2016 has gotten off to a grand start. The IV's seem to have worked (knock on wood!!!), and Lemon's health has been excellent all week. We had a wonderful time in Boston reconnecting with many of our oldest and dearest friends, most of whom were meeting Lime for the first time. He was in his usual fabulous mood, and had a big smile for everyone he saw. Traveling with two little kids is no joke, especially when one of them has CF. All the gear makes travel really cumbersome, and the treatment schedule constrains us and definitely eats into the time we'd otherwise be spending with friends or doing fun stuff. It also seems like an inordinately large amount of work to essentially replicate our home set-up somewhere else. We stayed in a hotel room suite, which was essential since we need a refrigerator for refrigerated medications and a stove for sterilizing our nebulizer cups. There may or may not have been an incident involving the stove and a dish towel. If there was such an incident, Papa Bear assures us that it involved smoke, but no actual open flames. I wasn't there at the time, so all I can say with confidence is that the hotel staff insisted that we turn our ventilation system up to maximum and that they revoked our dish towel privileges for a few days.
Given that we got home at 10 last night and both kids were up before 5, I will keep things short this week. It is hard to believe that it has been two years since we moved to Madison. We've come a long way since then, but Boston is still "home" to me in many ways. Our house is in Madison and the kids' lives are based here, so in that sense, Madison is home. But, when I walk through the old neighborhoods and visit all my friends, I can feel the illusion that it might be possible to slip back into my old life. I know that life is history now, but I do want the kids to have a sense of belonging in New England--it is Lemon's birthplace after all. One thing that I still find strange about Wisconsin is how rarely people who live here travel outside the state, and I don't want that to be our kids' experience, in spite of how difficult it is to travel with them. So, we learned some good lessons on this trip, and with any luck we'll have the chance to apply them on another trip sometime soon.
