Booked

Thanks to good health and great family and friends, it's been a fantastic winter.  This is true even though the weather has provided only one sledding opportunity.

Azalea's hat is actually an owl puppet that I made for her.  It was her own genius that told her to wear it as a hat.

However, I remain committed to my desperate need for a vacation.  I have worked and worked for months and months, laboring away at home and at my job and at my health.  During cancer treatment I longed for a Caribbean vacation, but this has been postponed until everyone can save up a bit more money.  I have taken long-weekend road trips to visit family and friends, and I have taken a trans-Atlantic flight for my job, but none of these have quite hit the vacation mark.  

Until now.  The stars have finally aligned between my hard-earned bank of vacation time (I have at last saved up 40 hours, no thanks to you, endless Herceptin treatments) and the affordability of airline tickets to Albuquerque, New Mexico.  That is where my mom and grandma live, and if I haven't seen my mom since March then it's been over a year since I've seen my grandma.  Ian, Azalea, Eleanor and I are going to fly down there for a long President's day weekend (Feb. 20), and I can't wait.  It'll be warm, it'll be sunny, it'll be mountainous, it'll be fantastic.  Oh yea, it'll also be a high-altitude cousin extravaganza because my sister and her family are accompanying us.  Won't it be great for my mom to have all three of her grandkids around at the same time?

If you think I'm excited, how about my Azalea Bud, who is old enough to know that she's never been on an airplane but would like to very much?  She is so excited!  She keeps asking when we're going, but as someone who is still learning the meaning of "just a minute", "leaving in two weeks" is somewhat lost on her.  Ian's birthday is just before our trip, so for a point of reference I told her that after daddy's birthday we will go on our trip.  The result is that every day she asks if it's time to give him his presents, bake his cake, etc.  Quite precious, but clearly I haven't helped her at all.  

My mom had the idea to cross off dates on a calendar, but I took it one step farther and turned the idea into a craft project.  Today we made two airplane trip counter-downers, one for each girl.  Every day they get to tear off a paper ring, and the day they tear off the last paper ring is the day that we're going on our trip.           

I wanted to make one for myself, too, but my creative energy was spent too soon.

Because of this trip I had to delay the colonoscopy by one week.  Honestly, it felt good to move an appointment like a normal person.  I never touch my oncology appointments, but I don't see the colon thing as an oncological issue and thus moved that appointment as one would move a dental checkup.  Let's hope it hasn't gone the way of the breast and I can continue to be casual about my colon.