Photos from the Last Few Weeks – Around the House and at the Hospital

I have such a hard time getting pictures of the boys together. Here are a few from an afternoon when they were watching a show while sitting on the beautiful Spiderman couch. I like looking at them together and seeing their similarities/differences.

Then there’s Eli, up later one evening and doing the first few minutes of a P90x workout DVD with us.

He looked at the screen at Pam (one of the people exercising) and said, “Why isn’t she wearing any clothes?” (she was in a sports bra and shorts)

P90x is SO HARD. Ben and I have been doing it for about a month now in the evenings. There are 13 DVDs in the set and they are an hour long, focusing on different muscle groups. You cycle through the DVDs, doing one DVD per day and providing muscle confusion so you get stronger and in better shape. Ben and I thought we weren’t in THAT bad of shape, but we are so exhausted after an hour with P90x. I wish I could say I was tough, buff, and a lean muscle machine, but I’m not quite there yet :) You’re supposed to do it for 90 days and have great results by the end.

Then on a different evening, Charlie took a late afternoon nap and was up a little later, so he did his own version of P90x too.

Now for an update on my Gram. She went in to the doctor on her birthday (March 23rd) and the tumor had grown considerably since she had seen the surgeon in the prior week. So he decided to check her in to the hospital that day and scheduled her surgery for the following afternoon.

It was kind of a bummer that Gram was in the hospital on her actual birthday, so we decided to surprise her with a quick visit. Davey got a ride to my house and then he drove into the city with me and the boys to Rush Hospital. Ben hopped on the el after work and met us there too. My dad picked up food from Pompeii Restaurant in Little Italy (near the hospital) and we headed into the hospital for the surprise. Eli especially liked the overhead walkway shown below – you could look through the glass windows and see the cars below.

About five minutes after we got into the hospital though, we realized his diaper wasn’t on properly and he had leaked through his clothes (I put him in a diaper so we wouldn’t have to deal with using the potty on the car ride through Chicago rush hour and while we were in the hospital). So we put him in his pjs, which I had brought with us since it was going to be a later evening for the boys. Eli looked pretty funny walking around in his one-piece striped jammies and crocs.

This was the view from Gram’s room – you can see the Hancock Tower straight ahead in the distance (the taller black building with two spires).

Eli and Charlie liked watching the el train go by on the tracks next to the hospital.

Here’s our Italian birthday feast – it was a lot of food!

Here’s Gram before the tumor came out. The surgeon said the largest mass (that you can see on the side of her jaw) was the size of a baseball. It was HUGE. I believe he took out 11 lymph nodes as well. The surgery lasted about three hours and she was able to leave the hospital five days later. Gram is recovering well, though she has some pretty major scars on her neck/side of her face where they did the surgery. She’ll start chemo and radiation in a few weeks.