Pretty little friends

I surprised a small toad yesterday when I moved our wheelbarrow, but I didn’t have my phone on me so he didn’t get a photo op. I’m hoping that he stayed out of reach of the Idiot Bos.

I got a hummingbird fly-by this morning, too. I heard wings and froze, then slowly turned to see him checking me out, too. With all the foxglove, lavender, and salvia I have around now, I hope he visits often and brings friends!

Sorry that this photo is a bit blurry. It’s hard to catch a busy bee with just a cell phone camera. There’s not a lot that is as cute as a bee bum sticking out of a blossom!

And this pretty little fella was just chillin’ with me on the porch swing when I took a break from cleaning.

 

Thing One is gettin' oooolllllldddd

A certain Thing One decided to join us so as to not spend spend a birthday alone with the brothers. That will make a lot more sense once you've read the following post. Anyway, we had a good time celebrating Thing One turning 22. Good gracious. How can we be old enough to have children who are old enough to be 22? Sheesh.

Kid knows how to eat, teehee.

And what to do next, haha!

I even got accompanied to treatment. Such a good bean. Happy birthday to our firstborn, who is a delightful, kind and hilarious human. We love you boatloads, as always. Thanks for taking such good care of your old Mum. And your Dada. And for keeping your brothers and the dogs alive whilst we were away. (More on that next.)

 

Radiation rundown- ONLY FUN PHOTOS- appropriate for all viewers, I promise!

FINALLY we are into the fun photo posts! Okay, so here's the deal: proton radiation wasn't here in town. It was in a big city two hours from here so Dada and I would get Thing Three on the schoolbus Monday morning and head to the city where we'd then stay until Friday after treatment when we'd drive back. We put quite a few miles on Gladys!

While it wasn't ideal to be away from the Thingz and I couldn't exactly advertise during our absence that hey, we are absent, there are always silver linings. The biggest one and the one we will be forever thankful for is this: 

WE HAD SO MUCH FUN WITH OUR FRIENDS!

Okay, okay, I was getting treatment that will hopefully help ensure cancer never gets a Round 3 and that's important too, but YAY, WE HAD SO MUCH FUN WITH OUR FRIENDS!

Above is a crew of some of Dada's childhood besties. Some of those guys he played ball with in elementary school, learned to drive with, got into Shenanigans with, and so on. They've gone to school together forever. There's a saying about "you can't make new old friends", and now that we are all turning 50, some of these are golden oldies, ha!

Another saying is "make new friends, but keep the old; one is silver and the other's gold." Everybody knocks social media, but it can be an incredible connector of people you loved lifetimes ago! Above is a gal I used to camp with. Not as a counselor or a staff member- we are talking as 10-year-olds in a cabin together at sleepaway camp without our parents. Not only did I get to reconnect and catch up with her and her wonderful family, she introduced us to one of her new coworkers so I got the old friend AND the new friend experiece! 

Dada had a group of guys he'd been friends with his freshman and sophomore years in college before moving across campus and falling in with a new group. I'd never met the guys of that first group and he himself hadn't seen them SINCE college, so we are talking 30 years of radio silence followed by becoming Facebook friends and maybe some texts to, "hey, we're in town, and you've never met my wife, but wanna have dinner?" It was so great! What a treasure to meet people who were kind when they themselves were students, who invested in a friendship and were willing to reconnect and then to also enfold me!

We also got to catch up with that second group, friends we love but we never get to see because it's just far enough that we can't easily meet for dinner or whatnot. Until now most of us were outnumbered by our kids, so there'd been sports and activities and all the nuttiness, but NOW that we've grown BIG Thingz, we are looking forward to staying in better connection. 

You're probably thinking, "how much eating out did they DO?" Yeah, you do quite a bit on an extended stay like that, AND our friends were happy to host get togethers. It was probably the most retsaurants we will try in a six week block of time for the rest of our lives, and I didn't have a bad meal at any of them. Our hotel had continental breakfasts, and for those of you who worry about money, rest easy: the hospital works with some of the hotels for reduced rates for those undergoing my kind of treatment. The hotel was also a quick walk to an amazing cemetery, but that's an entirely different post.

My team of ladies kept laughing at me. When I'd donned my gown and headed into the radiation room, one of them would ask, "soooo, do you have plans tonight?" Once I got to crack her up completely when I told her we'd been out for dinner the night before, had already had coffee with my camp friend, and had plans for a game night at a different couple's house that evening! We were wasting no chances to spend time with people. 

I hope that some of the intentionality sticks- I tend to turn into a hermit once I'm home- so in case you didn't get the memo yet, Chaos Party at our place this Father's Day weekend! 

What's a Chaos Party? It's us, adding chaos to everyone's schedules by throwing another party amidst the graduation celebrations and Father's Day BBQs. Just kidding. Dada is turning 50 on Friday the 13th and Thing Three just turned 15 and I'm (mostly) done with treatment (the intense stuff, anyway) so that deserves confetti and bubbles and hugs! So come on over!

 

Loud pants and healing skin *photos are viewer beware*

 Monday I had an appointment with my oncologist. She was pleased with my blood work, how well radiation went, and my general outlook on life. We talked about plans going forward, including alternating PET scans with circulating tumor scans. She said as of now I am showing "no evidence of disease" which is where we want to be, but which I take with a shaker of salt anymore because that's how I'd always presented until we found the new tumor last spring. It's been over a year of cancer stuff. Again. 

Anyhow, I wore some loud pants that I bought last summer at the beach. They're super soft and just about perfect except for a lack of pockets. One of the kind gentleman volunteers complimented me, saying, "you're rocking that pattern!" I thanked him and told him that a bestie of mine had a similar pair in black and white, and that when I asked how her day went she'd replied, "nobody heard a word I said all day. My pants were too loud!" Bless his heart, he laughed like it was in the top 5 funniest things he'd ever heard, and then reiteriated that I was rocking them. And people wonder how I could love my medical teams...

For the photos below, a whole week had gone by post-radiation and if you recall the previous photo I'd posted with just one small circle of peeling in my armpit, well, now you can see how that circle had grown and I'm shedding like someone who got snapped by Thanos. 

 It is amazing to me how something can look both better and worse at the same time. I can tell it's healing, but man, about two or three days before these were taken, everything looked TERRIBLE. I'm glad I didn't take pictures. My radiation doc was right on when he said the symptoms would peak that week after and then recede. I'd say 4-5 days post-radiation was the worst. I look even better than this now but am going to wait until Thursday to take any more photos. I think the peeling will be done by then.

Springtime loveliness

I love the flowers at our house. These are Japanese meadowsweet, I think- some sort of butterfly bush. If I was a bee, I'd hang out on these with my friends and giggle about being tickled. Don't they look like such fun!?

This gorgeous moth had me fooled. I thought he was a leaf and I bent to swipe at him before I realized he was holding on tight in the cross breeze through the garage. He stayed put all day before heading off to adventure elsewhere. Such a fancy friend!

Blackberry blossoms, above, are beautiful! I had no idea! And the photo below is also some kind of berry blossom. I must have missed them blooming before, because I was unaware that they were growing in a spot on the side of our property until all of a sudden there were white blossoms but not where our black raspberries are... yippie!!

 

In my defense, I was left unsupervised.

There were plenty of reasons NOT to buy plants this summer, but that didn't stop me! Poor Gladys. There were more plants in her backseat! They all made it home safely and about half of them have made it into more permanent pots. Guess what I'll be doing when I finish blogging today?