Ho, Ho, OH NO!
Not being much of a card player myself, even I know the difference between a good hand and a bad one. Now that I’ve displayed my entire card playing prowess, this hand is the ultimate fold’em hand… but I’m all in until the last card and last chip is played. For the first time in years, I/we have a real live legitimate excuse (I know, like it’s mattered in past years…) as to why the Christmas letter will be late in coming. While it may seem a tad bit easy to heap the blame on Emmah, or more specifically her cancer, the reality is that it has put a damper on things. Not being one to disappoint… though Julie may disagree… it may be void of my usual charm and wit… a.k.a. sarcasm… but I shall find a way to press on. Is everyone ready for a short letter? Yeah well… too bad… you should know better by now.
2006 will be a year that will not soon be forgotten…
Emmah (10) has cancer… Neuroblastoma. Sorry to those of you who are finding out here and now, but it wasn’t our intent to keep it from anyone… it’s not like making out a guest list for a party where you sit there and say who did we forget? She was diagnosed on the 11th of August of this year. While that in of itself isn’t good, the fact that the tumor has responded so well to the therapy while not taking too great of a toll on Emmah is. She has had some bumps in the road, but on the whole, she’s handled the therapy well. I mean it hasn’t exactly been walk in the park and we know that smooth sailing ahead isn’t promised but well, it is what it is and so we press onward and upward. As I sit here and type this out, we are in NYC for the resection. As a matter of fact, I’m currently sitting in the PEDs ICU at New York Presbyterian as she’s recovering from the surgery. The tumor is out, the operation was routine and by routine I mean nothing out of what was expected happened. Don’t get me wrong, it was a major surgery and because of that we landed (well drove to) in NY’s Sloan Kettering where there is a specialist.
The surgery, which took place on the 29th of November, was long… about 10 hours. We were told to arrive at 6:30 in the morning… to which Emmah replied, “that’s 5:30 in the morning our time”. While they didn’t start surgery immediately, it still took about 10 hours and we were called upstairs at 7pm. Makes for a long day as you may imagine, but that part is behind us now, the tumor is history and as of my typing this she’s recovering ahead of schedule. And that is a good thing. The hospital personnel are very impressed with Emmah’s extensive knowledge of the workings of the hospital… that is the nuts and bolts of her procedures… her hospital vocabulary and her maturity. While there are times that smiles come few and far between and at times has become an ongoing challenge for some of the docs and nurses to get her to crack… they do come. But who can blame her? Emmah is catching up on all those pre-teen girly type DVD’s and she also likes to read her Harry Potter books. When she’s not feeling lousy from her chemo and in-between sessions, she’s pretty normal. I mean with exception to the hair and weight loss, you’d never suspect anything out of the ordinary.
Going forward, we are keeping our focus aimed at finding all the good in the things that are going on and what we ultimately want to see for Emmah. We hope you all will join us in doing the same.
Nick (8) is holding his own with all that is going on around him. It is obvious to us that he misses Emmah when she’s in the hospital and there’s the fear and uncertainty that he’s feeling regarding Emmah’s condition… he knows what cancer is/can do. While Emmah is at home it’s nice to see being Nick as we know him, even if it is sibling bickering… in a twisted way, it’s like music to our ears. He allowed his head to be buzzed just short of shaving to support Emmah when she lost her hair. But I guess once was enough support since he backs away when I suggest he’s way overdue for another sheering. He at times reluctantly assumes the oldest role when Emmah is gone, but that reluctance is usually short lived. He’s doing well in school, and in general… in spite of the separation and temporary dismantling of the familial unit as it is. He likes going to his scout meetings when we can get him there. He’s grown to be as tall as Emmah, but I guess in some ways that’s not saying much… it’s not like Emmah’s a tree or anything… but the fact that he’s over two years behind and is within an inch of her sez something. He still has the wanderlust and if left on his own, would probably walk himself lost. He likes to run… I mean he runs and runs and runs! He runs most of the neighborhood kids ragged… “Run Nicholaus, run”. Nick is discovering that he can waste a tremendous amount of time by jumping on the computer… of course he doesn’t see it as such, to him it’s just fun. We limit the time he’s on there, but he’s been found “disappearing”… sneaking off to get in more computer time. He’s becoming a bit of a crafty sneak… he’s learned to turn the volume down on the computer so as not to give himself away. He does like to read… his favorite reads are the Captain Underpants books and he will sometimes head upstairs early just to read before going to sleep and he likes to play with Legos.
Jakob (5) is our poster boy for OCD, or as we see it OCDD… obsessive-compulsive drawing disorder. The boy loves to draw, and I don’t mean as in sometimes… he draws like continuously. I think secretly he’s hoping that we can figure out a way to implant a perpetually sharp pencil to his hand… I can’t tell you how many pencils that have been sharpened down into nubs. Practice makes perfect though, because he is very good. It doesn’t take him long to grasp how something looks and he does a darn fine job of getting it to the paper too. Our not so secret hope is that he gets a job with PIXAR and supports his loving and generous parents. He sez school is okay, but could be made better/more fun with more drawing… we tried to break it to him that going forward, it’s going to be more books and less drawing. He draws almost anything you ask of him… but he still has his favorites to draw. Still big on drawing Buzz and Zurg… and at times will get on a kick and draw every character from a movie or show… Finding Nemo, Sponge Bob, Veggie Tales… doesn’t matter. He’s currently working Cars into his rotation. He still remains the performer of the bunch… I think that if he could somehow (permanently) become Spiderman, he would. Julie picked up a Spiderman costume at a second hand shop and he lives in it. If allowed, he’d wear it everywhere… including school. Many of his drawings are of him as Spiderman fighting various villains and protecting us weaker common folk from said villains. He loves reading too… he likes to read about dinosaurs and spiders and snakes… for that matter, just about any kind of animal. Early on in the year Jake would tell us that “I didn’t know you were coming”… he’d flinch when he would get caught doing something that he knew he shouldn’t be and you’d ask him why he was doing it and he’d say, “I didn’t know you were coming.”
