School

School started again finally, after a long summer break. Ruben started full time school and Joshua returned to school like nothing had happened! He is cycling to school and has rejoined the basketball team. It's a total miracle the way he has just recovered from cancer. The hats are a Queensland thing, I know it looks a bit Amish! I have no answers for the socks. If you had gone to school where I did, you would have got beaten up for socks like that! Caleb says school is awesome, so that has to be good and everyone else seems to be happy. Ruben has slight issues with having to wear socks and shoes, which are hot. He spent most of last year in bare feet! If you wondering why they are all wearing different uniforms, it's because Joshua and Bethany are wearing the boy/girl versions of the high school uniform, Caleb is wearing middle school uniform and Ruben goes to a different school.

Last Friday was Australia day and was pouring with rain. However, that didn't stop us going down to the esplanade for a free breakfast (I love Cairns council) and it didn't stop some people swimming, (Ruben and Caleb), in their clothes!! There was also a baby croc down there!

There was a  lull in the otherwise very wet weather on Sunday, (it is the rainy season) so we headed for the beach for some chips and to get rid of some energy!! That is the ones with energy to spare in the first place!

Been a while...

Hello all, just a very quick post to say we are all still alive and well! No particularly good excuse for not having blogged, but life happens...

Joshua has had two lots of scans and appointments in Cairns so far, and all is clear. We are due to go back down to Brisbane for his February round, so we are starting to look at arrangements for that. Otherwise, there is not much to report.

So here are a bunch of random photos from the last month or so...

Four of us took a ride in a driverless vehicle that they were trialling on the Esplanade

 Christmas Carol concert, sponsored by the Council but led by one of the local churches

How we get a lie in on summer mornings...

An attempt at a family photo

Ruben opening his stocking on Christmas morning

Ruben thinking he might need a haircut...

A Google-created animation of New Year's Eve on the Esplanade 

(Google seems to have a habit of nosing about in my stuff and trying to be helpful...

quite scary if you think about it too hard...)

Finding God in the Waves

There seem to be a lot of spiritual analogies we can learn from water. This week I have been thinking about a few verses in Job. Job 38:8-11 says, "Who kept the sea inside its boundaries...For I locked it behind barred gates, limiting its shores. I said, 'This far and no farther will you come. Here you proud waves must stop'." 

Waves can be gentle, but they can also be violent, powerful and thundering. When you look at them they appear unstable and out of control. Yet every time a wave crashes it returns to where it came from. (OK, so I'm not talking about tsunamis). No matter how big a wave, there are limits on where it can go. Somehow when it seems out of control, there is total control.

So often when difficult things happen in our lives, it feels like things are out of control and that God has lost control. However, even in the craziest of times in our lives, like the waves,  God has total control. I have been amazed that although Joshua has had cancer, at the same time he has been his usual healthy self. The cancer aside, he hasn't really been sick. It feels like God has said over his body, 'this far and no farther will you come'. The cancer was something totally out of our control, but at the same time the way Joshua coped with treatment showed me that God was totally in control. Like the waves, God puts parameters in our lives. He allows certain things and we may feel buffeted and frightened at times, but it all happens within God's complete control.

Schools out!

It's that strange time of year again in Australia (at least for those of us who went to school in the northern hemisphere) where we are heading into the summer holidays and the Christmas holidays simultaneously. If you've been conditioned into feeling that these are two separate holidays it feels very odd when they merge. Clearly it's not wrong, it's just different, but there's a lot to get through when you have to celebrate the end of the school year and Christmas things at the same time.

Joshua returned to school on Friday for the last day of term. He is quite bemused as to why, when he is fine, everybody keeps asking how he is feeling. There is now a two month summer/Christmas holiday before school starts again at the end of January - happy days!!!!

An uneventful week medically. We got the dates of Joshua's next five scans at the hospital and a letter summarising everything he has been through.The words I liked the most were, 'complete remission', 'excellent prognosis' and 'complications nil.' Much nicer than bilateral bone marrow biopsy and intrathecal chemotherapy.

Two exciting things happened this week, or at least they were for the individuals concerned. Ruben visited the prep class where he will start next year full time. Most excitingly for him, he was given a little joey (not a real one, that would have actually been exciting and possibly illegal) wearing it's own school uniform and a book telling the story of joey's first day in prep.

