March 3, 2021

 We are about a month in to the maintenance phase of Aurelia’s treatment. My parent ALL support group told a lot of horror stories about this phase (which is 1.5 years long). To be honest, I wasn’t sure what to expect because it seems like a huge celebration to be finished with frontline treatment, but Aurelia still has to have chemo and other treatments so it’s not like we are done.

The big news: Aurelia returned to school this week! School hours are from 9:15-5:15 (yes, long school day in this country) but Aurelia is attending until 1:15 (lunch) for the time being. She hadn’t seen her friends in person since June 22, 2021….

Aurelia loves her “Team Aurelia” shirt my sister sent:

I’ll admit, homeschooling my child was often a struggle because we were dealing with so much on a daily basis and I had to try to keep her going with school stuff. Not the most fun teaching I’ve done, but we survived. We did a lot of baking with fractions and some things turned out better than others:

Aurelia goes to the hospital every other Wednesday for treatment. It’s an all day event by the time we get there and home, so she is pretty exhausted on clinic days:

Since Aurelia is getting her academics in during the morning, we have all afternoon to have fun! We’ve been doing lots of mountain biking in our local mountains. This massif is a 5 minute ride from our door, so I’m grateful to have such awesome space for our physical and mental health.

We planted our seeds and this year we will be home to take care of them during the summer!

We also made beeswax candles, which was easy and fun. I have to find activities that are extremely non-toxic as we are super careful with exposure.

First day of school photo! Eston was super psyched to take a photo 😂

We are grateful to live in such a special place.

So now the journey continues. Aurelia continues to have multiple medications on a daily basis and chemo once a week. It’s a lot, but she is handling everything really well. She says a bike ride, shopping, hiking, and watching Netflix make her feel better after chemo. 🙂

 She is thrilled to be back at school, but other than that we try to limit her exposure so she doesn’t pick anything up and end up back in the hospital. It’s far from over, but the days are full of good things. We are planning a very small outdoor party for her 9th birthday next week.

We can only hope that we continue this process and eventually make it to the end of treatment. Of course, we know the route could change at any moment because cancer is just a fu$&er like that, but we try to focus on the positive and take each day as it comes.

Sending lots of love to all of you and we appreciate the support so much. ❤️❤️