Settling In

Brayden and I had a busy day getting prepped for leaving for Little Rock. Dad was awesome to help make sure the car was ready and do some errands as well. All my lists and planning worked okay. We were sad to leave Dad but he has to work tomorrow and will join us later. A sweet friend brought some goodies for us from my sweet Circle of Friends for our trip! Everything from snacks, fruit, water, cheese, magazines, yuumy lotion and on! Even Hershey got some yummy treats! We are so thankful for that bright point of the day and some things to help our week here be a little better. It didn't take long for us to dig in to the goodies!!

In the meantime, we told Dad & Hershey bye before heading down the road. We had an AWESOME time of singing Christmas carols and watching one of our favorite Christmas movies, Elf. Well, Brayden watched...I listened to his giggles and reciting of lines from the movie!

I was super nervous about being in a hotel while his counts are lower. I can only hope tomorrow's update will show that they're still decent. I did a full cleaning when we got here and implemented some rules to keep Brayden as safe as possible from germs. It's so tough! I don't want to talk about how many Clorox wipes I went through or what they looked like after cleaning surface areas, light switches, door knobs, remotes, phones, and the list goes on! Thankfully Dad was able to keep Brayden preoccupied via phone while I cleaned away in the bathroom! I'm so thankful to my work for donating reward points that we can use for this visit this week. If we're going to have to be here this long, it really is a nice location and surrounding. It's a good test-run for what we'll be doing when Brayden's back for 10 days for radiation soon.

We've been a little bummed this evening. I was looking over Brayden's treatment protocol and hadn't realized he would be having another sedation with spinal lumbar puncture and chemo injection. Last week's was kind of rough for him. He's been so sore from them. We're definitely praying tomorrow's goes smoothly for him. He'll have another chemo dose of Cytarabine (Ara-C), but our bright side is hopefully he'll be done soon and we can come back here to the hotel and he can rest. Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday we'll be back in the Oncology Clinic at Children's getting the last doses of Ara-C and kiss this chemo med goodbye! One more down!!

My friend Linda put a great challenge out there: Remember to be thankful always, but especially this week. I've really been thankful for laughter today. A good laugh is amazing. Hearing Brayden's laugh? It's truly miraculous and I don't want to ever take that for granted.