Hope4Peyton

The Peyton birthday extraveganza sped along this weekend.

Friday was a present opening frenzy where she got enough presents to make Christmas a looming threat of disappointment…because, everyone born in December knows you get totally get shafted one way or the other.

Saturday…oh Saturday.

We were treated to some tickets to attend the taping of the Disney Christmas Parade at the Magic Kingdom. Sound exciting? You’d be wrong.

We had to wake up at 4:30 AM to be at Disney on time and that alone made it a trip into the bowels of hell.

Do you see that sky? Yeah…SUNRISE! ACK, reading too much Twilight has turned me into a REAL vampire because the sunrise made me a teeny bit nauseous.

It was chilly and it sprinkled off and on all morning…which, I KNOW, for those of you in snowy places, you’re thinking “WAH, you big baby!”  But that drizzle might as well have been golf-ball sized hail for all the whining that took place.  It’s Florida, people, we are NOT made of sturdy.

We were doing ok at first. We found sustanance and coffee.  We had a great view of Regis and Kelly and Joey Fatone (which thrilled Pete a bit, but not in a boy band sort of way, in a Dancing With the Stars kind of way) and we were just sitting/standing around waiting.

Waiting.

And waiting.

And, yes, still waiting.

After about 3 hours of standing and watching NOTHING happen, the kids getting pushed and shoved by adults who wanted the chance to be on TV Christmas morning and thought nothing of trampling a bunch of elementary school students and the kids asking for the umpteenth time “can’t we just go on some rides??”…we left the parade route.

We decided to go cruise the  rides and enjoy our free Disney time instead of watching Mommy get in a fist fight with a senior citizen with no sense of personal space.

Was definitely the better choice.

Peyton’s a future highway patrol…she’s already into the eyewear

Seriously, it was the Tea Cup ride…can you imagine them on Space Mountain?

That’s my Pete!

There’s nothing about this picture except that his eyes melt my heart

HEH…yes, I spawned

This is ALL Izzymom’s fault for teaching me to take pics of myself

Thank you so much to Radio Disney and the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society (especially you, Shelley) for making the day possible!

In five years Peyton has accomplished so much.

She’s beat cancer.

She’s changed lives.

She’s inspired and uplifted.

She’s charmed and amused.

She’s loved and made the world a little sweeter, a little funnier.

I can’t wait to see what the next five will bring.

Happy birthday, baby girl.

Peyton will be having surgery to take out her port.

Last week at her clinic appointment, I was so excited to see her counts rebounding and to have that proof in my hand that her body was truly recovering from the treatment that I totally forgot to update about her non-fuctioning port.

Grrrrr.

That port.

For those that aren’t familiar, a mediport is a cathetar under her skin that has allowed her to have needles stuck into a little round “septum” instead of having to have IV’s in her hands or arms.  It’s been the way she’s gotten chemotherapy meds, antibiotics, pain meds, blood products and probably a thousand other things over the course of the past two and half years.

It was the first step in her treatment…we’d only known that she had cancer for a few hours before we found out she’d be going into surgery as soon as they filled her with enough blood and platelets to get her through a surgery…to put this strange thing inside her body.

“It makes it so much easier.”

Have you sent YOUR toddler off to have foreign objects stuck into their body, Mr. Doctor?  Then don’t comfort me on how easy it will be.

I could be a tad hostile.

I was so monumentally scared to send her off.

The fakest smile I’ve ever had on my face. E.V.E.R.

I remember seeing her come back with that tape on her chest and that lump of plastic surrounding the needle inbedded in her soft baby skin.  The band-aids where they cut into her flesh with their knives.

Needles.  Knives. In my baby. It was so wrong.

We got used to it.  She understood the ritual, she was comfortable with the numbing cream put on before they stuck her, she would watch carefully as they performed each step of the procedure…once even telling her nurse, “You need to put your glasses on first, Cindy”…she had a preferred kind of tape and she understood that her “tubie” was important and to be protected.

We came to appreciate the port for making the journey easier.  (HEH, they were right…whatever!) Peyton doesn’t even remember a time she didn’t have a port…I think she has a hard time believing me that not ever kid out there has one.  Certainly, a large number of her friends do…but she’ll figure it out.

The  port has now stopped working. Kaput! As if it knows it’s time is up and it’s exhausted.

But it’s done its job and a part of me is happy to see it go.

I thought I’d be more afraid of getting rid of it…never let it be said that cancer moms think rationally. I worried about having to make the decision of when to take it out, can’t we just leave it in forever?…again, with the rational? Not so much.

That choice is being taken away now.  Because the port is no longer working properly, they can’t flush it out or put meds in it to make sure the cathetar part doesn’t clot, which could be dangerous for her.

It’s coming out.

I met with the surgeon today and we chatted about the simplicity of the procedure…the potential risks…the freedoms that are going to be allowed her when it’s gone…she’s going to be able to participate in gymnastics and sports that have been off-limits.

It’ll truly be the last physical tie to her cancer.

It’s going to be gone.

I feel good about it.

Surprised?

Me too!  I can’t wait to see it gone. I actually want it out.

