Rediscovered

After my dad's father passed away last year, my dad sent me a small envelope containing photos of my parents that I'd never seen before. My mom didn't keep any pictures after she and my dad divorced, but I was happy to have some pictures of all of them to keep for posterity. This picture is the only one that I think exists of all of my grandparents together at the same time. The original is pretty faded, so I had a good excuse to play around with Photoshop and scrap the picture for my own album.

This promises to be an interesting week... I go back to the Infectious Diseases guru to get my results tomorrow. I have a suspicion that they won't have found anything new, but I'm hopeful that I'll leave there with some answers. Answers or not, I board another flight this week, but this time with Rob and Sam. It should be fun, exhausting and interesting to have Sam at the nationwide Relay Leadership Summit with me this weekend. Everyone is looking forward to him being there, but I'm a tad nervous about managing to host breakout sessions, help direct general sessions, support Rob as he speaks in front of 600 fellow Relayers AND watch Sam simultaneously. Something tells me that he won't stay quiet just because Daddy is up on stage! I'm keeping my fingers crossed that the volunteers from Colleges Against Cancer find Sam as adorable as I do so that I have a pair or two of extra hands when there's a lot going on!

As I said to Kelli this week, it takes a village to raise a child around Relay.

Sportin a new 'do

After 10 minutes of screaming that made it seem more like two hours, Mr. Sam has a new look. It's hard to believe this is the kid who came home to us with long flowing locks. He plays hard and sweats like a beast, so we took the plunge and cut his hair off today. An unintentional, yet welcome, side effect of this drastic aesthetic measure is that we can avoid another trip to Kids Kuts for a very long time if we so choose.

We also spent today at Lukas' second birthday party. We all had a great time. Sam is in his glory when there's a moon bounce, cake and lots of kids to play with, so he came home deliriously happy and totally tuckered out.

He made some social/bonding headway today, too. He's usually pretty stoic about physical affection with most anyone but Rob and I. During the entire ride from Lukas' house to ours, Sam bemoaned the fact that he left without hugging and kissing everyone at the party. This complaint came AFTER the fact he made me stop in the middle of the cul-de-sac so that he could smooch Aunt Noel and Uncle David before we headed out. I just love watching him love other people!

Back to the drawing board

It's sort of back to square one with all of the fun medical testing. I finally saw the esteemed Infectious Diseases expert today... The good news is he doesn't subscribe to our friend Ted's school of thought and is not considering quarantine as a necessary measure.

The latest is that the Epstein Barr numbers are apparently "meaningless" now that we know the malignancies associated with that virus have been ruled out.

The new plan is to test for many other varied and crazy illnesses, mainly because as the new doctor puts it, I'm "no help at all as a patient." Translation: I give them no symptoms other than fever to go on, so they have no idea where to start.

All of these doctors visits could go to my head and make me think I'm more popular than I am. Everywhere I go now, it seems a whole gaggle of people come in to check out the weird patient. The nurse that precedes a visit at any doctor visit always asks how long I've had a fever. When I reply "about three months" as I did today, the response is always the same. It's some variation of "holy cow" or "Oh my G-d." Since when did they start teaching that as a smart bedside manner in nursing school?

I am heading to Denver, then to Phoenix for meetings starting tomorrow, so I'll be camped out at LapCorp as if there were a new iPhone waiting behind the door for me. I only have about one hour before needing to be at the airport to get half of my blood sucked out. Seriously. I left the doctor today with THREE prescription slips filled with teeny tiny doctor's writing... All names of interesting things to check for. My personal favorite is cat scratch disease. Hmmm.. Wonder where I could have picked that up? Maybe there was an outbreak in some city that I didn't know about and I contracted it from a hotel shower curtain or something. The doctor's the expert. I trust him and will just stick out my arm and keep my mouth shut.

My favorite question of the visit was this: So, you travel out west for work? Were the Santa Anas blowing at any time while you were there?

Uh... Paging Dr. House??

All kidding aside, this doctor is clearly insanely smart and experienced. It was actually interesting to watch his mind work. He also has a great bedside manner. He made me feel like he's concerned and going to get to the bottom of this, but also that I don't need to panic about anything. Even knowing it will take two weeks to get results, I really don't mind waiting that long. Up until now, I've been itching to get results so I know what to worry or not worry about. I feel like I'm in good hands and will just be a patient patient for now!

I'll keep you posted. I'm amazed at how many people have been so gracious about telling me that they're concerned and praying. It really does make me feel better.

