Busy Living

Where have you been? [you might be wondering]

As the stupid cancer folks are known to say, I'm busy living.  

There was that c-razy Facebook/Jewish Exponent contest, which, by the way, we won (thanks to all of our fantastic friends and family who liked the photo AND shared it with total strangers far and wide, asking them to like the photo, too).  

Oh, yeah, then there was that new job I was offered (and accepted)..  Guess who's getting business cards??

There's been socializing with wonderful people, 4th of July fireworks for Judah (first time), surviving a brush with hurricane speed winds at the beach, painting and redecorating Judah's bedroom (still not ready for photo tour), visits to new doctors' offices, entertaining Judah during a week off from camp, new acupuncturist, The Amazing Spiderman, and finally selling the white car.

Judah and my favorite founding father

BIG hippo

bye bye miss american pie

initial stages of pasta e fagiole 

Oh, and I found and demolished 2 gray hairs.

ew.  offensive gray hair.

All in all, I'd have to say it's been satisfying to be able to function semi-normally.  Summer heat and Northeastern US humidity are extraordinarily bad for my health (worsened fatigue, shortness of breath, and slightly elevated irritability...), but the opening of a new frozen yogurt place in our neighborhood has been helpful.  

can you guess which one was mine?

Now.  This may look perhaps like ordinary life.  In some ways, it very much is.  Hanging out with your kid, cooking dinner, dealing with typical growing pains of gray hairs.  But what I looked for (and couldn't find) while I was in treatment were the blog posts of what comes next.  For the most part, people are too busy living to come back to their blogs and update.  Plus, the every day stops feeling so monumental.

Psst: I know a secret.  (Most of us in the C club are in on it.)  Every single day can be extraordinary, even when full of vacuuming, carpooling, emptying the dishwasher, walking the dog.  There was a time when just doing one of those things in a day was a feat.  

I think it's valuable to take a minute and be amazed at yourself tonight.  What did you do today that you are proud of?  What might your life look like if you couldn't carry the clean laundry upstairs?  Or handled a kid's exhaustion meltdown?  I've had many a moment in the past few years when I became fiercely angry with my body and felt let down by cells I trusted to keep me safe.  But recently, I've tried to be a little more respectful and appreciative of all that my body unnaturally endured and survived.  I'm still breathing (and presumably, so are you).  And that's a good thing.

xxoo