I asked the surgeon if we can have it and he smiled at me, it’s apparently not an unusual request.

He said that some have a big celebration and smash it with a hammer or they frame it as a memento of what they’ve survived.

I have other plans…prettier plans.

I can’t wait to show you….but you’ll have to wait to see.

Perhaps you remember my post about how Rachael was really getting into the Little House On the Prairie book series?  Because, really? Why wouldn’t she?  I’ve actually re-read them as an adult and just find that life they lived amazing..how they did it, I have no idea.

Good mommy effort?  I set the DVR to record all the episodes of LHOTP for my girl so she could see Hollywood’s version…which is vastly different from the books…but still fun to watch. And they DO wear those awesome bonnets she’s so fond of.

Has she seen them yet? No, because we’ve been out of town and crazy busy and she could be watching Foster’s Home for Imaginary Friends instead.

Me?  I’ve been soaking in all the prairie goodness.  Yes, I have. Perhaps the reason she doesn’t want to watch all eleventymillion of them is because she saw them already…in utero..when I laid on the couch for the better part of three months eating nothing but microwave popcorn, incubating life and watching LHOTP and crying because Half-Pint got her feelings hurt again by that little bratastic Nellie Olsen.

So now I find myself in the position that I can’t record more LHOTP episodes unless I delete the ones I’ve already watched, but my daughter-the-reason-for-the-recordings-in-the-first-place hasn’t seen.  Which means either I have to force her to sit down and watch a ten episode marathon or I just admit that I’m actually recording it because I love it and I won’t be ashamed that I’m loving that Michael Landon has the same hair cut as several members of the Jonas Brothers.

Decisions, decisions.

**Updated to add

Oh, emotional punch by the Little House gang! Me and my popcorn sat down and opted to watch today’s LHOTP offering instead of Rocky IV (which is my favorite Rocky, I think even better than the original Rocky…I know!) and there’s an episode where a friend of Laura’s is diagnosed with Leukemia. Ok, what’re the chances? 6000 episodes of Little House and I sit down to watch one with a little boy with Leukemia when they have no options except to stand around and look morbid and steal rides on the train so they can take him to see the ocean before he dies.

Mah heart! It broke.

I really should have watched Rocky IV.

Cause I never once shed a tear when they kill off Apollo.

So there I am.

Cuddled warm and cozy on my bed, reunited with a pillow I left at a friend’s house a month ago, eyebrow deep in Jen Lancaster’s book “Such a Pretty Fat”….which, is HYsterical, but also makes me feel a tad guilt-ridden because I am not using the gym membership I started in January, which I would totally have canceled but you have to go IN PERSON to do it and if I could “remember” to go to the gym in the first place I wouldn’t be canceling the membership…and I hear the thwap-thwap of teeny feet slapping into the room.

I mentally check out of the book, but continue to hold the reading position to see what she’s going to say.

A hand touches my back.

“Mama, will you tickle me?”

“Tickle you?”

“YEAH!”

“Sure, but you have to crawl up here.”

“M’kay!”

She scrambles up the mattress and shows up in my range of vision, all bright eyes and huge smile, anticipating a romping good tickling.

“Let’s try it a new way.”

“Ok, mama.”

“Lay your head on the pillow.”

She does.

“Pull the blanket up to your chin.”

She does this as well.

“Now, close your eyes.”

“Are we going to tickle?”

“Sure.”

“Cause it feels like a nap.”

Dang. She’s sharp.

“No, no, we’re going to tickle this new way.”

“Hmmm, ok.”

So much suspicion from a four year old seems wrong. Where’s the trust, ya’ll?!

“I’m ready, mama.”

“Ok, we’re going to do a Reiki tickle.”

*chirp chirp*

“We’re going to tickle without touching…with our eyes closed…and our head on the pillow.”

“Are you sure this isn’t a nap?”

“Nope, it’s a tickle.”

Now, for all my devious trickery, it was actually quite successful because the threat of a tickle works almost as fiercely as the actual hands-on method.  Just knowing that I was almost tickling her had all the traditional signs of a good tickling: giggling, gasping and squirming.

Then she flings an arm over and slaps me dead across the face.

Oh. The pretty stars!

“Sorry, mama, you ok?”

“I’m fine…but…you DO KNOW what this means?”

She looks at me all serious, full of possible retribution.

“THIS means it’s time for a REAL tickle!”

And I attack.

The kind of tickle where arms and legs cease to function in any effective anti-tickling method, just flail around helplessly, where the armpit and the top of your head are equally ticklish, when you think you may pee just a little bit.

At one point, her shorts slide down and there’s a little handful of booty squirming around as she screams in glee and horror. Her booty is so small that both cheeks still fit in the palm of my hand and I grab it for a final tickle.

“Stop! STOP! STTTOOOOPPPP!”

We both flop to our backs to breathe after the tickle-fest is over.

“Ewww, smell your hand, Mama.”

I cup my booty-grabbing hand over her face and she screams in hysterical horror.

“MAMA, don’t!”

“What’s it smell like?”

“Like butt-crack in the morning.”