Hiatus

Merry Christmas!!

I just realized it's been a really long time since I've updated. I apologize to the two people who regularly check out my site (mom and my husband). But in my defense, it has been a fairly busy time of the year. Between my family and Scott's, we have 3 birthdays to celebrate in December, along with the cookie baking, present buying, and all things Christmas. To top it off, Attley is still going through chemo and we're trying out new pain relief drugs to help with his back hip. More on that later.

So, all in all, we've had a great December. Like I said, we filled up two weekends with family birthdays. Its great to see everyone but those events sure are hectic. On my side, we generally get together at my brother, Scott's house. Along with his family of 8, there's us with 4, my brother Jon and his girlfriend Liz, my parents and then Scott's wife, Marie, usually has her side at the parties too, which contributes another 10 people. Its always crazy but the foods always good and we have a good time. Scott's side is considerably smaller, but this year, our neice, McKenna, had her 2nd birthday at Chucky Cheese. Nuff said.

We had some good news this December. Attley went in for his 3rd round of chemo. Before his chemo administration they x-rayed his lungs. All clear! That means that the chemo is working and is at the very least keeping the cancer at bay, but hopefully its eradicating it all together. We also found a new drug to help with the pain in his hip. It doesn't just mask the pain like the Tramadol he was on, but it fights inflammation too which is what he really needs. We've been keeping a close eye on him because his liver doesn't handle the anti-inflammatories too well. But usually we see bad signs of it by now and so far he's been doing great.

Christmas was great. The girls are at a great age for presents and this is the first year that I think Cate actually understood the whole Santa thing AND the whole Jesus thing. I tried really hard to emphasize that the reason for Christmas is to celebrate the birth of Jesus. When I was a kid I always thought it was a cool coincidence that Jesus had a birthday on Christmas. So I wanted her to get it right from the start. Anyway, the girls got some fun presents. I didn't do too badly myself either!! Scott is a notorius grumpy gift giver. He hounds me for weeks asking me what I want and when I tell him what I actually want he calls it lame and won't accept it. He is also, however, fairly clever about making me think he got me something stupid and then he comes out with a really good gift. This year was no exception. You'd think I'd learn by now, but I totally got fed up with the whole thing again this year, totally expecting a super lame-o present. But the Schwake pulled through with a super cool Ipod Nano! Totally unexpected and super fun. We spent all of Boxing day loading it up. Its great!

So, here we are a couple of days after Christmas. The original plan was that we were both going to take the entire week off. I'm keeping to the plan but unfortunately Scott had to work today and, from the looks of it, will be pulling an all-nighter tonight to get something to a client by tomorrow at noon. We had decided a while ago that we would put the girls in daycare today so that we could get some stuff done or just hang out together alone. I could have kept them home considering Scott wouldn't be home but I decided to take advantage of it. I dropped them off this morning at Jamie's and went to the gym for a great workout. I haven't done that in ages. I was planning on going home after that and getting the house cleaned up. But it didn't take long for me to say "Screw that!". I decided to go to a matinee. I had a great time watching "Dreamgirls". It was a great movie. I had a ball!

Tomorrow, I'm going to take Clarebear to Jamie's and Cate and I are going to go to the "Happy Feet" matinee. It will be Cate's first theater movie. I hope she likes it. I'm just looking forward to having a "date" with my little girl.

All right I've blabbed enough. I'll try to post a little more often.

Happy New Year!!