I've posted some photos from James's International Day at school that they had recently - he decided to dress up as someone from Afghanistan with a real Afghan hat that my uncle sent him - the rest was pure improvisation! We're off next week to Kwazulu/Natal for a holiday with Danielle's parents and sister to celebrate her mom's 70th birthday! Really looking forward to it. There's lots of chickenpox going round at the moment so trying to work out what to do about that... and then it's into the Christmas holidays!

In a slight break from our normal family news...

Charis experimented with inserting a mini audio jack into the power connector that plugs into my (David's) work Dell laptop.
It produced no auditory success, but bent the pin inside the power connector. I managed to straighten it, but it subsequently came off inside the laptop power socket.

This pin seems to communicate that it is a valid Dell Power supply, and without it being connected properly the battery will not charge. My battery ran so low that I couldn't use suspend when moving the laptop around because I had so little battery power left... (see my plea for help if you want the gory details)

I got a new power supply, but still needed to work out how to extract the pin from the laptop (it was not sticking out at all, and there was no way to grab it with tweezers/pliers etc). I was too nervous of breaking the new power supply or something inside the laptop to try and connect the new power supply.

I tried soldering onto the pin so I could then pull out the solder but all I achieved was melting some of the plastic on the outside. I had various suggestions ranging from superglue on a needle to magnets, nitric acid, and drilling it out. I asked my friend Ian who said he'd have a look... he simply pushed the new power cable in, as he said there's usually space behind the pin. Voila. I couldn't believe it was that simple.

Since our holiday it's been the flu season in Cape Town - swine flu, other flu, and serious pneumonia going around. We've all been sick in turns and James has spent quite a while off school - two weeks a few weeks ago, and then the first three days this week. He could have gone back earlier the first time but we didn't want to risk him getting a more serious infection. He's back to school today. Tomorrow is their dress-up-as-a-Letterland-character day which he's really excited about (yes, he's going to be Jumping Jim).

We had lots of fun celebrating Charis's birthday although she was sick around it. One of the highlights was that the International Space Station was flying directly over Cape Town just around sunset - Danielle and I spotted it the night before (when it came past a bit later) and then on the day we all went outside and saw this yellow "star" moving rapidly across the sky until it disappeared in the Earth's shadow. The next day I found out that the space shuttle came past 5 minutes later and that night they docked. It's fantastic thinking "there are people on that thing whizzing round way up there!"

I've put up some photos mostly from Joy's visit in June but also of us being silly - hopefully more will follow soon.

We got back on Saturday from a wonderful holiday in the Eastern Cape. We really benefited from having a concentrated chunk of time together as a family... and we got to see lots of animals, which we loved!

We had been praying particularly that James would be able to see some cheetah as they are his favourite animal ... one evening just before sunset we saw another family who said they had seen some cheetah nearby - we raced off to where they had seen them, and drove along the road but couldn't see them at all! I thought I should turn around to drive back and try find them again, and just as I was doing a U-turn they popped up over the horizon - really special. We also got to go to a cheetah breeding farm where we were all able to stroke a tame cheetah and play with some lion cubs! (Pictures to follow...) Charis's chest cleared up fairly well, but she was fairly distressed by seeing a half-eaten buffalo in Addo ("I don't think it was very good for him...").

Yesterday James had his next bone marrow test (which he wasn't not looking forward to but went fine! results should be back next week some time) and amazingly his great-grandfather was in the same ward for a scheduled check-up at the same time, so we shared a room! Then he started school this morning, and also really enjoyed it - a great relief!

We're just sitting at the airport about to go to PE for an amazing treat - a holiday in the Eastern Cape, going to the Mountain Zebra National Park and Addo Elephant National Park for 9 days!

The last few weeks have been busy in a good way with people and work. We're looking forward to a time of relaxing.

We've just come back from a wonderful four days in Volmoed, in Hermanus (where we've been before a few times). We caught up on sleep (David has only struggled with sleep for one night out of the last two weeks!), had good time with God, praying and reading Tested by Fire by John Piper (available online as The Hidden Smile of God), which gave us fresh encouragement about God's sovereign purpose... cried, played with James and Charis, made spiders, went for walks, went for a family picnic at a beautiful waterfall, collected fir cones, made a braai and some roaring fires to keep us warm in the evenings, watched movies, looked at the stars (and Venus and Jupiter) and felt very very grateful! We've uploaded some photos of the holiday.

At the start of our adventure walk to the waterfall

Peeking through the giraffe tree

Content
(more photos here...)

On the way we were listening to a recording of the story of David and Goliath, which asked the question "David didn't want any armour to protect him. What was David trusting to protect him?" Charis answered "God", and then a few seconds later, "And maybe his monster suit". Both James and Charis have a wonderful sense of humour which really makes us laugh! (Although I think she was serious this time!) When we asked them what they enjoyed most about the holiday, James said "Playing with Charis" and Charis said "The tablecloth"...

James was nervous again going back to school, so we are trying to help him with this...

And we have even more to look forward to because this coming week Joy (Danielle's sister) is coming to visit, which is so exciting!

After yesterday's good news that James's bone marrow has been given the all clear, we had an appointment with the Prof who is in charge of James's treatment where we were able to hear more fully about the bone marrow test and analysis. We appreciated that both Prof and James's pediatrician seem to understand how difficult this is for parents emotionally!

He explained to us that although chemotherapy for children with ALL (the kind of leukemia James has), the main remaining problem is that even after years of treatment, some still relapse... this is because even after the treatment, some residual diseased cells can still remain, which can then multiply... a lot of research is currently going into trying to distinguish these cells before a relapse occurs, but this has not yet been successful.

So when they saw these strange cells in James's bone marrow they wanted to check as much as possible to see if there was any evidence that they could be diseased. They consulted with colleagues at Red Cross Hospital as well (they see a lot more paediatric cases), and concluded that the evidence all points towards them being normal cells. Importantly, they look different to the original leukemic cells that James had, and they show no signs of abnormality.

So the conclusion is that James is doing as well as he possibly could be under the circumstances. The risk of relapse remains, and the next expected high risk period is when he finishes his maintenance chemo in just over 18 months time... it was a bit disconcerting discussing this possibility again, but that's the reality!

We also discussed James's liver - his liver enzymes keep on fluctuating; while they aren't at a dangerous level, they're not going to increase his methotrexate dose unless they normalise more. This explains why James seems to not want food at some times but not others.

We are so grateful to God for sustaining us through the past few weeks, and we're trying to take a deep breath to gather our strength for the reality of the road ahead. Next week we're going away for a long weekend which we're really looking forward to!

Today we heard from James's paediatrician that she got the final report on his bone marrow test - and he's totally clear! The cells that they saw on the previous test turn out under closer scrutiny to be Haematagones, apparently also known as Haemocytoblasts - basically they're immature cells, but they're not cancerous, so he's officially still 100% in remission! They're also not caused by a virus. What a relief it was to hear that news! We'll have our appointment with the Prof tomorrow where we'll be able to discover for more details, but it was nice not to have to wait till then!

We went out to the Spur afterwards to celebrate... thank you everyone who's been praying and writing and sending messages, it's been quite a crazy 3 weeks of waiting! We are feeling exhausted, but very very grateful!

PS - just to clarify, he does still need to carry on with his chemo as planned, but this now means everything is going according to plan, and he hasn't relapsed, which was the big worry.