A Beautiful Way to End a Bad Week

Today is Sunday. The start of a new week. And thank God for it because this past week has been enough for me.

Meriah, over at With a Little Moxie, is hosting a blog hop focusing on finding the beauty. So, I dug up some old photos of Liza from the first day of school, cause they never fail to bring a smile to my face.

I hope they make you smile too. Take a load off. Decompress. Let's hope this coming week is a beautiful one. And, go to Meriah's blog and check out the other pics :)

Love her face in this one! LOL

She was really excited about all the cars going by that morning.

I think this one is my favorite. She's rubbing her hands
together cause she's SO excited. How can you not smile?

My Kid's a Survivor

I saw this picture on Facebook this morning and it made me hold my breath for a moment. Up until a couple of months ago I would have just "liked' it, thought of all the survivors I know, and then moved on. But, this time a survivor lives in my house and every time I really allow myself to think about that I either get choked up or I get angry and want to break something. I'm hoping those are normal feelings for a Mama who's faced down one of a Mama's worst fears.

I kinda mentioned in my last post that one of my boys had a serious health issue we were dealing with, but we were taking it in stride. Cracking jokes and milking it (the Kid) and just pushing thru to do what needed to be done. We're almost on the other side of it now but we still have a little ways to go.

Austin  had thyroid cancer. There, now it's out there.

Let me start at the beginning. Sometime in February Austin had a sore throat that wouldn't go away and kept him out of school a day or two. He never ran a fever so I kept telling him to just take it easy, gargle salt water, suck on throat lozenges, etc. After about five days of him complaining about it I finally took him to the doctor, thinking the whole time that he was just being a drama "queen" (king?). The doc couldn't find anything wrong, strep test was negative so she told him the same things I'd already told him.

The throat started feeling better so we went on with life and then about a week later Austin told me that he had a lump in the right side of this neck. I thought it was just related to the sore throat and would go away on it's own. When another week had passed and the lump was still there, I made another doctor's appointment. 

It was pretty obvious that this time they thought there was something to be at least a little concerned about. We were immediately sent to have blood drawn to check thyroid levels and set up with an appointment to see a surgeon, because he "could get us in for a biopsy before anyone else could". At the time I just thought we were going to learn that he had some type of thyroid issue. Like Hyper or Hypo, or maybe his levels were just off and he'd take some medicine to get it all under control and that would be it. Hoping for the best, you know? Or whatever best might be in a situation like that.

So, to whittle down this long story - we met the surgeon a week later, we had a biopsy done about a week after that visit, and about a week after that the surgeon called to tell me that my 16 year old son had thyroid cancer. Not what I wanted to hear or was expecting, at all.

So, on April 30th Austin had his thyroid removed along with the cancerous nodule. According to all the doctors we've seen he should be fine for the rest of his life now. I can't count how many times I've heard, "if you have to have cancer this is the one to have". Apparently it's almost always caught early and easy to treat. Of course, I'd much rather he never have had cancer in the first place and that he still have the thyroid he was born with. I hate the thought that he has to rely on medicine for the rest of his life now. We still have a few more drives to Charlottesville to see doctors and a Radio-active Iodine treatment to go through, but I think we're almost done with all this cancer craziness. Thank God for that!

I can't type all this out without giving HUGE props to all the doctors and nurses at UVA Hospital in Charlottesville, VA. The surgeon that we've been seeing, Dr. Kane, has been so good to both of us through this whole thing and I'm actually kinda sad that we won't need to see him after these next few check-ups. The nurses at UVA are just all simply amazing. Austin spent two nights in the hospital after his surgery and all the nurses, from post-op to in-patient, were so patient with him and treated him as if he were their child while caring for him. It really helped make the whole ordeal a little easier to bear. So, to all of our UVA peeps, if you're reading this - THANK YOU from the bottom of this Mama's heart!

If you wanna know more about Thyroid Cancer there's a really great website at THYCA.org. with tons of information. There are also two groups on YahooGroups: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/thyca/join for general Thyroid cancer support and http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Ped_thyca/join?referer=1 for Pediatric thyroid cancer support. I found both of those groups helpful. If you have questions for me, please leave a comment and I can answer in a comment or I can email you if you'd prefer. 

Is it Safe to Come Out?

It should probably really be a crime for me to take a year+ hiatus from my blog and then think I can come back and just start right up again. But, as far as I know it's not. So, that's what I'm going to attempt to do. You all ready? Is anyone actually still here?

I'm gonna try to do the Reader's Diges.. (can I use that here?) Version of what's been going on in my life and once that's behind me I hope to get back to blogging on a more regular basis.

BIG SIGH

Here we go:

Sometime near the end of August 2011 my children and I left our home and my husband. I'm not going to go into the why's of it. I'll just say, if you had lived with him you probably wold have left too, and sooner than I did.

Because I left my husband and "broke covenant" most of my friends from our church stopped talking to me. Well, that's once they had told me that I was "placing my children above my husband" and how wrong that was.

