Happy Birthday to Hans!

This post is belated by a couple of days. Hans celebrated his 6th birthday on Wednesday. We are so happy to party with him all this week. He had a big Pump It Up party with a bunch of his friends and a home made crazy iron man cake. I didn't hardly get a picture, because I am way too frantic during a party to remember to take many pics. But, we want to thank Roxie, our friend and Hans' godmamma for coming out to be here with us this week (she flies back to Santa Cruz today), and we want to thank Vickie for coming down from Bryan to celebrate the day with Hans. I also want to thank all of our friends that we were able to invite for coming out to make his day special. Hans loved his party and felt like the king of the world, I think.

When Hans was first diagnosed and getting through his first course of treatment, I remember thinking that if we could get him to age 6 (without relapsing) we would be out of the woods. I don't know what stats we based this assumption on, or what it means now that he has relapsed and is NED once again, but it is still joyous to be here, at the big 6, looking forward to giving Kindergarten another shot in just about 5 weeks! I think he feels proud to be getting big. It was cute to see him figure out which configuration of fingers to use to show people he was six for the first time. He tried it out a couple of different ways, but now he's opting for the traditional five on one hand plus pointer on the other.

His actual bday was cluttered with a counts appointment at TCH. His counts are looking good! But, he is on a bit of an emotional rollercoaster that makes him moody and unpredictable while on the ABT751. So, we decided it best not to brave the 105 degree heat to go do Sea World and San Antonio just now. We've been entertaining ourselves at home.

Yesterday, we knocked out several more lanyards and even taught Kevin how to make one! I sent all my stock and Carmen's stock too up to the CNCF NB family conference up in Chicago with Athena and Tracy, so it feels good to be getting some stock built back up. I think we're already back up to about 20 lanyards after a day's effort.

I've got two days to get ready for our trip. Looking forward to seeing our family and old friends. Email me at kevinandlara@hotmail.com if we still need to make plans to see each other! We'll try to come up with a couple of open invitation get togethers, one in Ellensburg and one in Seattle/Edmonds so we can be sure to see everybody.

Lara