Chopped

On Monday night it was just Jakey and me.  Poor Nate went to bed at 6:45PM with a temperature of almost 104.  Meanwhile James was putting another few hundred miles on his car as he drove home from Stanford. It sounds like his follow-up check-ups with the radiation doctor and the…

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Surgery 3

….And….  we’re back.  I’m keenly aware that the Team James updates have been few and far between and for that I am sincerely sorry.  During the six weeks of radiation I was just keeping my head above water.  And I was always cooking.  And putting Jake to bed one hundred…

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Words

Words.  I’ve always loved words.  Loved understanding their meanings, their history, and the way sayings can be so different across languages.  One of my favorites in Spanish is that someone thinks they’re the “ombligo del mundo” or “the bellybutton of the world.”  In English we’d say they think they’re the…

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Sassy 6

My sweet sweet Nate, You turned 6 years old on March first and are a strong, smart, sweet and sassy, Spanish-speaking six-year-old.  The past six years have gone much too fast.  For all the lamentations of the terrible twos, the tantrumy threes, the feisty fours, the effing fives and now,…

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Pokémon Parkour

We are eyeball-deep in schoolyard humor. Gone are the days of that catchy My Little Pony rhyme.  We’ve almost forgotten the Y camp sing-along mantra of Hell-o.  My name is Joe.  I live at Cost-co, I play the ban-jo, and I own Michael Ange-lo.  Or the ever more popular: My…

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Home

My oh my, I haven’t provided an update in quite some time.  We’ve been holding down the fort for the past six weeks.  And boy this fort has some vulnerabilities.  The good news is that James has finished his six weeks of radiation, as of Tuesday, and is now home with…

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Almost Friday

I had a rough day today.  I woke-up after a sleepless night with a body-racking cough.  Stumbled downstairs in the dark, only to be faced with Nate’s balled-up white shirt and sock on the counter… a reminder of the dinnertime “ketchup explosion” two nights ago.  The new box of cold delivered…

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Heartburn

Sometime in November, Jacob experienced his first case of heartburn.  I’m not exactly sure what we had for dinner that night, but he came to me on the couch, complaining that his heart hurt.  He was pressing on his chest and breathing deeply and anxiously pacing back and forth.  I…

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Valentimes

Crazy to think that this past autumn, almost exactly twenty years ago, I met James in college here in San Luis.  And it took us all that time to strategize and plan and finally make it back…  We still laugh about the Valentine’s Day when he took me to dinner…

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