This is the stuff....

It's so hard to know where to begin.  I have friends with blogs and they always are so eloquent.  There words just seem to flow and they seem to have a way to touch the heart of anyone who reads them.  I have never been one that's good with words.  I can't find the right words to write in a sympathy card let alone write a blog entry that will ever capture all the emotions it means to be a mom.  Any mom knows that you can't put into words the love that you have for your children.  It truly is a gift from God that we are allowed to be mommy and yet at times its so tough and exhausting we wonder if we are doing everything all wrong.  If anyone listens to Christian radio they may have heard the song "This is the Stuff."  It reminds me so much of my life... "This is the stuff that drives me crazy, this is the stuff that's getting to me lately.  In the middle of my little mess I forget how big I'm blessed."
This past year has brought so many blessings through good times and bad, sickness and in health.  We spent a week at Hilton Head with my parents in June and it was the most amazing time we have had at the beach since Layla was born.  For the first time we could really enjoy watching the kids play, swim, build sand castles and love life.  Layla finally went out in the ocean and found sand dollars and Davis learned to ride a bike.  It was amazing!  In July, the kids, mom and I went on "Family Road Trip 2011."  We went to a coal mine in West Virginia, to Ohio to visit with family, then to Columbus OH to visit my cousin and go to a great water park.  At the water park, Davis had to swim 50 meters to pass the swim test so that she could do the "big slide" and she did it.  She is such a determined i.e. stubborn little girl and those kind of moments make me thankful for the sauciness that God blessed her with.  When we left Ohio we went to Hershey Pennsylvania to the Hershey's Chocolate World for a long but once in a lifetime kind of day then heading back towards the South.  It's amazing after all the great things we did on our road trip the kids came in the door and the first thing they said was "We got to stay in a HOTEL!"  I am constantly amazed and humbled by how little things are such a joy to our children.  We ended the summer with a beach trip with Jamie's family.  It was another amazing time to watch the pure joy children ooze with.  I will treasure that summer forever. 
But then there was fall.  The beginning of September I noticed a mole on my back that didn't look right.  After deciding to have it removed, I got the call everyone dreads after going to the doctor.  You know the moment that you hear the doctors voice on the other end of the line that the news is never good.  The biopsy came back as melanoma.  Words can't describe what that moment feels like..... shock, disbelief, fear.  But then my next thought is, so this is a skin cancer, not a "real" cancer.  How bad could it be.  And like every, 30 something year old person does, I got on the Internet.  The first line I read was "In 2009 nearly 63,000 were diagnosed with melanoma in the United States, resulting in approximately 8,650 deaths."  Deaths... that's the word that stopped me in my tracks and caused my world to crumble.  At that point I wasn't thinking about me.  I was thinking about my kids.  What if this was this bad, what if they were to grow up without a mommy, what if I didn't get to see them graduate high school, get married, have kids... this list went on and on.  I think the words "what if" may be the worst words in the dictionary.  The fear of the unknown is a terrible place to be, just give me the answers and I can deal with them but not the what ifs.  I can't prepare for what ifs.  Some answers came the next day when I went to the surgeon.  He explained that they were going to do a "wide excision" ie cut a large piece of tissue out of my back leaving a 4-5 inch long scar and they would also do a sentinel node biopsy, most likely in the area of my arm pit.  They inject dye near the mole then will track which lymph nodes the dye travels to first.  By testing these nodes, they will know if the cancer has spead to the lymph nodes, the most likely place it would go first.  In the mean time, my surgery was scheduled for 6 days from then and I continued to research on the Internet.  The Internet was like a drug, though I knew nothing good could come from it I couldn't help but looking.  There was nothing else that I could do.  That same week the kids had the opportunity to go on an impromptu trip to Disney World with Grandma with Maxx.  It was bittersweet to let them go.  I wanted to just hold them and tell them that everything would be ok... though they didn't know there was any chance that things weren't great.  They were going to Disney and most exciting of all for Layla was she didn't have to go to school for 2 days.  The next week was a whirlwind of emotions.  I realized how truly amazing the power of prayer is.  I knew this before I guess in theory but never had I felt God holding me up as he did the next week.  I have an awesome Sunday school class that prayed for me among so many others but I would just feel a sense of peace then get an e-mail that someone was praying for me.  They blessed me in so many ways that week words cannot describe how thankful I am.  And on Thursday, the good news came.  The melanoma though it was a stage IB and very aggressive was well contained with clear margins and the lymph node biopsy was negative.  Then followed a trip to the Dermatologist and finally a trip to the Oncologist who answered the million questions of mine that followed.  I was so blessed to have seen the mole when I did, by no coincidence I saw it when getting ready for church, but just as much blessed by the lessons that this experience taught me.  Life is short, don't take things for granted. 
I went into this Christmas wanting to soak up ever second of it, because you never know when it may be your last.  You never know what God plan is for you and how your life can change in a second.  I certainly knew this already but apparently I needed a jolt to remember how fragile life can be.  And so here I am at this moment wanting to live every minute to the fullest and wanting to not forget one second of it.  Alas, here I am doing something I never thought I would do... blogging.     

So Here's a Start

So yes I am now attempting to enter the world of blogging.  We have so many memories from Christmas and the past 8 years since our world changes with the birth of our sugar plum princess, Layla Spetember 29,2003.  I wish looking back that I would have done something more to remember all those moments that seem to fade away in our minds, then suddenly reappear as vividly as the moment they happened.  But alas, the past 8 years were a whirlwind, with our love bug Davis' arrival November 2, 2005 then our handsome boy Dylan Feb. 13, 2008.  So, from here forward is my attempt to write down those memories that will forever live in our hearts.