I know some of you will cringe when I tell you this, but we put our tree up last weekend. I can hear the cries of outrage now. You put the tree up before Thanksgiving?!?!?! Yes, we did. Bram's next MRI is in January. It's the first of the six month interval MRI's. I can't lie and say I'm not worried about it. We've been looking inside his brain every three months, checking on it. Now we're waiting six months to see what's going on in there, and quite frankly, it's scary. What if it's back? What if it's been spreading all these months. It's hard not to consider that possibility. Anyway, I don't know what January holds for us, so I just thought it would be nice if we had an extra long Christmas season at our house this year. And so our Christmas tree is already up.
Now back to Thanksgiving. Well, I had hoped to take a trip down to San Antonio for Thanksgiving this year. Our budget's a little tight since buying the house so I'm not sure I'll be able to swing it, but I haven't given up on the idea yet. I suggested to Bram the other day that we might not make it down to Sea World for Thanksgiving, and he got pretty upset. Apparently he is really looking forward to touching a dolphin. He was a little too intrepid to feed them/touch them the last time we went (after his final round of chemo). I'll just have to see if I can pull a rabbit out of my hat. Make that a dolphin out of my hat.
Bram is doing really well in kindergarten this year. He just made reading level 1. He is now reading a book every night, and I am just so proud of him. He is one smart cookie. If he doesn't know a word, he looks at the picture for clues to help him figure it out. He struggles with first and last letter reversal, particularly when it comes to small words like "in." He says, "ni." I'm suddenly reminded of Monty Python: "We are the knights who say NI!" Anyway, it's too early for me to ask for a dyslexia screening. Even though dyslexia is a real concern due to the trauma his brain has suffered, letter reversal is pretty common at this stage of a child learning to read.
School is keeping me pretty busy, but I've recently vowed not to let it consume my free time. Bram really needs more play time with me. I don't want his childhood memories to be of me grading papers and not having time to play with him. We now come home, have dinner, read Bram's book, and then play a board game. Anything else that needs to get done simply has to wait. We spent today playing basketball and then building castles out of Bram's foam blocks. It was a nice relaxing day at home. Tomorrow we're heading up to Braum's for some pumpkin ice cream. Yum!
Well, that's about it for now. I'll post again soon. I'm pretty sure I'm forgetting a humorous Bram anecdote I wanted to share, but I'll just post it later when it hits me. I'm pretty tired and my little man is already asleep.
