First Day of School

Armed with hand sanitizer and Clorox wipes, Maddy was able to go to school today and join her classmates for the first day of second grade. Many children were excited to come back to school while others were not so excited. Maddy, on the other hand, was extremely excited! She has been ready for school to start since July. Even though she "kept in touch" through Skype last year, nothing could replace the face to face interaction with her teachers and peers. It was a reminder to us that sometimes we take things for granted and don't realize what we have until it is gone. Through Maddy's experience, we have learned yet another life lesson.

Maddy will continue to take her daily and weekly chemo medications at home. Once a month we have to travel to the clinic for a chemo treatment. As long as her counts stay up and she can avoid as much sickness as possible, we hope to have a somewhat "normal" school year. We are keeping our fingers crossed!

Give Kids the World

We took our Make-A-Wish trip to Give Kids the World on July 13-19. (Sorry it has taken so long to post- our home computer crashed the day we got back.) All we can say is that the Make-A-Wish organization is truly wonderful and the Give Kids the World village is named appropriately. We were treated like royalty during the whole trip and it was a week of NO worries! We went to many parks, swam in a beautiful pool, participated in numerous activities at the village, and ate A LOT of ice cream. We are attaching some pictures, but it was difficult to choose which ones to post out of the 500 we took! The only problem- we are now so spoiled that any future vacations will fail by comparison.

P.S.- Even though we did not get to swim with the dolphins, we did meet some at Sea World. And yes- they do have belly buttons! : )