Orienteering

Yesterday my family and I went out to the local YMCA, where we have a membership to take part in monthly activity days that they arrange. Through the summer, most of these have involved water in some form or other (canoeing, kayaking, raft-building & races, etc) and the people who run them seem to take great pleasure in ensuring that everyone ends up in the river, wet to the skin. Which is a bit of a problem for me, as apart from the fact that I’m not a big fan of being tipped in a muddy river at the best of times, at the moment I have my temperamental ileostomy bags to contend with too. So I’ve got into the habit of not going, and leaving my wife to take the kids on her own, which isn’t very fair on her, and wastes a lot of potential “quality time” I could be spending with my kids.

This month however, was orienteering, which sounded much more up my street (no rivers!), would provide me with some good exercise, and hence actively help with my recovery. So for the first time in ages we turned up as a family to the YMCA day.

Given that the event is for families of all ages, the actual orienteering itself was fairly simple, with a series of “flags” to find, each of which had a unique picture on it. However, they were scattered all over the (large) estate, which is composed of open grassland, light and heavy scrubland, and quite dense woods. The organisers had also been quite devious in hiding them, and then gave out the approximate locations of different target flags to each individual team (family) such that they kept all the teams apart, and kept all of us running back and forwards over most of the length of the estate.

Since the weather yesterday was really nice, it ended up being a great day. We managed to teach the kids the basics of map-reading; actually we only taught them to orient the map with the compass so they could more easily associate it with the features of the land around them, but lets not quibble – it’s a start! Then we tramped around the estate looking for (and finding!) the various target flags that we were given. I finally gave out after a particularly long walk all the way to one edge of the estate, only to find the next target flag was all the way to the other edge of the estate. So I sat that one out, and chatted to one of the mums from another family who was doing the same thing with her toddler, while her (ultra competitive) husband and son were running to their next flag.

After about 2 hours of this, we stopped for a 90 minute lunch and had a picnic in the sun, followed by a bit of a snooze which allowed me to recharge my batteries somewhat. Then in the afternoon we got to build marshmallow and toothpick towers, with the highest & most stable tower winning a small prize for the family concerned. The twist was that the more flags a team had found in the morning, the more toothpicks they were given in the afternoon. I was quietly pleased to note that we got more toothpicks than most, though clearly not as many as some!

So we then spent some time discussing stability with the kids, and how to make strong structures versus weaker ones, before building our tower around a series of triangular sub-structures. We did pretty well in the end, though we were neither the tallest, nor (once the marshmallows started to warm up) the most stable. But the kids seemed to enjoy it, and ate a huge number of our marshmallows too!

All in all, a good fun day out.

The sound of music

My elder daughters both play piano and flute, and have the shared use of a piano and a flute between them. So far that’s worked out really well, but contention for the flute has been getting difficult, and is getting worse now that they are both starting to talk about joining flute ensembles and the (same) school orchestra.

Meanwhile our youngest will start junior school this year, and will also be offered music lessons. Fortunately she wants to play something (anything?!) different to her sisters, but this means finding yet another instrument for her. We’d been starting to think about what we could do about this, when as though by magic, everything came together this weekend. My eldest daughters godmother mentioned that she had a flute that she no longer used, which she was happy to lend to “J” long-term, and a clarinet came up for sale through our local church at a very reasonable price.

So on Saturday I went to visit “J”s godmother to collect her flute. I had a great time too… Kirsty lives just far enough away that it’s difficult to just pop in, so I’d not seen her in several months. We spent a great morning quaffing coffee and chatting about everything and nothing, before going out and grabbing lunch together. It was just like the old times. It’s hard to do things like that now that we’re all so busy with work and families, but this convinced me that I need to make an effort to spend more time with my friends – it’s too easy to let it slide for too long.

Meanwhile my beloved wife had been persuading talking to our youngest about the clarinet, and playing her some clarinet music to see if she liked the sound of the instrument. Fortunately she did, so by the end of the day we became the proud owners of a rather beautiful Yamaha clarinet, for an extremely good price. Her school offers clarinet lessons, so with a little luck we’ll be able to get her enrolled in those when the autumn term commences. We’d like her to learn the piano too, but with three piano players in the house now I’m hoping that we can at least get her started on that with some informal lessons from within the family.

