Light the Night

We took Natalie to the Light the Night walk put on by the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society. It was too perfect...the same night as the two year anniversary of her diagnosis. During the walk all the participants carried red illuminated balloons. Natalie carried a white and gold balloon. The white was because she is a survivor and the gold was in memory of her friend Alexa who passed way in June.




Our friend Melissa went with us.

She got a green shirt that had the word survivor on back. I asked her if she knew what that word meant and she told me no, so I explained it to her. Later on we were waiting at the starting line for the walk to begin and she statrted to sing, "I am a sur..v..iiii....v...oooo..rrr!" It was super cute. She goes around making up little songs all the time. It is one of our favorite things that Natalie does. The walk was realy great and as we began walking in the dusk, I looked up at the remanats of the sunset and looked all around at all the blinking balloons. Most of the balloons were red and I felt pretty emotional on this two year anniversary. Looking back and thinking of all she has been through and where she is now.
When Natalie came back from surgery on Friday October 13th after getting her first spinal chemo and having her central line placed, someone handed me a purple bracelet with the word HOPE on it. I remember I was still sitting in her crib with her, holding her from the ride up from the OR. I wore that purple bracelet until last Novemeber when it snapped in two and fell off. I never took it off. Natalie would look at it and ask what it said. In fact the only time I would take it off was if Nat wanted to wear it. The day it broke was on the day of her fashion show, I remember wondering if it was a bad omen. Instead I decided that was the day when the chemo got the last cancer cell in her body and I no longer needed HOPE. They were giving away brecelts at one of the booths and I found this green one that said HOPE, no purple. The purple actually said TOXIC.