But up til now he’s kept everything pretty well maintained through diet and medications,lots and lots of medications and my mom who’s been fantastic about keeping him healthy.

He got glaucoma in his remaining eye earlier this year and because the thought of being totally blind was unacceptable to him he elected to have an eye surgery which helped a lot. He was the happiest I had seen him in a long time and talking about possibly being able to drive again once he got the okay.

He never got he okay, however because he starting having other heath problems that came fast and without anyone knowing what was going on.

For a man who hates hospitals and just likes to spend time at home-this year has quite frankly sucked.

This is a picture of my father and mother the day before he was admitted to the hospital.

His last doctor visit was the day after my daughter’s birthday party and he was admitted to the hospital that same day, he hasn’t been home since.

He had so so many tests and none of them showed any cause for his symptoms…the last one was a bone marrow test and that one came back positive for non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma.

Because of his age, he’s eighty,because he is so weak,and because we’ve been advised that treatments as well as a second necessary bone marrow test would probably do more harm than good, our family has decided on my father not going through with chemotherapy. We discussed it with him and he was in agreement with this.

We thought he’d be able to go to a managed care facility where he undergo rehabilitation so that he might be able to get his legs strong again and walk before going back home.

That was a huge mistake because none of us realized how much he would be pushed during his physical therapy.  His blood pressure spiked at an alarming rate during a walking session and he is back in the hospital again.

If I could undo the decision to send him to the managed care facility I would. I wish now we had sent him home as I know this would have been something he would’ve appreciated more.

The decision was a hard one but given the choice between managed care where it seemed like he would walk again and go home a little more like himself and just going home with Hospice….well, the managed care seemed a more hopeful choice.

We had no idea how quickly he would get weaker so quickly. The bone marrow test had tested positive for only 4% cancer but we had already been told that were we to go through with another bone marrow test the results would almost certainly be much higher. There’s just been such a huge change in his condition from the time we made that decision. Last week we were able to talk with him and now it’s extremely hard to understand what he is saying. They’ve had to put a feeding tube in through his nose because he was having a lot of trouble swallowing.

This is very,very hard-it’s heart breaking and I’m just trying be as helpful as I can be. I’m trying to spend as much time with him while trying not to neglect my young children and husband.

We are very lucky to have a large family that can take turns helping, everyone is doing what they can. My mother has been spending the night at the hospital with him every night at her insistence but we’ve finally talked her into letting us do that instead.She has health problems of her own and we worry that all of this will be too much for her.My dad is not sleeping much anymore and because he wakes up startled and confused we are extremely afraid that he might try pulling out his feeding tube.

Prayers for our family and him would greatly be appreciated.

I don’t want him to suffer..but it’s very hard to imagine having to let go.

I came up with some pumpkin pie hair clips but as you can see there are a lot of options when it comes to felt and personalizing hair clips to suit the occasion.

I have a video up at YouTube that shows how I made the pumpkin pie ones:

And while we are on the subject of hair clips I also wanted to share the neat hair clip holder I bought recently to keep all of these off the ground and hopefully lead to calmer mornings.(What? It could happen…)

It’s from Tabitha’s Creations and you can find more of these here in lots of different patterns.

We hope to add a head band holder to our wall next.

If you liked this post you might like this one on a hand print turkey necklace that I made last year.

Have a very Happy Thanksgiving!

Picmonkey helped with our invites

Because both of our girls love pink and anything glittery and or girly we went with a princess theme.

Pinterest served me well as it usually does in cases like this.

I found out how to make a balloon banner which came out almost as nice as the one I found here.

The party was at a park and transporting the thing plus all the other stuff we needed  was a bit of headache but I’d love to make one of these again if I had an at home party.

The post suggests using waxed thread and I couldn’t find that (possibly because I didn’t look for it for longer than five minutes) so I ended up using unflavored tooth floss  which worked out pretty good.

I also made unicorn poop  cookies I found here.

I couldn’t resist …I mean they’re unicorn poop cookies for crying out loud! I thought the girls might think they were a little gross but they just found them funny and yummy. I used a sugar cookie recipe I found here.

I did face painting on all of the littles  and that is definitely something I want to do again. Up to this point the only face painting I had done was small pictures on a cheek. I was inspired to go for a full face paint this time and liked the results a lot more.

Overall it was a pretty nice party. You try to plan these things and hope every thing turns out for the best but the are things you can’t control. The party was outside and it didn’t rain but it was a really windy day which meant none of our table covers stayed on for very long.

Also if I had to do all over again I would’ve made less goody bags but gotten cuter things to put in them. As it turned out we had a lot less kids show up than we planned on.

The kids had fun though and I enjoyed spending the day with my family so all in all it was a really good day.