Sunday, May 10th, 2009

Happy Mother's Day everyone. The rain has finally ended here in New York, and we are enjoying some sunshine this weekend. We started off our day here with 2 lacrosse games, one for each. We were done by noon, then I spent the rest of the day in the garden. Hannah planted with me (her own garden) and Colby painted a new agility piece for Riley. Our whole garden is planted, and right now it looks good (no weeds at all!) Hannah made me pare down the amount of tomato plants this year so that she could have more room. It's a good thing, because with all of the things she planted, there was NO more room for anything else. She planted big pumpkins, little pumpkins, watermelon, potatoes, sweet potatoes, carrots and a ton of flowers. She does great with planting, but not so great with weeding, so I'll have my hands full soon.

This week was a bit better for Hannah, but still with stomach aches each day. On Friday, it was bad enough to stay home from school. She went back to bed in the morning after sitting in front of her breakfast for half an hour without eating, at about 8am. She didn't get up until almost 3pm. The whole day! She still was eating much, about 2 spoons of rice. We went out to get plants, and afterwards she ate 1/2 a piece of pizza and 3 garlic knots. That was it for the entire day. She went back into bed at 10pm, and slept with no problem through the night. I know it will take a bit of time for her medicine to kick back in, I hope it's soon. She is really struggling with these stomach aches again. 

Her foot pain is no better, no worse. She has her bone scan next week, so we'll see if the results are any better or worse. Even though her feet hurt, we still try to keep her active with weight bearing activity, to help build her bone density. She went horseback riding on Saturday and did great. She was cantering (for you horse people) and did great. She was able to sit in the saddle and not wobble all around (with me hiding my eyes and crossing my fingers.) She is still pretty weak, but is getting stronger. 

We've been preparing for our upcoming Relay for Life. We are now up to 92 luminaries...closing in on 100!! This weekend our team got together to build our "tree of hope." I had this vision of our tent with a giant tree, filled with gold ribbons of all the children we know fighting cancer, of fallen victim to cancer. Not only did we have a lot of fun making it, it is really coming together nicely. I'll share pictures next time. In case you need order information, I listed it at the bottom here. 

Hannah and I have been working on our speeches for the Relay. Hannah was dictating to me this weekend, and her speech (with no input from me) starts out like this: 

Hi, my name is Hannah. I am a cancer survivor. When the doctor told me I had a brain tumor I was scared because there was a chance I could die.

Wow, that kind of blew me away. I never once thought that Hannah worried about dying or even knew there was a chance that she could die. I'm still trying to  process that. I can imagine that if I'm trying to process it, she must be too. 

♥Kim

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