Saturday evening and much of Sunday the house was filled with the sound of flutes as my two eldest tried to play some pieces together. A job for this week is to find them a book of proper flute duets to play. Meanwhile our youngest has started learning the fingering on “her” clarinet, and can already extract a series of notes from it. It occurs to me that when the kids finally start leaving home, it’s going to be very much quieter around here. I’ll miss it.

Back to school

This is the first post for nearly a week; there are a mix of reasons for that, I’ve been more than normally tired and sleeping a lot of the time, and also when I have been awake I’ve been trying to get on with “normal life”, with rather mixed success, I must admit.

I’m the vice chair of my daughters school governing board, and Tuesday morning was the first time I’ve managed to attend a full board meeting since I was diagnosed with cancer. It was great to actually get back and take part in a meeting, and catching up with all that has been going on in the school in my absence. As you’d expect, they’ve been managing just fine without me, though it was nice to be welcomed back so positively. As expected, I collected some actions, including the task to produce an “investors in people” style report for the school; that may need to be targeted at the 2010 time-frame!

That afternoon was my youngest daughters sports day, so I also spent the afternoon at her school, watching the usual selection of egg and spoon, relay, sprint, and sack races. The children seemed to have a great time, and despite the weather being rather overcast, the rain held off until right at the very end of the afternoon, so everyone had a great time. Once the rain set in, we took the opportunity to spend some time looking through our kids work from this year, and chatting to their teachers. It amazes me how much the children actually do, and how early they start now. They seem to learn a lot more, a lot earlier than I did. I came away very impressed at the progress my kids had made through this year, and at the amount of effort that the teachers obviously put into teaching them.

Wednesday I spent the entire day asleep. Every time I woke up, I felt exhausted, and so went back to sleep again. I never seemed to get enough sleep, and the day just slipped by. Which was most strange.

Thursday turned out to be a beautiful day, and after so much sleep the day before I was feeling great, so I had a spur of the moment decision to go into the IBM offices to meet up with friends and colleagues, have lunch, an catch up on the discussion and comments on IBM’s decision to announce the closure of its final salary pension schemes. In the end I arrived in the office around 10:30am, and stayed until about 3:30pm; in between I caught up with loads of people (Tracey, Martin, Kevin, David, Dave, Dave, Kev, Adrian, etc etc etc) and managed to start reinstalling my laptop with the latest version of Ubuntu, and the core applications for operating within IBM. In the end, it was a great day, but by the time I left I was struggling to keep my eyes open, and once home ended up sleeping for the rest of the afternoon and most of the evening.

Friday morning my wife and I popped into Southampton and visited the new IKEA store. I’m glad we did so on a Friday, as it was busy even then. I can’t imagine what it must be like on the weekend – chaotic probably doesn’t even begin to describe it.

And today was the school Summer Faire. Which was fun, in a very wet, rainy kind of way. Still, its the first wet summer faire that the school has had in the last 15 years or so, so I guess we can’t complain too much. Turn out was probably down a bit, but we still had a lot of people turn up, and it was great to see lots of friends. I helped out on the sweet stall and the book stall, and tried my hand at being a salesman for an afternoon. I have to say I thought I did pretty well, in a street-hawker kind of way. We sold out all the sweets anyway!

And through it all, my chemotherapy treatments have been ongoing. My tiredness has been the worst I’ve known. I’ve had extensive blistering of the skin on the soles of my feet. And as usual, I’ve struggled to manage my ileostomy. But these are all things I can cope with. So its frustrating and annoying, but I’m still coping. And cycle 4 finishes on this coming Tuesday, with a week off to recover from cycle 4 before starting cycle 5.

Which I view as the beginning of the end of the chemotherapy, which leads to the reversal of my ileostomy. Bring it on.

Positive side-effect of treatment – reprise

Yesterday my eldest daughters were taking part in their dance club’s annual show. This is a 3 hour extravaganza where all the kids get to show off what they’ve learned, from the little ones who are only 4 or 5 years old, and just starting, through to the young women who are getting ready to head off to college (often stage school).

