It has been a while since our last update – we just seem to be so incredibly busy.

For those of you who don’t have days to spare to read over 50 pages and about our lives over the past several months, I will give you a brief summary of where we are at the moment. I should also point out that I have attempted to keep the journal up to date in a Word document (we just haven’t uploaded it!). I have also needed a good break from journaling as I sometimes lose motivation to document our lives as living it is usually hard enough.

To summarise:

• Olivia has completed six rounds of chemotherapy and her treatment. She also completed a week of local radiation to the cancer site.
• In August, my routine scan (6 months post-chemo) was clear (much to our relief!!).
• After Olivia’s fifth round of chemotherapy, scans showed that she is in remission again.
• On a recent holiday to the Gold Coast, Olivia spent half the time in hospital. She developed very high temperatures and required emergency surgery to have her portacath removed as she developed a serious infection.
• We have since been enjoying time at home. Olivia has been back at preschool, which she absolutely loves. We have been very busy catching up on the things that need doing at home and taking Olivia to various appointments as we are now trying various alternative medicines and approaches to health.
• Olivia will be having her next round of scans next week. We are naturally very anxious but hopeful that they will be clear and we can continue to enjoy happy times with our gorgeous girl.

 After Olivia relapsed, we sat down and thought about all the things that we wanted to do with her. This included doing lots of fun things, taking her on great holidays, and building her a fairy garden in our backyard. We know how much she loves the fairy garden at Sydney Children’s Hospital and how it gives her a place that she can go to enjoy herself and get away from everything. We had originally thought about turning a small disused section of our yard behind the gazebo into a fairy garden. We considered doing it ourselves, though soon realized that we had neither the time, the expertise, nor the funds to turn this dream into a reality. We desperately wanted to do something for Olivia so we contacted one of our local radio stations. However, we assumed that they were not in a position to help us as we did not hear anything for quite a long time.

Just when we were starting to think that no one was going to be able to help us, we had offers of help on the same day from both Mix106.3 and GHD, a local engineering consultancy. GHD wanted to do it as a team building experience, as part of their GHD in the community program.  Once the two organisations joined forces, the project took off and grew considerably in scope. GHD had allocated a budget and planned to do provide a lot of the labour, including landscape architects, project managers and general helpers. Mix106.3 put a call out on their breakfast radio program for donations of goods and specialist trades to assist with Olivia’s Fairy Garden. We were thrilled to learn that because of the overwhelming response from the Canberra community and their willingness to help us out, GHD were able to transform our entire backyard. We were amazed at what they were proposing to do for us.

Olivia sensed that something was up so we told her that there was going to be a surprise in the backyard – she said “What? A rollercoaster?!” with beaming eyes. She later picked up on our discussions about a fairy garden, as kept asking us about it. Luckily, we bought a few pieces for the fairy garden and placed them in the garden at the side of the house and convinced our girls that that was their new fairy garden.