Very excitingly for Joshua he took and passed his driving theory test, which enabled him to get his provisional driving license. He now has to drive for 100 hours (not all at once) before he is allowed to take his practical test. The good thing about Australia is that it is so big, if you have the time it is easy to clock up the hours. Road trip here we come! It's a 32 hour drive to Melbourne, so there and back would help the hours in the log book. I am also going to have to learn to drive properly again - sigh! I started driving an automatic in Nairobi and haven't looked back. Most of the larger cars here are automatic, so that's what we have. I'm definitely a little rusty when it comes to using the old gear stick. 

Fishing

Joshua's hospital appointment was fairly uneventful. They checked him over and told him to come back in December. It was strange to see the doctors from Lady Cilento braving the far north of the country. For one of them it was his first visit to Cairns. As far as updating on Joshua's condition, this blog will hopefully become fairly uneventful. Compared to the intensity of the last few months we are back to the humdrum of normal life, most of which is not that blog worthy. I don't think you really want to hear about my visits to the supermarket, exciting as those can be! Stone fruit and mangoes are now in season and Bunderberg soft drinks are now selling their Christmas spiced ginger beer (see, not that exciting).

People keep saying to us how pleased we must be to all be back together and again and in Cairns. Of course we are and we politely smile and agree, but to be honest it's quite odd. The last few months have been very intense and now we are back to 'normal', I'm not sure what to feel. We probably need time to process our emotions, most of which we put on hold in order to 'hold it together' during the treatment. Cancer has been our focus, now we have to remember what we did and how we spent our time before. It was only a few months, but it feels like a lifetime. Maybe we are still in shock. There is definitely a gap between the way people expect us to feel now that it's 'all over' and the way that we actually feel.

When you receive the diagnosis you are numb and in shock and then you go into survival mode. You get through one day at a time. Finishing treatment possibly is the start of the release of all those unresolved emotions and feelings there was no time for during treatment. We are now part of a club that we never expected to join - the cancer club. I guess it is just something we will have to work through!

Normal life involved fishing on Saturday afternoon/evening. Here are a few photos.

All quiet on the eastern front.

All quiet here on the east coast of Australia. Joshua has been home a week which has been fairly uneventful. Today he has an appointment at the Cairns base hospital to see the team from the Lady Cilento Children's Hospital, who have flown up here for a remote clinic. 

In theory he could go to school, but the teachers have agreed that as there are only two weeks left of school, he can do work at home that he needs to do to catch up. He may go in for one day next week to see his friends.

It was the Presentation Evening on Tuesday. I went for a short time with Joshua and Ruben just to hear Bethany sing the national anthem. Josh sat with his friends, which was really nice until I felt it was time to make a quiet exit! Imagine a semi-dark, fairly hushed room for a formal event, except I had Ruben sitting next to me huffing and puffing and saying in a not very quiet voice, "This is so boring". I whispered to him that we were going to go and needed to attract Joshua's attention, but not to shout. We managed this quite successfully until Ruben said in a very loud voice, "MUMMY SAYS WE ARE NOT TO SHOUT". Good job he can still pull off cute and people are forgiving!

What was really nice was that, in spite of his absence, Joshua was awarded one of the Grade 10 academic excellence awards based on what he had done that year already. Joshua felt he didn't really deserve it, but I was pleased.

We're Back...!!

Joshua and I returned back to Cairns at around midday on Thursday. Joshua was quite keen that it be a secret, which is why the blog has been so quiet! In the family, only Libby knew (although Bethany had a strong suspicion) so it was a nice surprise for the other two. This is Ruben's face when Libby told him...

After having his central line removed on Wednesday afternoon, Joshua was cleared to fly home on Thursday. His operation was much later than expected (around 4pm) and he had quite a lot of trouble waking up from the anaesthetic, but by the next morning, although a little sore, he was feeling well enough to come home. 

Having not been home for 3 months, he was pretty excited to be back again. The first thing he did was to go out on his bike! The most exciting thing was, 'unlimited wifi'...

It is nice to be all back together, although there is going to be some readjustment required to being all back together. It's surprising how quickly you get into little routines. It is also going to be a bit hard getting used to the things that were hard before this all kicked off. 

In some ways, being in Brisbane was a bit like being on the field. We had a simple little house, which required relatively little cleaning, no house maintenance and no garden maintenance. We didn't have much stuff, much in the way of responsibilities and nothing to do or think about other than eating and getting on with the important things. 

It is quite hard to have to come home to a house that has a white floor and needs constant cleaning, lots of grass that needs mowing and shrubs and trees that need pruning and trimming, other projects that need doing, cars that need maintaining, etc. First world problems I guess! 

Anyway, it is good to be back together - now just to get used to it again, and maybe tackle some of those life issues that have been on hold for the last 3 months. 

Thank you to everyone for their prayer and support during this adventure.