In Which Life Kicks Us When We're Already Down

This retro-dated post is brought to you by my fancy droid phone, and the Cameron Village branch of the Wake County public library system, internet terminal number eighteen. 

Why, you ask?  Because I don't have a computer.* 

Why, you ask?  Because in case last week's flood wasn't enough, our house got robbed this morning.  And no, I am not kidding.  Not even a little.  I feel like a weird statistic.  Houses getting robbed... that's the kind of thing that happens to other people, right?  Apparently not.

It happened in broad daylight, in the half-hour when Mark left to go get the kids from preschool/mmo (I was doing farm deliveries).  Which is creepy because they had clearly been watching our house.  Which makes my stomach churn a little.

Along with our laptop, they also made off with our still-feels-new wii, our still-feels-new tv, some jewelry -- all the normal things you expect to get taken when you have a house robbery.  Fortunately our neighbor was home and saw them, and got the make/model of the car and the first digits of the license plate number, which means they got the bad guys (and a house full of could-be-stolen stuff, some of which could be ours, but no word on that yet).

You know how you sometimes have those weeks when you're overwhelmed with life and you're already crumpled on the ground crying?  And then life kicks you in the ribs and makes things worse?  Yeah, we're having one of those weeks. 

My plan was to wait and write about this when I could make light of it.  (That's my general rule of thumb.)  But, let's face it, that could be weeks months next year.  So I'm just laying it all out on the table right now: this sucks.  I can't find a way to laugh about it yet.  But I'm telling the internet now so that I can get on with celebrating my precious baby girl turning one seven short days (a week that will feel shorter this year than last year, for sure!) and tell the internet about that for the next week instead.

And in the meantime, if you're the praying type, I have some material for you:
- Our sense of violation.  We want to feel better and safe in our own home.
- Mark is shaken up at being the provider of a family who now feels vulnerable. Pray for him especially.
- For the cops and detectives working on our case, who have been kind and wonderful.
- For our stuff to find its way home.  I'm not getting my hopes up too high, since it's pretty rare for home burglaries to result in reclaimed property, but I would love to have our computer back (maybe with the hard drive not wiped out) and some pieces of jewelry that hold far more sentimental than monetary value.

We are safe. Our children are safe.  Bowden is safe.  And the rest is just stuff, right?

*And as much as I love my phone, I'm sick of typing on it, and couldn't bring myself to finish and publish this away from a real computer.