Why, hello there!

For anyone still following along, I know it's been 9 months. I'm making a couple updates to my blog and am deciding if I will keep posting here. Life got really messy and complicated in 2009. I'll just put it simply and say - it sucked. I've learned a lot about life and myself, that's for sure.

I'm not one to focus on the negative though. I'm so very blessed and fortunate to be able to tell you that I've done well health wise with my melanoma diagnosis. I had surgery back in March to remove a big chunk out of my leg and I had a lymph node biopsy. Since the original biopsy of the skin cancer came back as a clark level III (out of 5), I was facing the possibility that the cancer had spread. A few weeks after my surgery, my lymph nodes came back clean, which means that appears for now that the cancer hasn't spread, so I didn't have to go through chemo. All of my follow up appointments have been good so far. I'm planning on getting a PET scan in the next month to follow up on things, but I have no reason to believe anything is wrong. It's just to be sure. I want to be sure.

The kids are doing great. Aidan is now in Kindergarten and showing amazing progress. He makes me laugh every day and he's the sweetest child on earth. I thank God every day for him and that fact that he has some special needs just makes him who he is, and I love him just the way he is. Brigid has excelled in school and loves reading and piano. They're just 2 great little kids.

I hope to keep posting updates and get back here. 2010 is a whole new year and I have a whole new life. My parents are gone, but I still have many great family and friends and I've been shown so much love this year. I have God and my faith that has pulled me through every dark moment these past few years and has been the light that kept me on the right path and has given me hope.

I don't mean to sound overly dramatic, but it's been a bad few years. "Lo, though you walk through the valley of the shadow of death..." I've been in the valley of death and despair, but I don't fear. I truly feel like I'm emerging out of it and I've got a lot to look forward to in life. I don't know what the new year will bring, but no matter what, I'm not alone and I'm not afraid.

And the bad news is...

Many of you who know me well and read my blog, know why I haven’t been posting. I don’t mean to be mysterious to the rest of you. It’s just I’ve been having a lot of issues that I don't want to broadcast out into the world, to be recorded forever and ever… amen. I’ve let a few months slide by in my postings, so I thought I’d draft a small update. At least I’ll try to keep my little family blog from atrophying. I have been posting here for over two years and I’ve hardly let a week go by. Why did I suddenly stop posting for a few months?

Let’s start with Aidan. I am trying to keep his privacy for the future in check here, but I think it’s OK to say we’ve been dealing with autism here. At this point, we know it’s a relatively mild case, or high-functioning autism – something that appears to be around the Asperger’s level, and maybe a little worse. The good news is that it’s clear that he has amazing intellectual gifts! He has amazed many of his therapists with his ability to spell words, write letters and draw. It’s clear he is gifted in art, music, math and writing. That’s a lot to say for a four year old! The negative side of all of this is, as with most autism cases, he has a lot to overcome socially. Poor eye-contact, speech delays, lack of imaginative play and trouble making friends to name a few. We’re working hard with him and have him in different types of therapy

Dealing with that has taken up a lot of my time and thoughts… until…

I had my annual physical at the beginning of April, where my doctor noticed a funny looking mole on my lower-right leg. I’ve had a few funny looking moles removed in the past. I’m a moley kind of girl, and have even passed my frecklieness onto my dear children. Funny looking freckles on me do not tend to send up the alarm bells for me, but occasionally I’ve had them taken off, just to be sure. The doctor sliced, stitched, and I was on my merry way. It didn’t even hit my worry meter, which is saying a lot for someone who’s been known to lose sleep over where I’m going to park for a doctor’s appointment the next day. I like to worry.

About a week later, my doctor’s office called me at work. “Your biopsy results came back today. Can you come in this afternoon to consult?” It usually takes me at least 7 days to get an appointment with this doctor, and here he was calling me to come in that afternoon?! Try to finish a work day after that. I figured it wasn’t a social call, but I had no idea what it might really be. Time to dwell and obsess for awhile!

Since I worked for Mayo Clinic for a number of years, their website, www.mayoclinic.com tends to be my first reference stop when looking up health information. I typed skin cancer into the search bar and came up with:

Skin cancer — the abnormal growth of skin cells — most often develops on skin exposed to the sun. But this common form of cancer can also occur on areas of your skin not ordinarily exposed to sunlight.
There are three major types of skin cancer — basal cell carcinoma, squamous cell carcinoma and melanoma, which is the most serious of skin cancer.
Since I had no idea which one it might be, I googled pictures of each type, to see if any looked like mine. I started with the first two less-serious ones and they just didn’t fit the bill. The Melanoma one? The one that says “is the most serious of skin cancer”? Yeah. That’s exactly what mine looked like. The kind that kills people.

