Catching Up

I'm going to do a series of  posts catching up on the last six weeks, but here's the short and (mostly) drama free version:

 My Dad, who has had Parkinson's for nearly 30 years, got diagnosed with bone marrow cancer (MDS).  This sounds terrible, but is actually fantastic news. 

It turns out that much of the decline he's had over the past year is actually from not having enough blood cells, not really the Parkinson's, AND they can do many things to get his bone marrow producing cells again, AND the actual cancer is very slow and unlikely to be life limiting in his case.  After a certain amount of anguish before we understood all this, we are very, very happy and relieved!

Also, my Dad is retiring at the end of this month, shortly before his 81st birthday!

I've been doing a lot of driving back and forth to NJ, and my sister is still there now, helping out while his bone marrow gets up and running again.

Oh yes, and there was Christmas!  Christmas here, decorating the parish, Christmas in NJ, terrorizing my mother with dinosaurs and traumatizing my sister with llamas, and Christmas back in Maryland with family, friends, and weird frogs.  We really needed all 12 days this year!

And today we are packing up Christmas at the parish and at home, and starting to think about what this new semester will look like.  I've been working on new ways to organize schedules now that we have so many older kids going in so many directions.