I'm Back

Last year ended badly and the new year only got worse. I thought I would share just a little bit of why I haven't been posting in such a long time.

Last year my mother woke me up with a phone call that dad had taken a fall and couldn't get back up. She wanted me to come over and help her get him up but I convinced her she really needed to all 911. So I woke up my son, got us dressed and headed up to the hospital to meet them. After some x-rays we found out dad had broken his hip, not good. We explained to the doctors that dad had fallen a few other times in the past few months so they wanted to do a CT scan to see if he had a stroke causing the fall. This is where it goes from bad to horrific. They came back and told us that he didn't have a stroke, which was great but then comes the kick in the gut, they found a large mass on his brain near they thalamus.

After waiting all day in the er, they finally got dad admitted and into a room. It took four days before they decided it was safe to do surgery on his hip to fix the break and a few more days to decide if it was safe enough to do a biopsy on the mass as it was right in the middle of his brain, not a good place. Sadly we found out that it was a GBM, which stands for glioblastoma multiforme. For those of you who have had no experience with this type of thing, this is the most common type of brain cancer and, the one that under the best circumstances, has a life expectancy of two years at most. Dad's tumor was in a place where surgery was impossible making the only treatment options radiation and chemo. They biopsy also showed that the tumor was stage 4 and very aggressive. Due to dad's age the life expectancy, if the radiation and chemo were successful was 11.4 months. Dad was unable to do any chemo due to low platelet levels and only lived a very short time, passing away on March 18th.

I am very grateful that they had just moved close to me about two years ago so I was able to see him every day, take him to his doctor's appointments and help my mother out with everything. This has been horrible for us all but especially for mom as this past Christmas eve they celebrated their 50th wedding anniversary.

Going through this all there wasn't any time to be crafty and in all honesty, my creativity and my wanting to do any crafting just disappeared. Stamping and scrapbooking has always been my stress relief but while all of this was happening I just couldn't bring myself to even go into my craft room. I am hoping that this will change soon. I actually had to force myself to go up and make mother's day cards.

I didn't take a picture of the one I made mom but here is a picture of the one I made for my mother-in-law. I really love this stamp. I bought it a long time ago and this is the first time it has seen ink. I stamped with versamark and then embossed with black embossing powder. I then used my aqua painter and inks to color in the image, adding more ink as I went along to shade the flowers. The finishing touch was to add some ribbon with a pretty bow I made using my bow easy, love, love love this tool!!! If you don't have one, I highly recommend getting one, it makes creating bows super easy!


Well, I hope you all enjoy the card and please, spend as much time with your loved ones as you can, you never know what is going to happen so enjoy as much time as you can while you can. Don't put off calling, visiting and telling those you love that you love them.

And just so you know, I appreciate each and every one of my followers, those of you who visit my blog on occassion and all who take time out of their busy days to leave comments. You all make my day. Thank you!!!

Happy Stamping,

Ronda