My friend Andy should probably take the job of prayer team captain after today. He emailed to check in and say he and Anne were still praying down in Georgia for me. I asked him to say a little prayer for George, too. He sent a reply saying that he would, and not 10 minutes later, I found out George was released to go home straight from the ICU. That's some quick service! The minister himself didn't seem to be able to work that kind of magic... I don't care how it happened. It was good to see George at home and looking good tonight. It puts so much in perspective to see someone you care about go through so much without warning.

It reminds me to do a better job of hugging my family and enjoying life. Worry doesn't make life any more certain... It's always good to be reminded of that.

MommyMo revisited

I keep meaning to "capture" this little memory but forgetting...

When I started this blog, and was not feeling much creativity when it came to finding an appropriate title, I chose "Life as MommyMo" because I just LOVED the fact that Sam would ask for more kisses by saying "Mommy... MO!"

That phase didn't last much longer once he figured out to say more than a word or two, but I kind of liked remembering it every time I logged on to blog something new.

Well... Lo and behold, Sam actually called me "Mommy Mo" the other day. I'm fairly certain he hasn't been reading my blog, so it's not like he hears that combination of nonsense words anymore, but nonetheless, that's what he started calling me. It took me a day or two to figure it out, but I think I've figured out why the name has resurfaced.

Around the same time that Sam started with the kissy "Mommy...MO" requests, we gave Rob a shirt for Father's Day (2005) that has Snoopy on it and says "One Cool Daddy-o." A bit corny, but Rob had officially been a dad for just five days when the gift was given. It seemed perfect at the time because Rob was a huge Peanuts fan as a kid and we attempted to find decor that would allow us to decorate Sam's room with Snoopy as the Flying Ace. No luck, so he just had airplanes!

Anyway, for two years now, we've been referring to Daddy as "Daddy-o" at our house. Sam also started calling me "Mommy-o" not too long ago, then decided to add "o" to almost everything he said. That apparently got boring after a day or two, so he started learning to rhyme, toddler style. Somewhere along the line, he morphed all of that into calling me "MommyMo." As fast as he's growing up, it's so fun to be reminded of some of the babyish things he used to do!

Sam pretty regularly shows us how he's maturing. Rob and I went with my mom to the Farm to Fork dinner at Tortilla Press tonight (a belated Mother's Day dinner from my Mom to me and, as she also put it, a reason to celebrate a clean CT scan. She looks for any reason to celebrate!) Rob's mom was here to babysit. They played for a long time, and little Sam was tuckered out. When Nana went to put him to bed, he pretty much kissed her goodnight, then dismissed her to go let the dogs in! He heard them scratching and told her that she'd "better go take care of Frankie now, Nana. He wants to come inside." He used to whine and find a billion reasons to have us come back to his room, but after sending Nana on her merry way, he tucked himself in and went right to sleep... No more baby!

The saga continues, but good news for now

By now, most everyone knows that the BIG test came back with great news... No purple shirt at Relay for me! I tried very hard to be pragmatic, but truth be told, I was nervous once I heard we needed to "look for malignancy." My doctor tried to tiptoe around the "c" word, but from the moment he uttered those words, I was scared.

I think that's why, even with good news to report, it's been so hard to put virtual pen to paper and confirm that the CT scan showed no cancer. I did this with the ectopic pregnancy a few years ago... When things are that serious, I tend to talk about them when I'm actually with someone, but have a hard time writing about it. It's like the permanency of writing it down bothers me or something.

Anyway, I should get over that because for now, things are looking much brighter. I still have a fever, but I'm optimistic that with a scan of just about everything but my toes, we've ruled out really yucky stuff. I'm off to an infectious diseases specialist next week. Ironically, I'm seeing the same doctor who cared for Andrew. He was so good to Andrew, particularly as things neared the end, that I have a special place in my heart for him. I certainly never expected to see him as a patient myself, but if he can figure out what the heck my weird blood numbers mean, I'm happy to go.

I included the pic of Sam at the top of this post because given all that I've been worried about lately, I'm feeling even sappier than usual about how lucky I am to have Mr. Sam in my life. It's hard to take yourself too seriously when you have a three-year-old whose favorite thing to do is hang upside down from the couch and hum the theme song to Little Einsteins. That kind of reality check is good for anyone!

Sam's in another Nonni phase right now, too. He keeps waking up and asking what time Nonni is coming over. When she left here after a brief visit to use our computer last night he sat on the step as usual, waiting for her to give him her usual honk and yelled, "Bye-bye, cutie pie!" Even our neighbor across the street laughed out loud!