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We’ve been placing doodles into Cora’s lunchbag each day. I’ve posted some of them to Flickr.com. You can take a look by clicking on the image.

Jason’s been undergoing radiotherapy for two weeks now. The weird thing about it is that, despite how scary and awful the idea of “getting radiation” may sound, what I’m going through is no trouble at all. The type of radiation I’m receiving is very localized and leaves no side effects besides a little bit of sunburn-like tenderness.

The other day I was sucking on a breath mint as I went in for treatment. Because I must hold perfectly still while the radiation is applied, I held the breath mint immobile against my tongue during the treatment. The breath mint burned my tongue like a mouthful of Scope while the deadly, horrible radiation shining into my back didn’t cause even noticeable warmth in my skin.

As some of you are aware and some of you are not, Jason’s cancer from five years ago has recurred and we’ve been treating it since January. Everything is going well and we have reason to hope that all the cancer is gone now.

We didn’t leave anyone out of the loop on purpose but there are lots of our friends who will be getting this news for the first time here. Figuring out how to pass along what we’ve been dealing with has been one of the tricky parts. It made us feel very needy to raise the subject again and again and again with every friend we met even if he or she was hearing it for the first time. And when considering when or what to tell someone, we know there’s going to be more accurate info to pass along if we just wait to say something until after the next doctor’s appointment or procedure, so there’s always the feeling that we should keep it under wraps for just a bit longer. If you weren’t in the know until now, thank you for being a friend about this.

We got invited to our friend Phil’s birthday party. His wife Mindy made the invitations and included a stereotypical old guy on the front. Cora apparently studied the old guy on the card pretty well.

At the party Cora refused to sing Happy Birthday to Phil with the rest of us. Later, walking home, she explained that Mr. Phil looked nothing like his card. She suspects it’s not even the same guy.

Cora turned five today. We celebrated by having a Princess Party sleepover last night with a few friends from preschool. The party went well and none of the little princesses lost her nerve or needed a carriage ride home before bed (and three of them managed to see midnight without turning into pumpkins).

All the girls had fun but the real winner was Callie. She was thrilled to be hanging with the big girls and the big girls seemed to vie for her attention. It’s not so bad to be three and running with the cool crowd.

We promised Cora we could go out to eat for her birthday dinner and she picked Friendly’s. (No surprise: the two best restaurants on Earth in her opinion are Ledo’s and Friendly’s.) Once, while the server was at our table, Tina mentioned something about the “birthday girl.” Well when the server arrived with dessert he also brought with him about half a dozen reinforcements to sing the Friendly’s version of the Happy Birthday song to Cora. Their version included the lines, “If you’re good you’ll get your wishes, but if you’re bad you’ll wash our dishes.”

Being naturally very shy, Cora buried her face in Tina’s shoulder while the crew sang. Once they had left and she had a little time to recover she started repeating the part about “if you’re bad you’ll wash our dishes” and laughing like it was the funniest thing she had ever heard.

While tucking her into bed tonight she told me that she wants to call Gram tomorrow and sing her the Friendly’s birthday song. I guess it was a good birthday.