Summer activities!
The summer marches on and the monsoons have hit the desert here in Tucson with sunny mornings and afternoons filled with thundery rain showers.
So what have we been up to? Ilaria graduated her kindergarten class at Desert Sky Community School just over a month ago, then she began a three week day-camp with the American Cancer Society.
Since then, she's been going to work with Lina to Unity's summer camp and we headed up Mt Lemmon for Father's Day for an overnight camp at Rose Canyon. It was our first camping trip as a family and we had a blast - roasted corn and smores over the campfire, cool mountain air away from the desert heat... a perfect Father's Day weekend :)
We tried to go camping again this weekend but every campsite on Mt Lemmon was packed by the time we got up there this morning, so we had a picnic and headed back down to the hill. Ilaria was upset that we couldn;t camp so we had a campfire in the back yard using the fire pit and she's now sleeping peacefully on an air mattress in the living room for a "camp-out" :)
Ilaria has a pulmonology appointment next week to measure her lung function. Nothing's wrong, it's merely routine and part of her long-term survivorship care seeing as she had part of her left lunch removed during her surgery and one of the chemos she had is known to cause lung damage. So she has 3 function tests before we chat with the pulmonologist. We expect everything to be fine but as with any tests, there's always a nagging in the back of the mind. We'll keep you posted.
Ilaria was recenlty selected by the Steele Children's Research Center at UMC to be the "cancer kid" featured along wth other kids with various illnesses in a set of greetings cards they're selling to raise funds. The ohoto shoot was awesome - see some of the great photos I just uploaded. If anyone is interested in buying a set of the cards, please contact me and I'll send you the details.
On that note, we wsh everyone a very happy and safe 4th July :)
Colin
