Monday, 17 September, 2001

Last Tuesday morning, terrorists attacked the United States of America.  They were able to hijack four commercial airplanes and crashed two of them into the World Trade Center’s twin towers in New York City, one of them into the Pentagon in Washington, D.C. and another missed its mark and crashed in Pennsylvania.  All passengers, crews, and hijackers lost their lives as well as thousands of individuals working in and around the buildings.  The story is horrific and dominated the news all week long and again into this week.  I am not going to give a lot of details here because the information will always be available, I just want to say that the terrorists devastated a nation but have succeeded in drawing Americans closer together. 

I am grateful that my girls are not older so that I don’t have to try and explain what has happened and why.  I am certain, however, that there will be more opportunities where I will have to explain such evil to them as they grow older.

Alicia is now getting over her cold.  Her runny nose was gone by Wednesday or Thursday, but she has had a cough that is hanging on.  Unfortunately, it seems as though Amy is getting sick again.  She hasn’t been around anyone who appears to be sick, so I don’t know where she caught this one from.  She is sleeping right now and has been asleep for 2 ½ hours already.  I just hope that whatever she has, she will not pass it along to Alicia again.  I am tired of having sick children.

We went out to Firestone on Friday to look at our new house.  They just finished painting it and all of the cabinets and finish work materials are sitting in the garage waiting to be installed.  We had thought that perhaps we ought to lock into an interest rate on Friday with all of the turmoil that is happening, but both Chris and I felt that we should wait.  It is a good thing, though we don’t wish to benefit through tragedy, but another cut in the interest rate was announced this morning.  We’ll wait and see.  At least I don’t see the rates going up anytime soon which is fortunate for us.  We are hoping to get a rate lower than 7% this time.

We are excited by the thought of being in our new home in about a month.  I guess Amy is getting used to us driving around looking at houses in this area and to having us talk about our house; now when we are driving around she asks, “New house?”  I think she understands in a small way that this apartment is not permanent and that we will be moving again soon.  I hope so.  It should be the last major change for awhile–except for potty training....