The show itself covers everything from tap, modern and jazz through to the ballet that my two do. And it’s held in the public eye, at the local town theatre with professional choreography, lighting and music. It must be quite intimidating for the younger kids to get up on a proper stage in front of an audience of several hundred people, and perform their pieces. And so they all spend a lot of time learning their dances, and rehearsing like mad.

Which brings me to the point of this post. The show was yesterday evening, but the final dress rehearsal was early yesterday afternoon, which meant that the rest of the family got to spend a couple of hours in town, with not a huge amount to do. So we did quite a lot of window-shopping. Which is not normally my favourite occupation.

Except I happened to notice a nice looking jacket, and felt compelled to try it on. So I hooked out my size from the rail and tried it on, only to see it literally hanging off me. In the end I needed to drop 2 sizes to get it to fit. At which point it did fit very well indeed. Which hammered home to me just how much weight I’ve lost recently.

In the end, since I’m probably going to lose some more weight yet, I decided not to buy the jacket. But when we got home I went for a rummage through my older clothes.

• My most recent suit is now probably two sizes too big for me.
• My next most recent suit (relegated to the back of the cupboard as “too small”) is probably still a size too big for me now.
• My jazzy old waistcoats now fit beautifully, as do some of my older shirts.
• My oldest suit (three-sizes smaller than my newest) is just a little tight across the shoulders. But only just. A few more kilos off should see me back into it.

The only problem is with the trousers. Although I’ve clearly lost at least a couple of sizes off my waist (4 inches or so), the location of my ileostomy is such that it’s right where the trouser belt sits. Which easily adds a size to my waist, if not more. So the new slimmer, trimmer me has a way to go to get back into those older suit trousers … and that way involves some more surgery as well as probably some more weight loss.

Of course, there is a grey cloud surrounding this silver lining. If I keep on losing weight at this rate, I’m going to need to invest in some new clothes before I return to work. Yikes. Still, the good news is that my wife approves so much of the new slimmer me, that I get an automatic approval for new clothes, provided I keep the weight off

Oh yes. And the dance show was a great success too, with J & A dancing some really complicated parts, and (for the first time) being lifted. I was impressed and proud!

It’s a new day

I woke up about half an hour back, and after staring at the ceiling for a while, decided I may as well get out of bed.

So I’m currently sitting in my study in the pre-dawn (it’s 5:12am, and dawn isn’t officially until 5:34am) sipping some water and listening to the birds singing their little hearts out. It’s all very peaceful (anyone with any sense is still asleep, obviously!) but I suspect if I spend too long awake now, I’ll regret it later. So I’ll head back to bed once I’ve finished this glass.

But waking so early has given me some time for reflection, and I’ve realised that actually I’m not the one under the most stress here. I just have to take my medicines and focus on getting well. Whereas my wife has to keep the family going, maintain normalcy for our kids, worry about me, and help me through the dark moments when I’m not coping very well.

A much harder role.

The amazement of parenthood

Today my eldest daughter got the results of her recent piano exam, a pass, but only a few marks shy of a merit. She’s been learning for just on 3 years now, and took her ABRSM Grade 5 exam (from a standing start) a fortnight back. She was incredibly nervous, but controlled it, went in, answered all the examiners questions, and played her three pieces beautifully.

As someone whose musical talents roughly extend to pressing “play” on the squeezebox remote, I find her talent and abilities quite simply unfathomable. But I am incredibly proud of her too – she worked hard for this, and deserved the good result.

The end is nigh – unless we do something about it

This weekend we went away and hired a small cottage on a working farm. My family needed a break from the normal routine of dealing with my wifes cancer. It was great – miles from anywhere, nice friendly farmer and his family, lovely comfortable cottage, and nothing else. My kids played with the farmers daughters, helped to muck out the cows, fed the lambs, searched for the free-range eggs, and rode horses.

My wife and I chilled out and ignored the world. And I did what I always do when I’m on holiday, and demolished a new book.

Except in this case it was the most terrifying book I have ever read. This is the ultimate horror story. Because it’s talking about the future that we’re bringing down on ourselves. I urge you to go grab a copy, and read it. It’s packed with scientific evidence, and quotations from scientific papers, but presented in the most readable fashion you could ever want. You owe it to your children, and their children.

“Six Degrees”, by Mark Lynas. ISBN 978-0-00-720905-7