When we last left our heroine she had a day of school under her belt and had traveled to Houston for her latest clinic appointment. She checked out just fine (and relatively quickly, since Shari Feinberg, her nurse practitioner, has two competitive soccer players of her own, and we all needed to hit the door, beat the traffic, and get the kids to practice). Before we actually landed in clinic we dropped off requested stuff at Davis's dorm and talked Davis and his roommate Sam into lunch (not a long conversation).
We headed over to the Rice village to meet
. I have written about Sam Hutchinson here before. Sam is a fun-loving, soccer-playing, heelie-wearing, taco-eating, video game- playing, bike-riding, Magic Treehouse book-reading, bionicle-building, transformer-transforming, brother-tormenting, brother-loving, baby brother-kissing, speed-loving red-headed seven year old with relapsed neuroblastoma. Currently, Sam, like Erin, is benefiting from excellent doctor and parent care. When I heard that Neil and Margot (wunderparents not only to Sam, but Andy and Charlie, too) had planned a trip from San Diego, California to Houston, Texas for the last week of August for Sam to take part in an immunotherapy trial open at Texas Children's hospital, I knew they were crazy enough for the Buengers to love them. I was right. We met up for lunch on Tuesday and talked non-stop about children, soccer, treatment, and a thousand other topics and thoughts we shared. Right now, Neil and I are plotting to have Erin marry both Sam and Andy. Andy is four, so Neil figures 7+4 = 11 and Erin is 10, so it would probably work out just fine. The union would practically guarantee red-headed grandchildren for both families (if those darned side-effects from cancer treatment don't rear their ugly heads and put grandchildren out of the equation). Kidding aside, it was a delight and an inspiration to meet the Hutchinsons, and we hope to keep bumping into them and celebrating years of successfully keeping NB at bay.The rest of last week breezed along like the first part (luckily we got a first week break on piano lessons and church choir or I don't know how we would have fit it all in). The big event of the week was Erin's first out-of-town soccer tournament. We packed up five little girls (and their not-so-little collection of paraphernalia) on Friday night and headed to Austin.
For Walter and I, it was deja vu. We did the usually soccer tournament stuff--forcing players to chug gatorades and water in obscene quantities, slogging through dew-covered fields schlepping gear while watching the sun rise over the cow pasture adjoining the fields, attempting not to poke out our eyes with pointed objects when players arrived without essential uniform parts, despite numerous warnings. We saw a ref from the old days. He asked us what we were doing at the field since Davis had graduated and moved on. We told him we had gone back to "Start" and were taking another go at it. He winked and laughed. As we walked away, we considered (only for a moment) whether we should get busy tonight creating a Mystic or Magic 08 to go with our Magic 88 (Davis) and our Mystic 97 (Erin). We took a secret ballot and decided unanimously that two was plenty.
Erin had enough soccer to last her until Tuesday. Her team charged hard in two losses and a tie. She played every minute of all three games (the only field player to log a solid sixty minutes per game). She also made the (figurative) highlight reel for the tournament, swooping out of no where to clear a sure goal off the goal line and into the clear after the ball had skidded past the sweeper and the diving goal keeper. Here are few more of those Mystics:
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