My lovely little boy

It's been unfortunate over the past few months, even before I was diagnosed with cancer, as my ability to parent to Dylan was gradually affected (Lorien's recently posted photos notwithstanding).  We converted part of our basement into a bit of a home office, and sometime in January I started working from home most of the time due to my declining health.  One particularly sad part for me was when Lorien pointed out that whenever I started coughing in the basement, Dylan enthusiastically said "Daddy!"

I'm not sure whether on the whole it's good or bad how young Dylan is right now as we're going through this.  On the one hand, he's too young to know what's going on, which means that he doesn't have to worry about me, and assuming that I pull through this, he probably won't remember a thing.  But sometimes I wish I could just explain things to him, esp. on days when he's not being the easiest to care for.

But maybe deep down he somehow knows that I need a little bit of extra love.  The day I was admitted to the hospital, I was running around trying to get a bunch of errands done before departing.  I was standing at the door, getting ready to leave, and totally unprompted he came running up to me and put out his arms and wanted to give me a hug.  And then waved me goodbye.  I've gotten him to do that before when I initiated it, but I think it was the first time he ever did it totally on his own.  It brought me tears of joy.  Really, the worst possible outcome of all of this would be if Dylan had to grow up without a father.  And I'm determined that that's not going to be the case.

So on a somewhat brighter note, here's a post-processed drawing of a photograph of my lovely little boy.  It's a little bit dated -- I think it was taken when he was about 12 months old, and he's pushing 17 months now.  (My audience will hopefully forgive me for falling behind both on Dylan picture taking, and on editing and posting of the most recent sets of photos that we do have.)  Photo is courtesy of my mother-in-law Judy Fono, post-processing courtesy of Patti Scafidi.