The more I read about melanoma, the more worried I became.

“Malignant melanoma is the most dangerous type of the skin cancers. Typical features of melanomas include irregular borders, multiple colors within the lesion, rapid growth, and susceptibility to easy injury with bleeding. Any mole that exhibits any of these changes should be evaluated immediately by your physician.”

Check. Check. Check and… yep. Check!

photo below is an example of what mine looked like, but not an actual picture of mine. I never thought to take a picture of it, although I kind of regret that now.

By the time I got to the doctor’s office, I was a complete wreck. He handed me the pathology report, and it was exactly as I had feared – Malignant Melanoma – Clark stage III. My doctor appeared to be as shocked by the diagnosis as I was. He honestly thought it was just a simple mole. He rightfully patted himself on the back a bit for SAVING my LIFE! After all, I did not even point the mole out to him. He noticed it as he was checking me reflexes. If he had not noticed and removed the mole, simply put, it would’ve killed me.

Happy thoughts…

The next step for me will be to go in to surgery on Monday and have 2 square inches of skin removed around the original mole site. (Draw 2 inches and make a square out of it, and you’ll get the idea of the size.) I’m not very excited about this, but at least they’ll put me under and give me good drugs for the situation.

In addition, they will do something called a sentinel lymph node biopsy to find out if the cancer has spread. I’m not entirely sure what’s involved in that, but I’ll post more next week and let you all know the joy of a lymph node bisopsy. My prayers right now is that they are clean, because that means I’m done and can go on my merry way, with checkups every 6 months. If I have cancer in my lymph nodes, the next step is chemotherapy.

Chemo. We really really don’t want to think about that. After all, you know my hair is important to me.

That is all, in a nutshell, why I haven’t written. In the future I’ll write more about what has occurred in the past few months, when I’m ready, but I will keep you updated on my current situation. It's an amazing world we live in with this fancy schmancy internet thing. I just have to stay off of Google and melanoma searches because it's a scary internet out there too!

A is for Aidan - PART I

The stories have been funny. Boys will be boys after all. The “funny” Aidan stories are never in short supply. What a funny little quirky child – always up to some mischief. He has always had a mind of his own. But in the past six months or so, his funny quirkiness hasn’t seemed quite so cute and funny anymore. More worrisome than anything. Aidan is going on five soon. At what point do you draw the line and realize when a child just isn’t behaving like other children his age should be behaving? What is normal after all?

I be not one to judge that...

In the past five years or so, I’ve never known a parent of a young child who hasn’t had the big "A" worry. Talk of vaccine scares and toxins in our food and enviornment affecting our children are topics of everyday chatter at moms groups. From the time children are 18 months old, we’re all being told to watch for symptoms of... IT. Is the child talking? Is he giving eye contact? Aidan did those things. No hand flapping or tippe-toe walking. See… no need to worry about A. Except…

Aidan never really has played with other children, or participated in “circle time” or other organized activities. Many times I've watched groups of 30 kids all sit down to a puppet show or movie, except Aidan who continues to just do his own thing. He’s been known to pitch complete blow-out tantrums if another child comes into his space. That can be normal for two year olds and even three year olds. Four years? It should be stopping. He should be more interested in other children and joining the crowd. It’s sad when the other children at daycare come running up to him, excited to see him, and he just ignores them and goes straight to his favorite toys. Of course, that alone doesn’t point to anything wrong. At least he talks and communicates, except…

Aidan’s teachers have asked us on different occasions to have his hearing checked. We did, and his hearing is tip-top. He just doesn’t speak normally. It’s one of the first things people notice about him. He speaks very slowly and very loudly. From the time he was two, he has used great big eloquent words, but he can’t seem to spit them out. Where other children are rambling and babbling, Aidan tends to struggle to express his thoughts, slowly and methodically. He over stresses parts of words and becomes frustrated when he can’t get his thoughts out. He becomes irate when we finish his sentences for him, but sometimes I just can’t help it because I know what he’s trying to say, he just can’t get it out! Speech problems in young children are very common, and he will start speech therapy in a couple weeks to see what’s going on with language. Not something to worry about on its own, but again, we have another EXCEPT…

Aidan is also a deeply obsessive child. When he was two and could play with his train set for three hours straight, we found it cute and we were happy he had such a wonderful attention span. You just couldn’t break that boy away from his activities. To this day, he can sit and color a picture for more than an hour. He will obsess over every line and dot of color and completely tune out the rest of the world. He won’t even break away for a snack or treat. He learned how to write the number 4 this week, and he spent 45 minutes drawing 4’s all over a piece of paper. Big ones, small ones, thick ones, thin ones. He just loved that number. Not… normal… behavior.

