Well, it's been a crazy week since being home from the hospital. Sam has either had a really long cyclic vomiting episode, or he's had a stomach bug. It's always hard to tell. Either way, he's been puking almost every night. The stress of being away from mom and dad and everything that's going on with Max must be getting to him. I know it has me. My migraines have been awful and my stomach is constantly in knots. Not fun! Max on the other hand has been doing pretty awesome. He plays like he normally did, but he gets tired pretty quickly and goes to the couch and falls asleep. Then he's up and playing hard again until bedtime. He lets me know when his stomach hurts, but he's been such a trooper. He has had some behavioral changes. He has some pretty big temper tantrums and has been hitting me a lot. But he has had a lot happening and is in pain and doesn't really understand what's going on. And it doesn't help that I'm having a hard time telling both boys "no" right now because I feel so bad about everything they have to go through. I just need to get things back to normal as much as possible. We did get to have a fun weekend before he started his chemotherapy today. Sunday, we met up with some old friends that I haven't seen in forever. And Monday, we had some fun family time since Nate was off work. Then we were up at Primary Children's bright and early this morning. We were planning on spending most of the day there, but they got us in and out in two hours. They showed us pictures of the tumor and the kidney they removed. The tumor was 4x bigger than the kidney. It's crazy to think something that big was in his little tummy and it took us that long to find it. Thankfully, they told us that the Wilms tumor was only in stage two and was a favorable histology. Stage two means that it was contained within the kidney and didn't spread to any lymph nodes or other organs and the favorable histology means that it didn't have any odd appearances to it. They told us about the chemotherapy medications they would be treating him with. The first is Dactinomycin, which takes about 15 minutes to be pumped into him and the second is Vincristine, which is a quick push into his access. The side effects we have to watch for are nausea/vomiting, constipation, jaw pain, headache, hair loss, weakness and numbing in legs, feet and hands, and peripheral parathesias. (which is difficulty walking, and stumbling) We watched him all day for side effects and all he had was a little nausea and constipation. I was surprised how quickly the constipation kicked in and felt awful for him when all he wanted to do was have me hold him and cry that his bum hurt. But we got him some medicine for that and he's happy and playing again tonight. I'm so happy that he bounces back so quickly. Hopefully he will stay that way as the side effects get stronger as the meds get to a higher dosage. He's such a brave little boy. We are so lucky to have so many people supporting us and praying for us. We can definitely feel those prayers! We had a surprise visitor yesterday with a loaf of banana bread, a jar of hand sanitizer, and gift cards for two different restaurants. She's truly an angel and was so thoughtful for just thinking of us. Thank you again Natalie Mitchell. : ) Whether it's gifts, donations to Max's cancer account, or even just prayers, we feel so loved and blessed.

 Breakfast with old friends.

 It was so good to see Julia again!

 The boys on the train at the mall.

Max snuggling on mom's lap with an "ouchy bum" Poor kid!