It took a while to get to a place where I felt like I knew who I was again and to feel safe sharing my life with others. But, I am in that place now and I am looking forward to getting back into the community of bloggers that I left behind. I hope I'll be welcomed back.

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I hope you'll come back for tomorrow's post. I'm gonna share where I'm hoping to go now that I'm free to be me! (haha, is that cliche'? I'm not sure I care!)

Melancholy Musings on Christmas Eve Night

*Now that I do have a connection I figured I'd add a bit to this. Cause I reread it and it kinda depressed me :) I sent this as a text from my phone cause I haven't been able to figure ut how to email a post yet and it only let me use a certain amount of characters. What I add will be in italics. Probably no one cares but I'm big on honesty so if I don't I will feel like I'm not being real. Yeah, I know I'm a weirdo!*


I can't seem to get a good connection to post lately but wanted to speak a little bit of my heart. This is my outlet after all. I have been realizing that I desperately need community.

I don't know if it's the holidays, the weather, hormones, or what but I really feel lonely a lot of the time. I feel like I was made to live like the Algonqins did (right?) in those longhouses with many generations in one home. I love the idea of that! I find myself wishing for the days when I was a young single mom. I lived with my children in my Godparents' home with my Godparents and my Godsisters. Not that I don't want Rick but I miss what those days represent. Just wondering if that makes me weird? It was a sense of community, I think. It's similar to when I lived in my apartment. Even though it was my own place I knew there were always people close and there was always someone in and out. Maybe some folks would hate that, but I loved it. And where we live now it just doesn't happen. 

So, now that I've depressed everyone. Merry Christmas!

My Goals

Courtney inspired me to post some goals that I'd like to see myself reach by the end of this year. I'm really good at having ideas or wanting to accomplish something but then it never actually happens. I just can't seem to find a way to make the idea become a concrete thing, or I get sidetracked by a hundred other things and never take the time to follow through. I really want to change that about myself and maybe listing some of them as goals right here for the world to see will hold me accountable.

Run a 5K

I have actually done this 3x's now and am planning to keep going. This has been a total God thing for me. I am learning so much about endurance, running the race and finishing strong even when I don't feel like I have anything left. It's actually scary sometimes, cause I just keep asking: "why am I learning this?" "Is there something coming that I'm gonna need this for?" I think it's tied into this whole adoption journey and the stress and bumps that come along with it.

I do want to get my time down though and that brings me to my next goal.

Run a 5k in 30 minutes or less.

My time in my first race was pretty good-mid 30's and since then it has been in the 40's. The second one was actually in the late 40's. ICK! I am hating that. I really want to get my time up to something more consistent and I want it to be less than 30. I have been at races and listened to the stats of others. There are women in their 40's who are getting better times than me! This makes me feel like a wimp, and I have never liked the idea that I am not as strong as someone else. Probably a complex developed from being small my whole life-but there it is, and I just don't think running three miles in over 40 minutes is very good. Gotta do better!

Eat healthy and more organic.

This is one that I share with Courtney. I really want us to eat better than we do and I would LOVE if we could eat organic. Unfortunately it is expensive to do this. We are on a tight food budget right now and eat a lot of pastas, chicken, and canned or frozen vegetables. We went to a friends house who had out some fresh fruit and the kids ate so much of it I was embarrassed. We just don't buy it much right now.

Another side to this is Rick's Rheumatoid Arthritis and Noah with his ADD. I firmly believe that a better diet and some natural products would be much more beneficial for both of them. I really want to find a way to improve our diets and see if it brings any benefit to them as well as the rest of us. We are growing some tomatoes, peppers, and herbs this year and maybe if they do well we will add more next year. It's a start.

Paint the boys' bedroom.

My poor boys have brown wood paneling in their bedroom and it is so dreary and dark in there. We have been talking about painting it since we moved in and have never done it. I am determined to finally get it done this summer. I just hate the thought of having to prime it and then paint it, plus I have never really painted a room in any house before so this is gonna be a new experience for me.

Any volunteers to come and help? Or ideas on how to streamline the process? :)

BRING LIZA HOME!

This is last on my list for now, but definitely not least in my mind. I want to get this little girl home with us as soon as possible. I am getting tired of waiting and hate to think of her there any extra days than she has to be. She is already 3 years old and every day brings her closer to 4 and the possibility of being transferred to an institution before we can get there for her. This is scary because once she's transferred there is no guarantee we will be able to adopt her from the institution. I really don't want to even think about that happening.

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There are probably more that I'm not thinking of now. Maybe this will be a continual list that I update from time to time.

Music and Life

One of my passions, besides adoption and pro-life activism, is music. The video below is one of my favorite songs of all time. I loved it when I was young and I still love it now. I wish that songs like this one were heard more on the radio these days. Today's "Hot, New Country" ain't got nothin' on yesterday's classics, at least, in my opinion.



Was it the story that I loved or Dan Seals' voice or a combination of both? I like going back and looking at it with my grown up eyes or listening with grown up ears - whatever. I wonder if my firm belief that Mom's should never leave their kids comes in part from songs and stories like this or just that I love my kids so much I can't imagine how anyone could just leave that way for selfish reasons.