The worrisome thing is the way he obsesses over toys isn’t really playing with them. He can build tracks and push a train around the set, but he’s not pretending to, say, pick up passengers or role play a story. He’s only interested in the mechanics of toys. It took me a long time to realize this, since he was always busy with his toys. We’ve been proudly watching him and thinking what a great engineer he will be someday since he loves to build, and missing the fact that he’s not really playing.

A couple months ago I got the Dreaded Daycare Director call. As I’ve posted before, we’ve had many daycare issues in the past, and directors never call to tell you what a delightful child you have. She was mostly concerned that our 4 ½ year old is still having potty-training issues, among other things. These are things daycare directors are concerned with, as opposed to a child who obsessively and quietly draws numbers for hours being a problem. After a few minutes of discussion she asked me “have you taken him to see a doctor?”

What kind of question was that? Of course we go to the doctor! He gets his annual Well Child visit each year and he’s fit as a fiddle!

“Not that kind of doctor. One for… behavior issues.”

I knew what she was getting at, but I wanted to hear her say it. I wanted her to tell me exactly what she was thinking. “No? What do you mean? What kind of behavior issues?”

She was silent for a moment, and I could tell she was trying to formulate her words carefully. Maybe she’s afraid I’d turn her in for falsely diagnosing my child, or sue her for insulting him. “He seems to have some autistic tendencies.”

There. She said it. And as much as I knew it was coming, it still hit me like a ton of bricks to hear the dreaded A word being used to describe my child. All these years I’ve been looking for it, and looking away at the same time. I didn’t want to see it and I didn’t want it diagnosed.

My strategies this past two years are starting to unravel. I’ve been waiting for him to outgrow his quirks, yet he seems to only be growing into them more. Every time we solve one behavior issue, two more seem to crop up in its place. Some days he behaves so well that we can overlook the quirkiness. He’s so funny and loving and just darn cute! But kindergarten is looming just 6 months away, and I know it’s irresponsible to just sit and assume everything is fine. It was time to see what’s really going on. Maybe it's nothing, or maybe...

Time to see a developmental pediatrician.

to be continued...

New Year. Again.

So… I suppose you noticed it’s been awhile since I posted anything. Yeah. I’m sure I can be forgiven for my lapse. Having our parents pass away within months of each other, and just before the whole “holiday season” began, sucked away my writing ambitions for awhile.

I can’t even say that I was all that busy, since honestly, I had a lot less shopping and wrapping to do this year – what with there being fewer people and all.

We did celebrate Christ’s birth with festivities and gifts for the children. We put up a tree, but did not send out cards. We attended church each Sunday of Advent and gave thanks for our many blessings we do have. We kept out of the hustle-and-bustle for the most part, and kept Christmas what it’s supposed to be; a simple celebration of life and family.

Once again it is time to look forward to a new year. I can honestly say I have a lot of optimism and hope to move forward. The children are happy and healthy and we really do have everything going for us. Paul’s business is picking up more and more everyday, even in this tough economy. I have my job, my health, my family… I need to just pick up and move on.

I want to start working on some hobbies again. Maybe I’ll really dive into sewing, since I loved that at one time. Maybe I’ll pick up the guitar again and start plucking away. Don’t worry though, I plan to stay away from singing! I suppose I should start exercising too. That’s what healthy people do, right?

Most importantly, I need to start reaching out to more people and making time for friends. I fill my life with work and the kids and don’t focus enough on developing outside relationships. It’s a typical mom-mistake. I suppose I need to start by apologizing for being such a recluse. Forgive me for not calling/writing/talking!

Forgiving is truly the only way to move forward after all. I plan to move forward now and keep looking forward.

A Musical Note

Photo from a really long time ago...

I'm just experimenting a bit here to see if I can upload an audio file to blogger. In 2000-2002, Paul and I were great friends with a musician named Ben Mallory. He enlisted our musical tallent (well, Paul's tallent and my... musical help!) to put out some Irish Folk Music CD's. We travelled around rural MN playing at coffee houses, county fairs and some private engagements. Some may even remembering coming to see us at Rochesterfest! Ok, so we never made it big time, but we had a lot of fun.

