Countdown To Christmas

We're counting down the days until "hoo-hoo" comes to our house and leaves toys under the tree for a certain good little boy.

2008 hasn't exactly been a banner year for us. We battled with infertility - and lost, we got a cancer diagnosis, Chris's employer had to cut back hours (and wages) due to the economic crisis and we're feeling the pinch just like everyone else - but we still feel we have a lot to be thankful for this holiday season. We're still here. We still have each other, we love each other more than ever and Chris has been feeling pretty great these last few days. It's with these positive thoughts and happenings that we look forward to 2009. We hope the new year will open it's arms, welcome us in, embrace us and protect us from anything "unpleasant" that the year may have otherwise had in store for us. We're ready for a break.

But for now, we're ready for sleighbells. And the glees and wide-eyed wonder that will shine from within our 2.5 year old on Christmas morning. We're sending this year off on a high note and we're hopeful for what 2009 has in store. And we'll be sure to leave cookies and milk for that jolly man in the red suit. Cookies never hurt anyone, anyway.

Merry Christmas! We love, and are grateful for, each and every one of you.

Our Crazy Monkey

Wanna come over?

Update To Our Update

Chris ended up seeing another dr. at the practice he goes to (Dr. D was out yesterday) and he said the pain that Chris has been feeling on the left side is still his liver - even though the pain had always been on the right side (apparently it's a LONG organ). They sent him for bloodwork this morning to see where his numbers are at.

The bloodwork from a few weeks ago came back ok (from what I understand - I wasn't at this appt - his parents went with him) and it may just be that this monthly injection isn't going to work out for him. If that's the case, he may have to go back to the 3x/day injections, or perhaps another "combination" of doseages will work - we'll just have to wait and see.

Things are still up in the air, and will be until we get the bloodwork back and Chris talks to Dr. D again. But it does all appear to be "more of the same" - which of course is far better than having it be something new.

Just keep sending those prayers his way!

Much love and appreciation. Always.

Update

This last week has been a rough one for Chris. He's spent much of his time either in bed because he was tired or lying around because he was in pain. It's tough to see him like that.

He's got an appointment with the oncologist's office this afternoon.

Please continue to keep him in your prayers.

Peace

There's nothing more peaceful and calming than a blanket of white snow - right up until you unleash 2 dogs and a toddler into that nice, fluffy, blanket anyway!

We woke up Sunday morning to our first snowfall of the season - and this year (unlike THIS from last year), Shane couldn't wait to get outside and see what it was all about!

When his eyes find the right light, they are truly AMAZING:
Our sweet little face:

Different kind of processing for me on this one - a bit "vintagey" - not sure how I feel about it. I think I'm missing the vibrant color (or my "go-to", peaceful black and white):

Ankle deep in the snow - and (seemingly) loving it!

Just a few shots of some of the snow covered trees in our yard:

And there you have it! A post a day for a week, and NO cancer talk (plenty on that next week) - what a welcomed change!

Our Baby

I swear that these first two belong in a J. Crew catalog!!! Assuming they had a catalog for children of course!!!



And these last few I fondly refer to as "the same, but different"! I love that little face too much to be able to choose a favorite - so I'm sharing them all!

LOVE HIM!!!!!!!!!!

Wrapping Things Up

Just a few more from our holiday get-together over the weekend!

Dinner with the girls!!
Poor Kevin! He and Paul were such troopers though - thanks, guys!!
Mommy & Shane:

And a few from our visit to Jones' Family Farms to get our Christmas tree!

"Mama!!! Choo, Choo!!!!"

Our little conductor!

Santa's little helper!

Not to worry, - this isn't the end of the photos! I've got tons to share tomorrow of Shane playing outside on Saturday and of him enjoying our first snowfall of the season early Sunday morning - stay tuned!

Santa Claus Is Coming To Town . . .

Saturday we had our first holiday gathering of the season!

Sullivans, Finns - it's always so nice to get together with you guys. We always have SO much fun and it's great to see Shane play with all of his cousins! Thank you all for making the trip up to CT - we certainly loved having you!

Here comes Santa Claus!!

Shane wants no part of Santa - regardless of who's inside the suit!! He barely even LOOKED at him long enough to get the present that Santa had brought for him -

And when I passed Shane over to Santa so I could grab my camera, all hell broke loose!!

