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I am home... having just returned yesterday from a 5 week visit to my parents. I am so pleased to say that my parents are doing better than I could have imagined. Which is not to say that everything is hunky dory in their world... far from it. But they can be genuinely happy on a day to day basis and that is more than I hoped for last Christmas.

Caden made Christmas happy for all of us this year. We missed Karen immensely and it was hard to spend Christmas in my childhood home. A place where I always fell her loss most. A place I never had been without her until her accident.

On New Year's Eve I realized that I was happy to see the back side of the past decade. Although some wonderful things happened in the last 10 years (mostly I got married- - 2000, and my children were born -- 2007 and 2009), mostly it has been a decade of heart ache and pain, most notably of course the loss of my sister but the brain tumour and six years of infertility certainly didn't help.

Despite this, I am happy on a daily basis. I love my children and am so pleased to see that they already love each other deeply. Today Caden spent a good 20 minutes doing the same action over and over because it made Kara laugh so hard she got the hiccups. She stares at him adoringly all the time and when he notices, he says "she likes me Mommy" and then "I love her too."

Caden is such a precocious two and a half year old. His vocabulary is astounding and if you say a word that he has never heard before, he will ask you what it means, think about it and then try it out in context. It is quite something. He is extremely focused and can and will spend hours doing something if it catches his attention. For example for Christmas he got a couple of L..ego kits and spent 3-4 hours a day for at least 4 days playing with them. When he gets focused like this, it is hard to distract him. He has a great imagination and can make up his own games or story lines. For Christmas Santa brought him a puppet theatre and I have been entertained ever since. He also has the memory of an elephant and you had better not tell him you will do something later or tomorrow unless you absolutely plan to do so.

He is also extremely cautious and easily intimidated. New people fascinate him, but he prefers to watch from a distance than to participate in anything they are doing. He takes it all in and then asks me questions about it later. Although he is quite happy to play with other children, it has to be other children that he wants to play with. He has a friend and a cousin that have similar personalities to him (sensitive, quiet, and polite - no grabbing or screaming) and he will happily play with them for hours and usually cries when it is time to go home. However, I have other friends with children who are more typical 2 year olds (loud and rambunctious and wholly unconcerned with other people's personal space) and Caden has no interest in going there or having them come here. In a rather embarrassing development, he has now taken to telling me so both before they get there or we arrive and after, in front of their parents. "No Mommy, I don't want to play with ....! I don't like ...... or ..... is too loud or snatches toys or is scary" Because he is sensitive and easily intimidated he finds many situations scary and often has nightmares at night. When he is not sure how he is feeling, he asks me in a slightly anxious and higher pitched voice "Am I scared Mommy?" It is the most adorable thing and of course I always take that opportunity to say no, this situation is not scary because .... Then whenever he runs into that situation again, he will say "I am not scare because ..."

He is my articulate, imaginative, intense little boy and I love him so much.

Miss Kara is now 6 months old (how the hell did that happen). She was exclusively breast fed until 6 months. She refused to take a bottle or eat cereal early, despite the fact that I needed her to do so in order to have a MRI with contrast dye. I did have the MRI in December (the results of which were no new or recurrent tumours!!!!) and in the 8 hour period that I had to discard my mild (new drug - much shorter half life) she drank a full 2 oz of formula. She nursed like a mad woman in the following 24 hours. Quite amusingly the day she turned 6 months she started eating solids and has been slurping it down ever since. It's like her body knew that solids weren't supposed to be introduced before. Although she only started on the 3rd, she is eating 2 different kinds of cereal, pears, blueberries, banana's, carrots, squash and prunes. She seems to favour the veggies over the fruit but so did Caden and now I have to trick veggies into him.

She can roll from front to back and back to front, sits independently and gets up on hands and knee's as if to crawl but has not actually moved those limbs in any kind of coordinated fashion yet. She has perfected the bum scoot though and can often be found several feet from where I sat her as a result of wanting a toy that was originally out of reach. She says da da , ma ma and raises her hands when she wants to be picked up. She is a dream sleeper and will go to her bed awake and put herself to sleep. In fact, she prefers to go to her bed awake and it takes a lot of work to get her to sleep if going directly into her crib is not an option.

For a long time she was sleeping through the night or only getting up once but in the last month she has started getting up several times a night to nurse again. Today while Caden was making her laugh I saw a tooth shaped white spot under her gum on the top. I am hoping that is the reason for the night wakings and once through, we can get some sleep again.

She is one of those children Caden doesn't like (although he loves her). She is loud and rambunctious and has no misgivings about taking Caden's toys or putting her fingers up his nose, pulling his hair or poking his eyes or ears. She is smiley and happy almost all the time but you can see the mischievousness in those eyes. When she is angry at a toy or a person she looks directly at it and yells at such a pitch and with such consternation that you can almost imagine the curse words. And when she laughs out loud it is with so much joy that you wonder what a six month old could be so absolutely joyous about. She loves to cuddle and give kisses and will stay with you to give and receive kisses and raspberries and tickles and whatever else you can think of as long as you can give it.

She is my loud, happy, loving baby girl and I adore her.

I am so in love with my family and I do truly hope that while the last decade brought them into my life, the next decade will be filled with my love for them and with treasured memories made as I watch and guide their childhood.

I'll post pictures soon.