Four Years Ago

 On this day four years ago Ian accepted Christ as his personal Savior! I have had the worst time remembering the date for Nadia's spiritual birthday, but Ian's has been very easy to remember because it's the day before my sister's birthday. Ironically, this was the date he was due to be born in 2010, but he decided to come early on December 12. So in a span of about 5 weeks we celebrate his physical birthday, Christmas, and then his spiritual birthday. I asked Paul to stop at Dunkin Donuts and buy 6 donuts on his way home from work last night so we could have donuts for breakfast this morning. Yesterday I got him a t-shirt at a Christian bookstore. It is patterned to look like a Star Wars t-shirt, but on the front it says "May the Lord be with you" instead of may the force be with you, and it has a Bible verse on the back of the t-shirt. He liked his gift. We packed lunches to eat in between two of the basketball games, but I told him we'd splurge and buy him a hot dog at the concession stand since it was his spiritual birthday. Yesterday I got two large pizzas, and we ate the second one today for dinner, which was perfect as pizza is one of his favorite foods.

Nadia and Oliver had their team pictures today. Hopefully they smiled! I only purchased a 5x7 of the team photo, which cost $5 per child. Ian's team pictures are in two weeks. We were spoiled in the fall with Ian and Oliver being on the same flag football team and most weeks the games were back to back. Today the basketball games were at 10, 12, and 2. Nadia had to be there at 9:30, and her coach didn't dismiss her team until after 11:30. We ran one quick errand in between Oliver and Ian's games. Aside from that brief errand, we were at the church from 9:30-3:10pm. Some weeks the gap between the games is bigger, which is actually better because then there's time to go home in between. Today was Nadia's very first time playing a full court game. They play 5 on 5. She and Ian each played for 4 of the 6 periods. Oliver played for 2 of 6 periods. Nadia's team won, and Ian's team lost. I was not paying any attention to the score in Oliver's game. I was just hoping he'd actually run on the court and be in the proper location. Ian showed a lot of improvement this week compared to last week, which was encouraging. Nadia looked so small on the court, but the girls range in age from 4th through 6th grade, and she's already shorter than many fourth graders so she was really dwarfed by the 5th and 6th graders. Ian and Nadia both dribbled the ball and had a couple of attempts at making a basket.

The best part of the day was finding out that this morning Hannah's parents received an email from the doctor at CHOP stating that Hannah is cancer free! Geisinger (the local hospital) had recommended chemo treatments "just to be safe," but CHOP disagreed. She just has to have an ultrasound once a year. They believe ALL of the cancer was removed during the surgery. The tumor itself was benign, but it metastasized, and there were some immature cancer cells in the lymph nodes that were removed. CHOP believes the cancer was caught very early and removed during the surgery done at Geisinger in November. PTL! Her parents were crying tears of joy over that email! We had been praying for Hannah multiple times a day, and I am so, so, so, so happy to hear this news.