Catch up to 2020

There currently only remains less than two hours until the last day in January is complete. (When I started typing this entry.) Is anyone else’s head spinning? Just me? *sigh* As some of you may have noticed, I didn’t manage to send out our yearly Christmas card this year. This was the first time in 14 years (since Nick and I have been married) that I haven’t sent out a card! Can I still get credit after I post this blog entry?

A belated Merry Christmas and Happy New Year from the Coursey’s ❤

Since our last update in August, Nico had a birthday. He is now eight years old! ❤ We kept our tradition of celebrating with our friends who also have a son with the same birthday as Nico. We’ve gotten together to celebrate their birthdays since we moved here and we thought that tradition should continue so we made the trip up to Salmon Arm to visit with them. We sure miss having them as neighbors!

Nico’s last scans of the year were at the beginning of November, and all remained clear! He had several appointments during that trip to BC Children’s Hospital and got good new from most of them. Scans were clear, no cavities at the dentist, got the all clear to resume normal activity from his orthopedist- which was Nico’s favorite news because that meant he can ride his dirt bike again! Nico has healed very well from treatment and radiation but it has become apparent that his left eye which received radiation exposure tends to be irritated and teary a lot. In fact, he had an infection over the summer which according to our family doctor he is more prone to getting now. So during this trip he also saw the ophthalmologist and they realized his tear duct is blocked which causes an overproduction of tears and eye irritation. They weren’t able to do the procedure to clear it that day but they are planning to do it and we are hoping that will help.

This year, Nico’s follow up visits will be every four months instead of three. His next set of scans will be around March. Since Rhabdomyosarcoma is a very aggressive cancer, the protocol is to monitor it pretty closely the first few years after treatment.

This year we managed to get away for a month to visit my family in Florida! We hadn’t been able to spend Christmas together for almost 10 years. Although traveling with kids is a lot of work and was exhausting at times, we made a lot of memories during our trip and I’m so thankful we were able to pull it off. I have to say that we didn’t manage to see everyone we wanted to see, which was disappointing. When we were planning our trip, a month seemed like such a long time but it really went by so quickly! Some highlights include, taking Uncle Adam’s boat out on the lake and barely beating the rain clouds back to the dock. Although we did have some rainy days while we were there, we also had lots of sunny days which made for excellent pool days. Watching not one but TWO SpaceX rocket launches! We also went to Kennedy Space Center one day which everyone enjoyed. My personal favorite was making tamales with my mom and sisters and all the other cooking we did together. So yum! And of course, we made sure to get some professional family photos while we were all together. They turned out lovely!

I loved the fact that we were able to skip a whole month of winter while we were in Florida. However, Canada made up for it after we got back and the temps dropped to below zero for about a week. We at least got some snow out of it which the kids enjoyed!