#CAPTURINGDECEMBER: Day 4

Day 4 "Joyous": Biggins finally earned enough money to buy a video game. :)

 

#CAPTURINGDECEMBER

#CAPTURINGDECEMBER: Day 3

Day 3 "Red": This is our Christmas ornament from 2008.

#CAPTURINGDECEMBER

#CAPTURINGDECEMBER: Day 2

DAY 2 "Favorite Holiday Movie": The Grinch! I <3 Jim Carrey's performance! 

#CAPTURINGDECEMBER

#CAPTURINGDECEMBER: DAY 1

DAY 1 - "Your View Today": My ultra-organized garage after our block yard sale. =)

#CAPTURINGDECEMBER

NEW Phtoto Challenge: Capturing December

I LOVED this photo challenge I found from acontenthousewife.com. I need to take more photos and this will help me focus!

Tomorrow is DAY 1! #CapturingDecember

Alto at The Scottsdale Hyatt

The Stud surprised me this week. He took me out on the town since I had the day off of work. It was heaven!
He found this place: The Hyatt Regency Scottsdale Resort. 

We didn't stay there, we just ate there. And I gotta tell ya . . . 

It. Was. SWEET.

It was quite possibly the best meal I've EVER eaten. I had an authentic Italian pasta.

 The Stud got the pan-seared tuna. 

 We shared this fabulous {and flippin' cute!!} dessert.

 We finished it off with a complimentary gondola ride

{complete with an Italian serenade from our gondolier.}

 I don't have very many perfect days,

but this was definitely one of them.

My Baptism Towel: Free Printable

My youngest son was baptized this weekend and it reminded me of a poem a wrote years ago.

At church, I was working with the children ages 3-12 at the time. Every year we gave a pure, white towel to each child getting baptized. I wanted to add a little something so we attached this poem:

It was so sweet to see each child's reaction to their special towel.

It's a SWEET memory. =)

 (Feel free to download, print, and/or share this.)

Raising Awareness

I was contacted by {what I thought was} a stranger. . . but she turned out to be a wife, a mother, a fighter. She is a cancer survivor.

This is her story:

I had cancer. I was the mother of a 3 1/2 month old baby and I was told I had malignant pleural mesothelioma. Those words are able to cripple you with fear. I was exposed to asbestos and now I was not sure if I would live.  

 There is a prevailing idea that asbestos was banned. It was not. When I tell people that I got mesothelioma cancer from asbestos, they want to know where I was exposed. Well, my father worked in construction and was exposed regularly. The asbestos powder got on his clothes and he brought it home in the car and on his clothes.  

 When I was diagnosed, I was only 36 years old. The Mayo Clinic had only one other reported case of a person having mesothelioma that young. The majority of cases were men who had worked in trades with asbestos. Those trades were pretty much everything. Plumbing, shipbuilding, mechanics, construction and heating are just some of the jobs that exposed men to asbestos. There were jobs that exposed women too. There were school secretaries, teachers and wives who did their husbands' laundry. All of these people were at risk of getting the disease I now had. 

 After the husbands and wives, there were people like me. I was the beginning of a slew of sufferers who were exposed as children. These children went to the same schools where women were being exposed. They put their faces near their fathers' clothing when they hugged them, thus breathing in the powder. They crawled in attics with asbestos contaminated insulation, they wore their daddies' jackets and they rode in cars that their parent’s rode to and from work in.  

 I have become involved in the community of mesothelioma victims. As I get more involved, I meet more young people and get to know them. They are in their early 30s and some even in their late 20s. They have barely begun their adult lives. They have new careers, perhaps college, marriages and children. Once they are diagnosed, they have to drop everything else and focus on getting better. They are too sick to do anything else. Thankfully, modern medicine is making it so more of these young adults and even older sufferers are surviving mesothelioma.  

 Getting a cancer diagnosis changes your life, but I have hope and many of my peers in the mesothelioma community do as well. We have each other to share experiences with, struggle with and celebrate with. I share my story so that people will know about us. If no one knows about this disease, how will anything change? I would also like to reach those who are struggling with mesothelioma and give them hope.

I feel honored to help give her a voice in spreading the word. Thank you, Heather. YOU ROCK!!