5 O'Clock Shadow Eyebrows

I have recently taken to referring to my eyebrow hair regrowth as a 5 o'clock shadow because that is what they look like to me when I look up at myself in the mirror everyday. I am not quite sure but these might actually look worse than no eyebrows (or what amounted to no eyebrows when I was sporting one hair as my left eyebrow and three hairs as my right). First of all before tweezing, waxing and way before chemo I had pretty significant eyebrows (that is politically correct terminology for bushy). What that means is that as they grow in they are taking the pre-tweezing, waxing, chemo shape, whatever that was. Reining these bad boys in is proving a little challenging when what you are dealing with is only the shadow of eyebrows. I think I am going to have to take these unruly shadows over to a salon and see if they know how to shape eyebrow shadows. Every morning I stare into my 10x mirror to try and figure out which faint hairs to pluck out to get them into better shape but I don't think I am winning this battle. Hey, at least my eyelashes are growing; that certainly makes me feel better when I am staring at myself in the mirror. They are short but at least they're coming in.

As for my hair, Billy refers to that as my gray hood. None of us are used to looking at me with gray hair which clearly would have been the color of my hair pre-chemo if not for my hairdresser. I am not sure what I will do with my hair once there is any length to do something with. Joanne (my friend and workout buddy) asked me the other day if I was going to keep it short once it grows in. I told her I think I will let it grow down to my butt to start just to be able to enjoy having hair again but after that I don't know. Of course I don't think that long, gray hair is especially becoming so that leaves me with the dilemma of choosing dying it or cutting it; at the rate it is growing I will have quite a while to decide. A lady stopped me the other day in Trader Joe's and asked if I was having chemo and then she gave her long ponytail a flip and assured me it all grows back.

I have yet to decide how often I am going to update this blog. When I was blogging on Caring Bridge I tried to do it everyday because I needed the outlet and there seemed to be new side effects to report daily. Now that I am feeling better there are lots of days where there is just nothing interesting going on to write about; I am very thankful for that. The writing is important to me though as the battle is really still continuing; if after 5 years I have managed to stay in remission we will finally be able to exhale all the way but until then I need this outlet. Still, I think I need to have some sort of schedule to my blogging if only to save my mother from having to pull this up everyday only to find out that I still hadn't updated it. For now I think I will stick with updating on the weekend when I have time to mess around with posting the pictures (it seems to be a little more difficult to do on this blog site than on Caring Bridge). Of course, when life throws one of those funny "curve balls" my way I will take the liberty of sharing the details with you mid-week.

Today has been a glorious morning. Due to the February Nor-easter we are snowed in and there is no way to go anywhere. It is nice once in a while just to be forced to stay huddled up inside. I don't know that Don shares my opinion of today because at this moment he isn't huddled up inside; he is outside in the blowing snow making an attempt at snow blowing. Fortunately it isn't that heavy, wet stuff but there sure is a lot of it as you can see from the pictures. I am going back to huddling now and maybe getting a start on making a few snacks for tomorrow's Super Bowl. The Super Bowl just isn't as exciting when you don't really care which team wins. Billy says we should root for the Saints because they have never won the Super Bowl so I guess I will try and muster up some enthusiasm for them. Till tomorrow...

Invitation Etiquite

We finally had a weekend that was swim meet free so I arranged to go and visit with my two year old niece, Emily, for the afternoon yesterday. By arrange I mean I invited myself and Don and Billy of course. Kids are so cute at that age and I feel like I miss so much by not seeing her more often. Joe and Laurie (my brother and sister-in-law) are very good about calling and letting us chat with Emily but that is not the same as seeing her. I called Joe on Saturday and asked if we could come for the afternoon on Sunday if I brought dinner with me that we could share. He said we could come but bringing dinner wasn't necessary and he seemed excited that we were coming. Sometime between my call and us leaving he called back and left a message with Billy. What I heard Billy say was that Joe said we didn't have to wait until the afternoon to come and to not worry about eating lunch before we got there and also something about taking Emily for her first ice skating adventure. Now I probably should have called Joe back and gotten a better read on this message because I don't think I interpreted the message the way he meant it and I don't think I envisioned the visit the same way Joe did. I had wanted Don to have the opportunity to play basketball in the morning because he has missed so much of it lately because of the Cancer; now that I am "in remission" (I still put quotes around that because of the limited three month guarantee I have on it) I think he needs to get back to some fun. I pictured us leaving when he got done, between 9:30 and 10am, eating lunch on the way or maybe grabbing a hot dog at the ice skating rink, sharing dinner at Joe's house, and then starting on our three hour trip back home. What happened was; Don went to b'ball and then we started from home around 10. We stopped over at "Grocery Store Heaven" (if you are new to my blogs this is the Wegman's that opened near my house at the end of last year); I wanted to grab a cake to take for dessert and a little treat bag for Emily. I called Joe and asked if he wanted me to bring anything for lunch but he said no and that I should call him when we were about 1/2 hour from his house. Wegman's took longer than I imagined (it usually does) so we didn't leave the parking lot until 10:45. When we were about about to be run off the road by a young girl who clearly hadn't mastered merging yet we got a call from Katie, my daughter, who was already at Joe's house because of the snow boarding trip she had been on for the weekend. We told them we were about 45 minutes away and we arranged to meet them at Joe's rowing club for lunch. You can see this is already not going like I envisioned because I was picturing a quick lunch before skating and a sit down lunch wasn't leaving much time for ice skating. We got to the club around 1:30 after being slightly lost due to Ginger (the name we have given to the imaginary women in our GPS) not knowing where the club was. We had a lovely lunch (I had a lobster roll and I love anything that has lobster in it) and I was seated right next to Emily so I had quite a bit of face time while we dined. She was totally occupied with the valentine's I had brought to her in her treat bag: she is such a smart little girl. Anyway, we finished up lunch and then headed back to Joe's; apparently our not getting there earlier had nixed the ice skating plans. At this point I am already suspecting that Joe's and my visions for the day were not in sync. We played with Emily for a while and about 5o'clock Katie asked what the dinner plan was because she was tired from her weekend of snow boarding and thought she should be getting on the road soon. Not hearing any response from Joe to this query I said that if she wanted to get going that it was fine with us and that she should get packed up. Well..., Joe and Laurie flew out of their chairs to help her. When your hosts jump at the chance to help you leave, it is definitely time to leave. We all packed up while Joe ran out and got Katie's car started. When your host starts your car for you it is MOST definitely time to vamoose. I guess what I didn't catch when Billy was giving me the message on Saturday was that Joe was hoping we would get there earlier than lunch, we would have lunch, take Emily skating, and then we would head home and he, Laurie and Emily could spend their Sunday evening in peace. Oh well, we had a great time anyway and I think it all worked out fine. Next time I will make sure I call back and check the message out for myself. Maybe I can blame my faux pas on "chemo brain". Till tomorrow...