Saying Goodbye

Tonight I sit in the oncology ward of the Hamilton Juravinski Cancer Centre with my step dad.  I am listening to his raged breathing, and he no longer speaks.  His eyes settle on me and I can see the terror, but he doesn't communicate.  None of this makes much sense, he was a good man, he looked after his children and even though he was divorced from their mother, he paid his support, and took them whenever he could.  They would pop in and have dinner, or go camping, or on vacation.  He was a good dad.  Oddly enough, it is me that is sitting here, neither of them have even visited during this whole ordeal.  Also as I said before in a previous blog, he has cared for my mtoher for the entire time they have been married and before.  She has serious issues, and he has tried with as much love as he could muster at times, to be caring and get her help when needed.

This has been so hard on her as well.  He completed all his chemo, and they found a bone marrow transplant.  I brought him home from the hospital on Good Friday, and actually siad Happy Birthday, today is the first day of the rest of your life.

I have never been so wrong about anything.  He contracted the worst case of graft vs host disease the doctor has ever seen.  They are unable to save him, or do anything more for him.  So now we wait.

They have withdrawn all the devices and medications expect for pain meds.  And we wait.  We wait for him to slowly and painfully slip away.  I am struck by the irony that we treat our pets more humanly.  Today they passed a bill in Quebec to allow medical intervention to end a life.  It is now my sincere opinion that Ontario should quickly follow.

This just makes me sad and sick to see what could be my, or any of my loved ones futures.

It's party time

It's been a while since I posted a blog, and truthfully I haven't been doing much lately.  After the Christmas rush, of getting everyone home, and then having all the festivities, and then getting everyone back to school, snow storms, and ice storms, flight delays and cancellations I decided that I needed a break.

Then I got a phone call from daughter #1 asking if it would be possible to have grandson#1's birthday party at our house.  They have limited space, so we usually do his here, or she takes them to a party venue, which we all know can get expensive.

We talked it over, and since the little man in question has become obsessed with super hero's we decided to make that the theme.  I was in charge of the cake and decorations for a photo booth.

For anyone viewing this and thinking you need all kinds of special equipment and tools to make a cake, that is false, I have very limited equipment, used boxed cake mix, and printed templates on my computer, cut them out and traced them in the icing with a toothpick then filled them in with the appropriate colour icing.  I do endorse using premium colourings, such as Wilton.  They are the masters, and it turns out every time.  The base of this cake was a very large cookie, made on a pizza pan, lined with parchment paper.  Also super easy if you buy ready made cookie dough.

I need to find a better recipe for Butter Frosting though, this one turned out a little runny, and made my cake tilt a tad, I put some dowels in to keep everything where it was supposed to be.

The photo booth was super easy.  Some dollar store wrapping paper, in the appropriate colours, and a dollar store calender taken apart and taped to the underlying paper.  The whole thing cost $3.75.  Super economical, and still a ton of fun for little super hero's.

Kids came dressed in costumes, so we used some of the masks as props for the photo booth.  I had to make masks, apparently in our location you can not buy a simple mask.

Snacks were simple, some green Kool-aide for Kryponite, some pop corn and chips. 

Daughter #1 had some activities planned.  Our guested were able to make their own super hero capes, which she had ready, made out of large t-shirts and cut to a cape form, she had ironed on the initials and let them paint them as they please.  Also another fun game with balloons, divide kids into teams, pick one to put on a large t-shirt, and have the other team member stuff their shirt with balloons, after the specified time limit she counted the number of balloons and the team with the most won.  Also there was a very cool spiderman pinata.