Thursday, January 1, 2015

Thursday, January 1, 2015

Tonight's picture was taken in December of 2007, and was featured on the cover of our Christmas card. Mattie was five and a half years old and was in his first year in elementary school. This was the last year before cancer entered our lives, and naturally we had no idea how lucky we had it.  


Quote of the day: There is overwhelming evidence that the higher the level of self-esteem, the more likely one will be to treat others with respect, kindness, and generosity. ~ Nathaniel Branden

I wish our readers a very happy and healthy New Year.  As always I am very grateful to all of you who continue to check in on us and read my writings, thoughts, and feelings. This marks the seventh year I will be writing! Writing anything, even a blog, on a daily basis requires a great deal of discipline and to some extent love. I have had people ask me….  why do I write, when is enough enough, or at what point will I stop writing Mattie’s blog? There are NO answers to any of these questions but the one answer I do have is there isn’t a simple answer to such questions. I do know that the answer has changed or it has evolved over time. At one time I may have written for others but as time has marched on, I find I write the blog FOR ME! Time is a curse! I mean the time that has lapsed since Mattie’s death. Time plays many tricks on the mind and the worst trick is it strips the mind of the vivid beauty of what was once so real and vibrant. Writing however makes the memories much more real for me, it keeps Mattie in the forefront of my mind, and keeps some of the more intangible things that start to fade away over time present in my life. As a parent, one nurtures one’s child DAILY. When you lose your child to cancer, there is NO PHYSICAL child any more to nurture. Therefore I have been left in a quandary and very frustrated with no outlet in way, with nowhere to place the energy that I once devoted to Mattie. In some ways, some of that energy goes to the blog. The blog and the Foundation! They have become my surrogate Mattie. They represent him and I am very protective of both of them.

I am so happy that Peter wrote the blog yesterday! We had 10 hours of touring and I was beyond wiped out. Today I am not feeling much better. I am the only person who could come down with a sinus infection on a Caribbean cruise. But I am feeling miserable. I am sitting outside while writing today’s blog and despite it being most likely in the 80s, I am wearing a fleece, sitting under two blankets, and I am sure I am a sight. I just can’t take the air conditioning on the ship and moving from hot to cold!!! 

Today we are at sea the entire day! This photo was taken yesterday while we were at Tulum.  There is a story to this photo which I wanted to tell you about, and since Peter did not share it with you, I decided to tell it today! The tour of Tulum was extremely long. Our tour guide first gave us a 45 minutes tour, and I will spare you my commentary on him, his attitude, his non-factual agenda, and so forth! I will just tell you ten hours with his grating personality was draining and sucked so much energy out of me. I am USED to ALL sorts of people but he was truly noteworthy, so I will leave it at that. After his lack luster tour of something that to me should have been SO SPECIAL, he then gave us two hours to explore these ruins on our own in the blazingly HOT sun. Sun which felt like an oven! After that, we had time to explore the surrounding  town of Tulum until the bus took us back to the Ferry. While in the town, I saw these acrobats up on these wires spinning in the air! So I started to take photos! BAD, BAD idea!! Before I knew it, I was surrounded by people who were telling me I owed them money for taking photos of their comrades who were flying up in the air. Naturally I gave them some money but this is a lesson to be learned in a way about different cultures and expectations. 

I am not sure how we did it, but after touring for ten hours yesterday, we came back to the ship and got it together and got dressed in formal attire! 

Peter captured this photo of me with my parents. 

On the entrance to the dining room is this lovely display of cream puffs in the shape of a tree!

This morning we saw this beautiful cloud site over the Atlantic Ocean. We have now left the Caribbean with its blue waters behind. Tomorrow we will visit the Bahamas and then Saturday we will be land back in Fort Lauderdale and fly home. Amazing how fast a week goes by.