Happy Mother's Day!

Today we went out to Martha's Bloomers, in Navasota, TX, to celebrate Mother's Day with my mom. We really enjoyed lunch in the cafe, which was very delicious and elegant (girlie). The shops and gardens were very nice too. We took the opportunity to snap a few pictures.

Actually, the first picture is in Mom's front yard, but the rest are at Martha's Bloomers.

an exciting night at the Astro's game

We had a blast Saturday night! We enjoyed walking through the plaza on the way to the ballpark. Brendan especially liked the water, and really would have liked to join the kids playing in it. I thought that colorful wall was really cool. The Astros played well and beat the Brewers. Wes played well too. He got picked to play one of the trivia games they do between innings. He answered correctly, and won a fancy, new cel phone. Here's a picture of Wes and Brendan on the Jumbotron.

Spotlight on Brendan

Brendan was the star of the week in his class last week. His classmates all got to interview him and then made a book about him. Here are a few pix of Brendan doing what Brendan likes to do.

boys in the bluebinnets

It's Bluebonnet time! Here are a few pictures of the boys and one with their grandparents, Jim and Virginia Smith. I took these out near Brenham, TX., along Hwy. 290.

All clear

Well, we went back to the hematologist on Wednesday, and Brendan got the all clear. His big lymph node has shrunk back down to nearly normal size. We're trying to put some meat on Ryan's bones, but he's doing well.
His biggest chore is eating a slice of cheesecake or something of equal torture everyday. I can't believe the doctors want me to feed my kid "junk food". At this point, we're just getting as many calories as we can get in him and if we can work some nutrional value in there, that's good too.

Brendan update

Brendan is doing great! We're still watching that lymph node. I think it has gone down some, but is still very large. His follow-up is on Wednesday.

A rough couple of days

We had a little scare with Brendan this week. He woke up with a high fever, discomfort in his chest, eyes, body aches and a bad headache on Thursday, so I called the hematologist and then took him down to Texas Children's. He went through the usual gambit of tests and got IV antibiotics and fluids. The pain/sensitivity in his eyes frequent headaches and big lymph nodes had them leaning toward doing a spinal tap. I urged them to wait until the blood tests and other tests came back. They said they would give him a 24 hr. observation period and do it in the morning. Lucky for us, they didn't have any beds available on our floor in the hospital, so they sent us home for the night (with the IV), and we went back first thing in the morning. Brendan did great overnight and his temp was nearly normal in the morning. They did a few more viral tests (epstein-barr and something else), gave him more antibiotics and sent us home this afternoon. He has a follow-up next week in the clinic and we'll find out all of the results then. We are still a little concerned about one very large lymph node on his neck. It looks kind of like an egg in his neck, but hope it's just an over-zealous gland fighting whatever bug he had. It should go down soon since they gave him the strong anti-biotics. I'm trying not to be a worry-wort. Keep those prayers coming though.