Decisions, Decisions...

June is almost over?  I can't even wrap my brain around that.

Tomorrow is June 30th, Jesse's 8th birthday.  For his birthday we were going to donate whatever monies we would have normally spent on him to a good cause.  After much deliberation... do we donate to the Jesse Lyle Hernandez Fund at Northwest Community Credit Union... do we donate to the Relief Nursery... do we donate to Toys for Tots... do we donate to CASA of Lane County where Jesse recently participated in the fundraising walk with Holly?  So many choices.  We decided to donate to Project Reindeer.  It's a project Holly's(and Owen's) school does at Christmastime where they take boxes of supplies to families who need it in the community.  Holly is very active with the program and Jesse always wanted to help in any way he could.  We feel like that's the most close to home way we can contribute. It took a long time to decide (it takes us forever to decide anything these days) and we feel really good about this decision.  Thinking about Christmas in July (ok, june, whatever)

David is doing pretty well.  One of the hospice nurses was talking to us this week about his medications and suggested he switch from liquid morphine to pill form morphine that he'll only have to take twice a day.  YES, PLEASE!  It will increase his total dose from 25mg to 30 mg a day but it will be continuous release rather than taking it every 6 hours when it starts to wear off after 4 hours.  The peaks and valleys of the morphine swing should even out a bit and since his neck continuously aches I think this will be a good thing.  He starts taking the pills tonight so we'll see how the weekend goes.  He may be a little sleepy for a couple of days while his body adjusts to the even flow of medication but since he's been on 20-25mg a day (which is a smallish dose) for a while now they think he's building up a tolerance which could be why his neck aches more now, not enough pain management.  We'll see!  We still have the fast acting liquid stuff for breakthru pain.  It would be nice if we could get him in a not-too-doped-up state of ease.  I'm eager to see how it goes.  That also means that he would only have to take meds twice a day which would be awesome!  Not that his meds would be reduced, he still takes somewhere around 15 pills a day.  Yum! No wonder his stomach hurts sometimes.  It just means it's less overall things on the to-do list.  Or more importantly, I won't have to worry about napping through his meds schedule on wonky long nap days.

Speaking of his stomach, I think it's finally settled down since the last Temodar treatments.  Glad he's not starting another round on the first since it took almost a month for his stomach to get over the last round. 

Dave's parents are in town for a couple of days.  When they got here (without hotel reservations) they realized it might be difficult to find an affordable place since the Olympic trials are going on at the University. Sure enough, everything in town was $150 or higher, even the seriously scary crack house rent a room by the hour kind of places.  We busted out the computer and found them a nice little non-chain place up the road in the next town over for a reasonable price and reserved it online.  Thank goodness as they didn't have to rush to check in then soon after they arrived they noticed the place put out the no vacancy sign.  Yay internets!  It's been nice visiting (we're not so exciting these days) but lots of both catching up and reminiscing.  We're glad they could come visit.

They plan to leave tomorrow to head for Utah to see David's brother's family but we were saddened to learn that David's cousin (their nephew) took his life yesterday so if arrangements are made for a service in the next few days that may waylay their travels a bit as they may head back to Portland to see family and pay their respects.  The Wach family has been through an awful lot and tragedy has struck every branch of this family tree.  If there's anything to be thankful for it's that he's not hurting any more, but it's a small consolation to those who love him.

I really don't want to end this on a sad note so I will mention that David's mom brought a box of his assorted papers and such with her. I can't believe they've moved from Oregon to Arizona to Texas with things like this!  (I'm sure she's glad to have passed it on!) In this box we found an old journal of David's from when he was 11.  It looks like something they did at school where the teacher provided the topic and the kids write about it.  We cracked up reading them and wanted to share some now and again.  It actually reminds me a lot of Owen's writing voice.  This one is... strange.  hahaha

April
April is the time of Easter bunnies and eggs and strange weather. April's holiday is strange, it's called Easter.  A big rabbit comes around and gives everybody candy and strange looking eggs. That's dumb because the easter bunnie or any rabbit can't lay eggs especially ugly eggs that are different colors.  The weather in april is strange.