testing our “solo” skills until mid-April. Praise God that all these dates lined up at the last minute! The Europe story is copyrighted to Mom, Dad, and Anna, but I CAN tell y’all how our solo experiment turned out.

What we tried: Both of us dealt with schedule changes and extra responsibility (Mom and Dad have a condo and a cat), Ivan still worked during Week 1 of Europe, and I threw in some extra outings since it’s June and who doesn’t want early-summer fun?

What actually happened: We saw some interesting epileptic and TBI developments with the raised activity level. This felt weird at first, but I think God sent it early so we can plan for a fun AND safe summer. Here’s a breakdown of what we saw.

• Epilepsy: My seizure frequency went way high (I even started clustering again), since fatigue makes my brain more susceptible to triggers. We still made it to church one week out of two (any church is a yay!), but we had to turn around on our way to visit Ivan’s family since I started having seizures on the freeway (yikes for everyone involved).
• Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI): This is one of those things I always forget to plan for until it starts acting up, but unfortunately TBI also gets irritated by over-activity. There were a few days in there when I reverted back to some REALLY old deficits…usually because I couldn’t remember what we were supposed to do that day, much less figure out the order we should do it in. I ended up staying in the car for some of our outings, and got so noise-sensitive again that I wore earplugs to go feed my parents’ cat. That’s when ya know…

We certainly had our share of fun moments, though! Ivan got some extra chill time with my parents’ grand piano, I met up with a couple of church friends during some of my good days, and Ivan and I inaugurated the first swim of the summer. For the record, I can swim just as well as I did before the accident. (Including longer/faster than some people who shall remain nameless.)

Now what?? We’re looking forward to a great summer. 🙂 Thankfully we have a heads-up to count in lots of rest days, too, since happy brain = happy all of us. Quality is always better than quantity…and you can bet we’re aiming pretty high on the “quality” level.

As always, Ivan wins a gold medal for keeping up with me.