The following song features Ben Mallory on guitar and vocals and me on the bodhran (drum) and female accompanying vocal. Enjoy if this works!...


If you can't get the embedded tool thing to work, just click on this link if you want to listen!

Thou Shall Not Covet Thy Neighbor's Manservant

Last month, Brigid worked very hard in her 1st grade class project to memorize all of the 10 Commandments. I admit, I didn’t even have them memorized myself, so it’s been educational for me as I helped her as well! We got through the first few pretty smoothly, but hit a snag at the whole “Thou shall not commit adultery” thing.

This is not first grade material!

I explained what it meant, sans the whole sex thing, and Brigid pretty much understood and went on. This surprised me from a girl who could cripple me to my knees with all the Why? Why? Why?’s on everything when she was just a bit younger.

The one that really stumped her was #10

“Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour's house; thou shalt not covet thy neighbour's wife, nor his manservant, nor his maidservant, nor his ox, nor his ass, nor any thing that is thy neighbour's.”

The questions poured in about all things thou shalt not be coveting! She was particularly interested in the whole servant idea, and I told her it was a person who lived in the house and had to do everything they were told. I was glad she was more interested in this one than the adultery topic, since it’s a lot easier to explain, however, I may not have done a very good job…

Fast forward a couple months to last Sunday morning. We ran into her teacher and her husband on the way to Sunday school. I had never met her teacher’s husband, and Brigid proudly introduced him to me. “That’s Mr. B! That’s Mrs. B’s manservant!”

Whoops! “Husband Brigid! Husband!” Of course Mrs. B understood the mix-up, since she is the one teaching the children the commandments. I would hate for her to think that we're teaching the children that husband and manservant could be used interchangeably.

One thing’s for certain though. I will be referring to Paul as my “manservant” from now on.

A 6-year-old's perspective on death

Brigid was in her back-seat booster-seat this morning, as usual, on our ½ hour commute to school. As usual, she happily chatted about one topic or another, and I only half listened to her discussion about something about flowers and candles as I tried to catch up on election coverage on NPR for the eight-thousandth day in a row. Suddenly I turned off the radio and asked her to repeat what she was telling me. She happily answered me. “Oh, I’m just telling you what kind of box I want my body placed in when I get to die and my body is burned to ashes.”



Don’t get me wrong, death is not a taboo topic in our household, and never has been. Paul makes his living drafting wills and managing probates after all. But I’m not ready to hear my six year old describe what kind of casket or cremation box she plans to be buried in. It’s a bit, I don’t know, young to worry about that?!





Death, death and death. That has been the total focus of our family for the past year and a half. If we go back 5 years in fact, there’s a whole laundry list of losses. My mother’s parents, my grandparents, died in 2004 and 2006. Brigid looks through relatively recent photo books of family all around us, and every single person in the book, except for our immediate family, is gone. It’s like a holocaust of sorts just hit our family. Her beloved nana even dropped dead in front of her when she was four. How do you explain all of the missing people from the photobooks?

Grandpa Gerry holding Brigid -

Grandma Bev holding Brigid- Grace holding Brigid - Dad holding Brigid - Mom holding Brigid -
My explanations have gotten better since the time when she was two and we had to put our pet cat, Sammy to sleep. Back then, we just told her Sammy “went to the doctor” and felt no need to explain more than that. I learned the hard way that honesty with kids is the best policy, when she asked me for the next year and a half why Sammy hadn’t returned and why couldn’t we just go get him? I also told her one day that I was going to the doctor’s and she nearly turned white with fear that she would never see me again!

We’re keeping things as simple, yet detailed as possible. Dying is just your heart stops beating and you quit breathing. She understands heaven is where your soul resides after your body dies. I even put a glove on my hand and described it as our body, and our hand is our soul. When your body dies (take off the glove), we can discard it, but the soul lives on forever.

She listens to our explanations, and happily takes it all in, as if we’re explaining to her that dad goes to the office everyday. “Death isn’t sad mom, because everybody is up there in heaven just waiting for us. Daddy’s mom and dad and your mom and dad are there waiting, someday you will be waiting for me too!” As an adult, it’s hard for me to see it as simple as I explain it, but I really really want to see it so simply as well. Everybody just sitting up there, around the dinner table, waiting for us to walk in the door and sit down to supper. We’ll all catch up on old times together and laugh about the good times, while we wait around for everyone else to get there.

That’s a good enough image for now.