Back to "normal"

Last night I returned to our Friday night bowling league for the first time in two years. My game is still lacking but it is about spending time with friends and winding down from the week. I have missed it. And I will have to take a break in a few months when I have another surgery but hopefully that will be a short break.

Also last weekend we went out to celebrate my birthday. Most of my friends were able to come out and join us. I got to do one of my favorite things for the first time in years - singing. I love to sing and the shower and the car just don't fill the void. Then my girlfriends all sang Happy Birthday to me. It was so great!

(I was going to post a picture of them singing but it is on the computer that quit working this afternoon!)

My sister, my birthday

My sister has posted a wonderful entry on her blog about my birthday lunch today!

http://jillboandscottie.blogspot.com/2008/09/happy-birthday-jenn.html

She is right about my response. I was depressed about turning 35 in 2006 and 6 weeks later I was told I had cancer. I will never be depressed about becoming older, only depressed if the party isn't big enough! :-) I am now celebrating being here another year for my kids, my spouse, myself, my friends, and all the other I hope to impact in the years to come!

Don't forget

Friday night is the Stand Up To Cancer event.

Danica we will miss you.

We have lost another brave young mother to cancer. She was waiting for a bone marrow transplant when she passed away this morning. She was a single mother of 3 young children.

http://danicamartinez.com/

Under Armour Power In Pink

The 2008 Under Armour Survivors are out. I wasn't selected as one of the three winners but I was selected for the "additional survivor stories". Check it out! These women (and one man) are amazing!

http://www.underarmour.com/powerinpink/

"Trinity"s and tadpoles

Over the long weekend we took the kids camping at the base of the Trinity Mountain. We went with some friends who spend a lot of time in the area and we did a day trip to the Trinity Lakes. (For those of you who don't know, our daughter's name is Trinity and her daddy has been promising her all summer that we would go to the lakes.) We started at Little Trinity Lake first. There were little frogs everywhere along the bank. The kids must have caught about a 100. I am a huge frog fan so I enjoyed watching them hopping and swimming around and my kids chasing them. Then we went up to Big Trinity Lake. There was hundreds of tadpoles. So the kids caught about 30 of those. (We now have a glass tank filled with frogs and tadpoles!) Before we came down from the mountain we ran into a lady who works with Alvin and our friend Scott. She was camping with her little girl who is about 6 weeks younger than my daughter. I went to introduce the two girls so they could play and it turns out her name was Trinity as well. So the two Trinity girls met at Trinity Lake. They were going to head home but decided to join us at our camp and the girls had a wonderful time. It was a memorable weekend for all of us!

Poem

Mary Ellen Ryder is a Boise State professor who died in a major fire here in Boise last night. She was a two time breast cancer survivor and wrote the following.

Ryder wrote a poem about her experience with cancer in 2005:
Mirror, Mirror—I always hated my body.
My mother hated hers.
It’s an old family traditionhanded down
motherto daughter
along with the genes
of hefty Yorkshire farmwomen
and strong Irish washerwomen.
“Your body is a temple!”
Ha!mine was just a pedestal
to put my beautiful brain on
and not even good at that.
a routine mammogram
five white dots
small at the first glimpse
of bombs dropping from a clear sky
“—abnormal calcificationusually indicate cancer cells”
my body abnormal
of course
“—exceptionally luckyto be given such an earlier warning”
exceptional?
my body?
again I look at the dots
spelling help a message from a castaway
hoping I would notice in time
and in timeI did.
I hug my lovely body.
thank god I say
thank god we’re in this together.
—Mary Ellen Ryder