Moving In and Moving On...

Forgive us for the lack of recent updates.  Now that Bud is living a more normal life (if a weekly chemo session can be considered normal), we are burdened with more mundane things like house cleaning, doing the groceries, house cleaning, cooking, house cleaning, laundry, house cleaning, preparing for school, house cleaning, summer camps, house cleaning...you get my drift...

Last week we moved into a home whose previous owner was a single guy (looks to be in his late 30's - 40s) with a cat -- you can just imagine what cleaning the fridge and oven (where all he cooked was pizza as evidenced by the pizza pan that he left behind) were like for me -- who never had to clean any of those before in my life!

But I guess it was good, too, that he was single because he never bothered to put anything up on the walls so all we had to do was re-paint the shocking yellow bathroom walls and the psychedelic blue master bedroom to the Zen-like white walls we have in Manila and we were all set to move in -- but not before we had professional carpet cleaners and a cleaning lady tackle the bathroom grime do their thing though.

We are making the most of our life here in the US, but would give ANYTHING to be able to go back home to the life we knew.  When Nadya was given $50 as a birthday present last week, Bianca immediately asked..."Is that enough to buy a ticket to Manila?"

I personally feel that we have been given a second chance to renew our life here.  Not that there was anything wrong with our life before, except maybe that we rarely saw Buddy because he was traveling for work all the time.  Now we are all learning to spend more time together, sometimes I tease Buddy, half-jokingly, if we're going to survive this, since we haven't spent so much time together in all our married life...and now we're together 24/7.

In 2 weeks we'll be going back to Mayo Clinic to see Dr. Gertz.  Bud's progress has been so remarkable that the doctors here at Park Nicollet think he may be ready for a transplant, but that can only be determined at Mayo Clinic which has the facilities to do that.  When he was first diagnosed with cancer on April 18, Dr. Gertz said we were looking at treatment of at least 1 year before we could even consider a bone marrow transplant...that is how miraculous Bud's progress has been!  And there is no scientific explanation for it -- it can only be because of everyone's prayers...

But geez, God, if all you wanted was for us to relocate to the US, couldn't there have been an easier way???  But maybe the answer is NO, because through all this we have all grown and learned so much.  So many things, on hindsight, are making more sense now -- as if God was preparing everything to make our journey smoother...and hopefully, the road stays smooth from now on...

Ria