My dearest Jacob James, You turned 8 years old on March fourteenth and are a smart, funny, industrious, resourceful, feisty eight-year-old. The past eight years are truly brimming with Jacob stories— you’ve gone from three to eight in a heartbeat. My sincerest apologies that your annual letter is six weeks delayed. And your birthday…
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…
….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…
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…
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,…
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…
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…
The Scotts Valley Purnells brought James home this weekend for a little R&R. I was so so excited to see him on Friday I felt jittery as I left work. Mostly we took it easy this weekend. We had lots of cups of hot tea and several sessions of “barn…
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…
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…