Thanks

Since we had a great day I wanted to quickly just post again on the blog, a big thanks to EVERYONE so far. All the emails, calls, well wishes, prayers, meals, baby sitting, laundry, being there to vent to etc, has meant so much to Tracy, myself and our entire family. We also have read every comment on this blog at least once. Things you may think are trivial mean so much in situations like this.

My good friend Erik Hansen has created a cool way you all can sign up to help even more, mainly we are going to need meals and child care for Haley for a couple weeks here while we get used to being at home, and we want to have something in place so we can quickly activate our support network when we need it in the future, something that is very likely to happen. It is setup with email notifications so you will hear from us when we have a request. Erik, Tracy and I have to go over the details tomorrow and then we will post the URL here and actually email it out to everyone. It's made with a product that my company Intuit makes called QuickBase, not that it matters, but I know how it works really well and am excited Erik has made this it will be really helpful. You aren't going to need to sign up for anything you need to pay for or anything, don't worry.

And even though Emily is going home tomorrow, we still have a two year battle ahead of us, with many unforeseen challenges that lie ahead. We are going to have days like this where we can be really happy, and then face a challenges the next day and the mood of the blog may quickly change. It's really helpful to me to document all of this. We aren't naive about what's going on, and I want to give you all a head's up about that too. The Doctor's have warned us that while the prognosis is very hopeful, that battle along the way will have it's tough days.

One last thing and I hope everyone of child bearing age reads this. When you are given the option to bank your core stem cells from the umbilical cord when you deliver your children, do it. Yeah it costs a few thousand bucks to bank it, and I'm not trivializing that amount, but if you ever end up here where Tracy and I are, you will wish you did it, we wish we had. I have learned over this past week, you can't get down about things you can't control, but if we all can learn from this, I'd consider banking your stem cells when you have children going forward. And if you have banked your stem cells, and have wanted to know if it was worth it, it WAS. Tracy and I never thought in our wildest dreams we'd need them and odds said we didn't, but odds get thrown out the window when it's your baby, we all get that. I don't want this blog to get political in any way so let's not comment on stem cell research, you can hit me up in email if you want to get into that.

Tomorrow's post will be late with the plan to have a photo of my little warrior in her own home, back with her sister and Mom and Dad.