And the only way he would take our family picture with Santa was if we stood as far away from Santa as possible!

Santa's pretty cute, huh?!?!

Look at our poor little boy! Is he scarred for life, or what?!

He started to warm up to Santa just as things were winding down and Santa was getting ready to leave -

But he still had to keep an eye on him! I don't think Shane trusted the big, jolly guy at all!

Santa with all of the kids - notice who's missing from the picture??

I think it's safe to say that MOST of us are looking forward to doing it again next year!!

A Taste Of Things To Come

An incredibly fun weekend means LOTS of new and fun pictures to share! It actually felt REALLY good to get behind the camera again. It's been a while!

I'll share pictures later in the week that show how Shane REALLY feels about Santa! But this is how Shane feels about him right before it's time for Santa to leave!!!

SSShhhhh!! Shane didn't happen to notice that Daddy was the only one NOT around when Santa stopped by!!! (WINK, WINK, HINT, HINT!!)

Shane-isms

Just little things that I don't ever want to forget:

*Snowman = "NoMac"

*Man = "Mac" (go figure!)

*Santa = "HooHoo" (think owl, not Ho Ho Ho!!)

*Glass = "ass" (we ask him to say glass ALL the time now!!)

*"Catch a ball" = his new favorite saying

*Truck (has always been, and will probably always be) = "Gee"

*McDonalds and/or Eat and/or chicken nuggets and/or hungry and/or lunch and/or dinner = "dodtch" (we haven't quite figured this one out, but if "gee" is "truck" we're totally screwed!)

*He looks up in the sky for the "moon" every night as we walk to the car after I pick him up from daycare

*He tells us he's going to do "nice" to the dogs (as opposed to "not nice", which is what he normally does!) and then he'll go up to them and give them a kiss and a pat on the head (Zoe's gotten a lot of "nice"since coming home with her leg wrapped up from hip to toe!)

*He'll open the fridge to help himself to a yogurt and go into the drawer and look for "poon" (which is really a fork!). When his yogurt is done, both the container and the "poon" go into either the sink or the garbage can! (Since he figured out how to open the fridge we go through twice as much yogurt in a week and we end up having to buy new toddler flatware MUCH more often!)

*Everything is "Stuck". If he wants out of his carseat, he tells us he's "stuck". If he can't open a drawer, he tells us it's "stuck". If he can't get a book off the bookcase, it's "stuck". And if you've ever seen "Elmo Saves Christmas", then Santa is "stuck" in the chimney and Lightning is stuck in Santa's sack!

We LOVE this cutie of ours!!!

***And two posts in one day, how about that??***

Oncologist Update (And Our 200th Post)

Today marks the day that Chris was oficially "taken off" his daily injection schedule and put on a monthly one!

He had his first monthly injection today and his next "needle apointment" isn't until January 2!

Dr. Dressler (we'll call him Dr. D from here on out on the blog) came in and asked how Chris was doing. We happily told him that the liver and shoulder pain he had been having was gone and Dr. D looked at us and said "That's often the best indicator that this stuff is doing it's job" - FANTASTIC NEWS!!!! He then examined Chris and as a smile spread across his face, I knew he had good news for us! Chris's liver was "NORMAL"! It had been swolen and that was now gone! He even passed the stethoscope to Chris so that he could hear what a normal liver sounds like! (Bet you didn't know a liver made any kind of sound - neither did we until today). They drew some blood to check his liver functions, but we could tell that he wasn't expecting much of anything to show up! Still, we'll breathe a LOT easier once we get those results back!

All in all - a great day today and we're happily looking forward to the holiday season that's quickly approaching!

As always, your continued prayers are wanted, and appreciated. It's VERY obvious that someone up there is listening!

***************************

Sometimes it really is the little things that make you smile!

This post marks the 200th post of our blog! Trust me when I tell you that when we started this blog a year and half ago, if someone had asked me when I thought we'd be posting our 200th post I would've said "Never!" But, life happens and those happenings need to be documented!

Looking forward to our 400th post!

Poor Zoe

Chris dropped Zoe off at the vet this morning so that she could be sedated so that the vet could take an x-ray of her leg.

Her ACL was completely ruptured!

The vet did the surgery and repaired her ACL and as I post this, Zoe is in the process of waking up from the anesthesia.

We're hoping she'll be able to come home tonight, but the vet tech said that they will often keep dogs overnight after an ACL repair because it is a difficult surgery to recover from.