Reminds me of a comic strip I saw… It’s of an “employee” sitting at his desk with the “boss” standing in front of him asking the question, “why aren’t you working?” to which the employee responds, “Cuz I didn’t see you coming.”
Rachael (4) is our Lady Godiva in waiting… her hair is down to her butt cuz mom doesn’t want to cut any of the original curls off. Involving much trauma, brushing hair isn’t a daily event since it is a bit of a challenge to get a brush through it all. She is our little cutie-pie though… very girly like in her ways. Even though she barely misses the cutoff, we decided to try and get her started out in school… we felt she was ready from a scholastic standpoint, we only wondered about the social aspect of it all. She’s doing great and is wowing them in class with her ability to spell (and write) her own name… she even helps other kids spell and write their names too. Everyone there sez that she’s such a happy girl and is always smiling… she does indeed smile an awful lot and is very sweet. She truly enjoys school and is always asking, “Do I have school tomorrow?” She enjoys drawing too and draws many family pictures showing all eight of us. She loves her new baby sister and likes rocking her in her seat and does a fine job at getting Ana to sleep. Spidergirl lurks in the shadows of our resident Spiderman… and in fact is Spiderman’s sidekick. Bet you didn’t know Spiderman had a sidekick… you do now, but don’t confuse them… Spidergirl does her own thing. She got her first taste of swimming lessons this year too. Though she was a tad upset when she discovered that she wasn’t going to be in the same class as Jake, but all in all, she did fine and in the end enjoyed it… especially the last day when all the candy was handed out. One of Rachael’s favorite saying early on in the year was, “you didn’t see me do it”… you’d ask her if she did something (that she shouldn’t have) and she’d respond with “you didn’t see me do it.”
Lyndsey (22 months) is a touch brutish. She’s a typical 22 month old though… temperamental, hungry, silly, happy, tired, thirsty and cranky… all at the same time, and by thirsty… I mean she really likes her milk. I believe that if we could somehow graft a cow’s udder to her she’d be happy as a clam at a canceled clambake. I mean it’s been a real challenge to get her to drink anything else. She’s discovered the word “try”… but what it really means to her is “I want some” and she does say “want some”, but she just needs to sort it out in her head. She will say “try” to chips and cookies… like she’s never had those before. “I pooped” or “I poopin’” are well worn phrases, seems that anything that escapes her butt is “poop”… even if it’s not truly poop. I mean she knows the universal slag term for passing gas, and she knows what it is since she thinks is so funny when someone releases. She will call out said offenders name, wave her hand in front of her nose, and say “P-U”. If you ask her, “what?” she will identify it using said universal term. She’s also pretty good in letting us know “baby’s crying”. She likes to draw on anything other than paper. She’s also pretty assertive in knowing what she does and doesn’t want. Though currently not getting her way is generally followed by a flop to the floor accompanied by some loud wailing… which we don’t acknowledge… going to be a hard lesson to learn that that type of behavior isn’t accepted and won’t be tolerated. We were recently at Rachael’s Christmas program and Lyndsey had one of her little episodes… some of the other parents were looking at us like “um, you do know your kids laying face down on the tile crying don’t you”? When she’s not flopping, she’s busy getting into things that she’d be better off not getting into. Never fails though, as with the other kids the more you don’t want them to get into something, the more likely they will… it’s directly proportionate. She loves to dance… she really loves shake her booty, as the other kids call it, to the music. Whenever she sees my iPod, she will say, “Blue Clues”… or as she sez, “Clues Clues.” She’s really starting to get into Blues Clues and I have the first two seasons on it and, so she gets excited when she sees it.
As if writing about, talking about and reading about five kids weren’t enough, just when you thought the letter was finally and mercifully coming to an end, there’s another to write about…
Drum roll please…
Introducing… Analiese, (6 weeks) as of my writing this and pronounced like “on-uh” and not like banANA… so it’s “on-uh-lease”. She reluctantly joined the traveling sideshow that we call a family on 26th of October. I say reluctantly because after two false with two runs up north the third time was the charm. If it was left to her Ana, she might still be in the womb. It was a very sluggish delivery… starting and stopping making for a long day, but in the end all was good and we collected a large amount of cord blood. See we banked her cord blood for future use for Emmah and for that reason, this was the first non-home birth... but it was for a good cause. Our hope is that by having it we won’t need it. Anyway, she’s the fourth nine pounder in the bunch… 9lbs 6oz and 21½” long… and is quite proud to show off her lungs. She sounds like a stuck pig and we fear that one of these times, she’s gonna blow a gasket or something, that or she’s gonna pop her navel into an outtie.
As far as Julie and I, well… we’re still together, still working on the never ending saga of out house
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