Radiating joy

It’s not all doom and gloom around here, folks. We’ve had a great week. Austin went to school every day (well, his school is only Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday, but it’s been a while since he’s done even that “full week”). And not a tear out of him. Only many many smiles. Especially on Wednesday when Daddy was the parent helper (always an extra special event and even more so for Austin). I received several messages from other parents telling me how he was simply radiating joy on that day. But I didn’t need those messages because I knew he would be.

Then yesterday, we had Braedan’s school concert “Bugz,” a song and dance production put on by the three kindergarten classes. He had a speaking part (two lines) which he beautifully and clearly enunciated into the microphone (without wandering off during the last few words like many of his fellow classmates did).

He’s the third one back in the green shirt.

After the fact, playing with the microphone.

With Mommy, at the after-party

Austin and I had gone to the clinic for labs in the morning and discovered (shocking!) that he needed platelets again. When our nurse placed the order, the blood bank informed her it would take two hours to “spin them down” to the right volume, even though it had only taken one hour to do the same thing on Monday. That one extra hour would have made us late for the all-important play (totally unacceptable) so we arranged to come back as soon as it was over.

Well, right in the middle of the second song, I got a text message from our nurse saying the platelets had arrived and were going to expire in less than an hour! So, as soon as Braedan said his line, my mom whisked Austin off to the hospital for his transfusion. Thank god for text messaging because I would never have answered a phone call at that moment and then we surely would’ve ended up spending the night.

But all was well and Braedan was beaming with pride the rest of the afternoon and evening. We rode our bikes out to dinner for his best pal Lola’s birthday — our first restaurant excursion since Austin’s new diet restrictions. And ya know, you gotta live so he had a Tums followed by a grilled cheese sandwich and perhaps this picture can give you some clue as to how he felt about that:

The kids were all delighted with the summer-like weather and with how very brilliant and funny they find themselves and each other. Good day, good week. And we carry on.

With Lola and Olive at the Colony.
It just doesn’t get much better than this.