Fingers crossed for a speedy recovery for our little pup and that she's back at home with us tonight.

I see lots of lovin' in Zoe's future!!! And even though Kylee wouldn't admit it, she's home missing her sister right now!

Ten On Tuesday - Our Week In Review

1) First and foremost, today's is Chris's last day of the daily injections 3x/day! He'll meet with Dr. Dressler (our local oncologist) on Thursday and will be setup on a schedule for the monthly injections! He did great during this 2 week period, but it's starting to get to him. He's also running out of places to stick himself! 42 injections in 14 days is a lot! His poor belly has a ton of black and blue spots all over it!

2) Our poor little Zoe girl is hobbling around on 3 legs right now! She slipped on the wood floor in the family room a little over 2 weeks ago and limped for a day or two. She then seemed better for a few days and started to limp again a bit here and there. We took her to the vet a week ago and he thought everything felt okay and gave us some pills for her. This past Friday night she started limping pretty badly and has been favoring her rear, right leg pretty heavily. She's keeping it up most of the time and is hopping around on one rear leg - she's completely breaking our hearts!! Chris took her back to the vet yesterday and they want to take an x-ray. Because Zoe is so frightend at the vet's office and spends the whole time she's there trying to leave, they'll need to sedate her in order to take an x-ray and play around with her leg - so she's going back to the vet tomorrow morning for all of that. Hopefully she'll be back on 4 legs really soon!

3) We had a great Thanksgiving this year and we were able to stay local, which was nice! We hit a lot of traffic coming back from Long Island last year, so it was nice not to have to deal with that again. We were able to spend Thanksgiving at my mom's with ALMOST both of our entire families together (we missed you Aunt Trae!) which was great. We certainly have a lot to be thankful for this year, but we're already secretly hoping that 2009 has better things in store for us than 2008 did!

4) The day after Thanksgiving, we made our annual trip out to Jones' Tree Farm to get our Christmas tree! We even managed to select the perfect size tree this year! Normally we end up with a tree that's far too big for the spot we have to put it! Shane is still trying to figure out what a tree is doing in our family room!

5) We took Shane to see Santa a few weeks ago and for the first time he cried when we sat him down on Santa's lap! This will be his 3rd Christmas, and the first where he's starting to understand things and is actually getting into the holiday spirit - but he could do without the big, jolly guy in the red suit!

6) Shane's new favorite thing to do is to find anything shaped like a ball (it could be an apple, an ornament, an orange - he doesn't care!), throw it across the room he's standing in and then yell at one of us to "catch a ball"!!! Too cute! If we could only get him to actually try to throw the "ball" towards us, instead of away of us!

7) I finally forced myself to get a "holiday-ish" picture of Shane on Sunday and then sat down and did our Christmas cards. Certainly not my best effort, but it's a card none the less! So keep your eye on your mailbox in the coming weeks!

8) The holiday season is totally upon us! We've done NO shopping and NO baking! Normally, by now, we're done with both of these things! We do have our first holiday gathering this coming Saturday with the Sullivan and Finn clans and we couldn't be more excited! We're ready for some holiday cheer around here! There was even a rumor that Santa might stop by!!!

9) Bedtime has become a 4 letter word at our house! We start our bedtime routine around 7:30 with a bath. 3 hours later Shane is FINALLY asleep! He'll do anything and everything he can to avoid going to bed! We finally had to start putting a baby gate up in his doorway to keep him from coming out of his room (we do take it down when we go to bed so he could get to us during the night if he had to) and even this doesn't deter him! Last night I found him sitting in the rocker in his room watching his Sesame Street Christmas Carol DVD!!! Did I mention that he now knows how to use the remotes???

10) Shane LOVES to help out with the dogs lately! He helps me feed them dinner by scooping out the dry food from the bin and putting it into their bowls (and I'd be lying if I said he didn't help himself to some dry food while he was at it!) and he'll then run out into the garage and bring me in a can of wet food to mix into their bowls! He'll also let the dogs in and out of the slider when they're looking to go outside! And when HE thinks it's time for them to come back in, he'll open the slider and stand there calling for them by yelling "Woof!", "Woof!" - cutest thing ever! He doesn't call for them by name, or even by calling for "doggie". He simply calls for his "woofs!" We are SO in love with this little boy of ours!