Author: Phil

Busy Christmas Season, thanks to Cancer Support Groups!

Just wanted to post a quick update and share what Serenity has been up to so far this Christmas.
She has seen Santa three times!

First was at a family Christmas party:

Then she saw him again at the Make A Wish Foundation ‘Christmas Cookies with Santa’ activity:

Finally, she saw him again tonight at the Christmas for Children with Cancer Foundation:

While there, she also saw Cosmo the BYU Cougar again!:

But her favorite part of this evening was getting to hang out with her “Cancer Sister” (as she calls her) Brinley!!! Brinley also has ALL and is just a few months behind Serenity in treatment. We’ve grown pretty close to their family and really appreciate their family, they have the cutest kids in the world! (besides us of course 😉 )

Serenity is funny – Brinley is one of her favorite people, she talks about her all the time and makes sure we pray for her every night. But, whenever we get together with Brinley’s family (and whenever we’re around anybody for that matter), Serenity goes into her bashful to the doctor about to poke her mode. She begs to see Brinley and buries her face in my chest the moment she gets there.

We still have a couple more parties coming up so I think she’ll see Santa at least once more before Christmas. I need to say though, we sure are grateful for the organizations that put on so many events – especially around Christmas! That list include The Make A Wish Foundation, Hope Kids and CCC.

Day 2 of our Make a Wish Trip to DisneyWorld

So, no DisneyWorld yet, but we’ll be there tomorrow!

This morning we were able to visit Goofie, Pluto, Belle, Mickey and Minnie and get our pictures taken with them. Serenity wasn’t too sure about the guys in dog costumes, or the mice, but she was definitely comfortable with Belle! She had fun hanging out with a fellow Princess.

After photos we had breakfast and visited the park here for a while. Then we headed over to GatorLand to spend some time with the Aligators – Talysa was the brave one!

We’re pretty sure Kaniho was hoping to meet some girls here – but I doubt he thought he’d end up kissing Minnie Mouse!

We were planning on watching the Space Shuttle launch tonight but they changed it (again) to tomorrow night. We’re hoping we can catch it then.
Needless to say, we’re all pretty worn out – can’t wait to see how we feel after tomorrow. All day at DisneyWorld is going to wipe us out!

Make a Wish Trip – Day 1

Today was a LOONG day! We started out leaving a half hour later than we wanted to to head for the airport. I managed to make up most of the time during the drive though – don’t ask. 🙂 So after chasing 7 kids around all morning, then driving to the airport for an hour, we got on a plane for four hours. What a lovely time. About 2 minutes after we were airborne, the excitement of being on a plane wore off for the kids and the reality of being strapped into an uncomfortable chair for 4 hours really settled in on them. To their credit, they did a pretty good job of keeping quiet for most of the time.

I need to diverge for a second. 6 days ago Indigo (our 4 year old daughter) fell on the concrete and landed on the underside of her chin resulting in it being split very wide open. We took her in and she had to get 6 stitches that had to stay in 5 days – so they came out yesterday night.

Well, no sooner had we landed then a stir crazy Indigo started messing around in the aisles while we were waiting to de-plane. Somehow she managed to end up on the floor and getting her chin stepped on by Gibson. There are about 300 people standing in the aisle and suddenly she is bleeding everywhere! I had to “excuse me” towards the back of the plane to get paper towells and take care of her. Turns out her chin now looks pretty much like it did a week ago. So now I’ve got blood all down me, she is covered in it and there’s some on the seat. Our clothes looked like a mass murder had taken place. Fortunately a good woman handed me a bandage (mine were all checked underneath) that I promptly slapped on her chin.

After we finally exited the plane (in what felt like the slowest de-plane in history) we met up with a rep from Give Kids the World who was holding a big sign for Serenity. We rented a 12 passenger van and made our way to the GKTW Village. This place is magical! The whole place is a playground for kids! We are staying in what looks like a candy house (pictures coming tomorrow) and is right across the street from a lifesize Candyland game! That place looks just like the board game!

We got settled into our cottage and then went to dinner followed by all you can eat ice cream for desert! The kids went and participated in “Village Idol” – a contest for the kids to perform for everyone. In an interesting turn, the judges just could not decide on a winner and so all the participants won!

We headed back to the cottage and got settled in for the night – then everyone decided to order late night pizza. Did I mention that all this food and the lodging – in fact EVERY SINGLE THING is free?!?

So now everyone is crashed and for some reason I’m up blogging. Wow. Time for me to go to bed, it’s 1:25 here! We’ve been taking lots of video and pictures, I’ll get some put up tomorrow.

Serenity Made a Wish – to see Snow White


The awesome folks at Make A Wish Foundation have granted Serenity a wish! She wanted to meet Snow White so….. they’re sending our whole family to Disney World! We’ll be leaving August 26th and returning a week later on September 2nd.

While we’re there, we’ll be staying at Give Kids The World. We’re really excited to take a family trip there! We’re ramping up for it now and trying to get everything organized.

We’ll be blogging much of our trip and sharing lots of photos and videos here. We’ve received advice from several cancer friends who have made the trip already but would love to hear more from anyone else who has already done it!