Well, our 8 week stay at our vacation home in Iowa is coming to a close and this Saturday Eli and I will be boarding a plane heading East to our home in Manhattan. Ok, for those of you new to Eli’s CarePage, that’s mostly a joke, but it certainly feels like we live in NYC and have been visiting Iowa lately. We already know several of Eli’s buddies that are going to be in town the same week we are, so that will be a lot of fun. We also have plans to go visit the new office of our friends at Animoto.com. Side note, the guys at Animoto.com made the cover of Entrepreneur magazine for January 2009 (http://www.entrepreneur.com/magazine/entrepreneur/2009/january/199000.html)!
Mostly people want to know how our Christmas at home was. It was terrible, really awful, couldn’t have been worse. Ha! We had Christmas in our own house, how do you think it was? It was great. We had Christmas Eve at my parent’s house with family. We drove back up that night and put the boys in their beds. We hadn’t gotten out a Christmas tree this year, frankly because we didn’t want to deal with Isaiah constantly getting into it. So, after we put the boys to bed, we pulled out the prelit Christmas tree from the basement, set it up, threw on ornaments, and put their presents under the tree. The next morning, we saw Eli walk past our bedroom and silently stare at the tree and presents. Both boys had quite the smile on their faces and Eli wanted to make sure that Isaiah got to open all of his presents first. Before Christmas, Eli said, “I think I like giving people presents more than getting them.” In all honesty, I think that’s true for him. That afternoon we went to Lacey’s parents house for more presents and dinner. It was very manageable and we were able to start some of our own traditions with the boys, which was great. And get this, I really didn’t take many pictures. I took some video and a handful of pictures, but mostly just enjoyed watching the boys.
Eli and I did some sledding in the backyard last weekend, which was fun. It’s crazy that we can sled considering the fact that we have a flat yard, but we have such bad drifts out here, that we have decent sledding hills! I made a fast Animoto.com video of that, but don’t want to go to the effort of embedding it (I’m feeling really lazy tonight), so I will give you the link:
Yesterday the GMCSF shots arrived (Eli has to have a shot every day from today until January 9th) and Lacey said, “Eli, you got a present in the mail!” He said, “What is it?” and Lacey said, “G shots!” Eli laughed and then said, “Why do I need shots anyway” with a big smile on his face. How many kids laugh when their shots arrive in the mail? To answer his question (for the benefit of those just joining our journey), the GMCSF shots help boost Eli’s white blood cell count so that he has lots of attackers in his system ready to kill any highlighted neuroblastoma cells they might find during treatment. Unfortunately it also means he has lots of attackers in his system ready to attack his nerve endings as well (which is why the treatment is so darn painful). This is the first time Eli has gone 8 weeks without treatment, so we’re expecting that it will be a rough week.
On a final fun note, I forgot to mention that last month Lacey got new Iowa State Cyclone license plates for her truck. They say “ELI4CY”, so if you see these going down the road, you know who is on board! 🙂
Thanks for all of your prayers. We certainly appreciate them. We are praying for safe travels to NYC and back and for a successful week of treatment. There are no scans this week, so it won’t be as rough as last time when Eli had to do treatments in the morning and scans in the afternoon. We should be home on January 10th!
Happy New Year to everyone and my next post will likely be from New York City in 2009!
Oh, and please please please pray for our buddy Coleman Larson (cp ColemanScott) and his family. They had a rough time around Christmas and now have some hospice people helping them out at home. We had a fantastic time with them in Boone at a special Polar Express event they had for the boys. Peggy posted about it and made a great video. They could really use your prayers right now. Thanks!
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