Sunday, January 6, 2019

Backtracking

I wrote this one before Christmas but...better late then never.

Better

Even though I’m back to work (because I’m back to work?) and don’t have as much time at home with my family this Christmas/New Year season, I definitely feel like this year has been better than last year.

Last year I realized on Christmas morning that I hadn’t given Olivia nearly enough to play with. I fixed that this year and she’s in Miraculous Ladybug heaven. She got four new dolls from the cast of Miraculous Ladybug and two new books. At one point I looked over and saw that she’d lined her four dolls up and they were reading one of the books. I mean…can you even?

It was just adorable.

Tom has been…less Scroogy this year. I don’t think he’s ever really meant his Scrooge-like attitude, I think it’s mostly always been sort of a joke with him but this year, he hasn’t seemed to need to be quite as “Bah humbug” with the whole Christmas, gift-giving, spending time with loved ones scene. I appreciate that from him and refuse to ask him if it was due to my medical issues in the past year. I mean, if I mention it, he might decide that this gentler, merrier version of himself has to go and I don’t want that.

Alyssa, being just over three weeks away from sixteen knew pretty much everything she was getting this year. But I was able to surprise her a little, with a pair of duck-foot slippers and a t-shirt that reads: Just a girl who loves ducks.

Have I mentioned the loves ducks? It’s a new obsession and it’s cute. She mostly wanted clothes and hair stuff. But she got a piano too.

Before anyone starts to think we won the lottery or something, this piano has been in the family for years. In fact, my mom has been trying to give us this piano for years. I’ve been trying to convince Tom to let us bring it home for years.

He gave up the fight this year. Wheeee!!! I asked him what his biggest objection to having it in our house was. He admitted that he just didn’t want to have to move the heavy thing.

I told him that my mom promised the help of my brothers and bam, he agreed to do it.

Alyssa is in musical heaven. She’s played it every single night since it’s been home. She’s so excited to be able to practice the song she’s singing in the solo and ensemble contest in a couple of months.

I feel like since I didn’t have nearly as much time off, I’m soaking it all in as much as I can when I am there with my family.

I hope we’re building memories and making the best of our time together. I can’t help but want to make each moment count, just in case I’m not here next year.

I know that’s morbid. I wonder if all cancer patients/survivors feel and think this way in the year following their treatment.

All I know for sure if that I think it. I worry that this is my last Christmas with my family, my last chance to make it magical for them, my last opportunity to lavish them with my own brand of love and affection. I know that this time with them is the only guaranteed time so I’m trying to make the best of it, the most of it.

I hope and pray that I’m wrong, that next year is better yet and the year after that better still for decades to come. I pray for miracles every single day, for each and every one of us.

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