A ROYAL cake

Well once again I've been keeping busy.  A key ingredient for anyone moving on in life after a tragic event.  I have recently started a new hobby...making cakes for my friends birthday.  I'm not sure it is a full out hobby seeing as how two of them happened to be in one week and you can't make one friend a cake and not the other.  My first cake: double chocolate fudge with peanut butter filling between cake layers SMOTHERED in peanut butter frosting covered with crushed Reese Pieces.  YUM!  Cake 2: crushed Oreo crust layered with hot fudge, homemade ice cream, peanut butter pie filling, and crushed oreo's.  YUMMMY.  I felt real great about myself when I left Hy-vee tonight with a box of oreo's, hot fudge, whip cream, and a bottle of margarita's.   The high school girl working asked if it was a rough day....YIKES.  I guess my basket of items looked as if I was 'dumped' and was going home to self loath with margartias and chocolate.  Anyways, the cakes I think were a huge hit...who doesn't love peanut butter and chocolate...I DO, I DO.

Nothing exciting is on tap this weekend, I usually stumble upon something however. 

My parents took off for the weekend to celebrate my Aunt's life.  She passed away on Thursday morning after a long battle with head, neck and throat cancer.  I know she had a very hard road and am thankful she now rests comfortably.  When I look at her fight and the fight others have all I can do is pray for thanks that Brian and I did not have to experience that.  I'm so blessed that Brian had a relatively painless fight even though it was a hard and difficult battle.  

When hear about people who pass due to cancer you think "wow that is sad, how horrible" but then a minute later you carry on with life as normal.  I know I did before this and I know I would always think, "that would never happen to me."  But it did, cancer doesn't discriminate.  When you hear about someone being diagnosed or losing their battle who have a new perspective on it after being in that position.  Your heart aches for them because you understand the road ahead, you know exactly what the nights after chemo are like, you know what the fear of the unknown is like.  In the past year I can count on both hands and both feet the number of people we have known that have passed away from cancer...I can count on one hand the people that went into remission.  That is pretty scary.  It makes you think, makes you wonder why that is?  Why is there nothing more for treatments.  It makes you scared in case you are the next person because the odds are stacked pretty high against you.  You have to hope when you battle and you try to find positives to hang your hat on with success stories...but one thing Brian and I hated was having people tell us stories of people they knew who were told they weren't going to make it and then the treatments worked.  We weren't math majors and we knew the statistics...we knew that if it worked for that person that  mean the odds were it wasn't going to work for us.  You don't want to be negative but that is the reality...you can't hide it.  It was hard fighting so hard to beat cancer but then receive tons of letters and emails with success stories but yet no treatments were working.  It gives you sometimes false hope and when you get knocked down with the latest scan it was that much harder to be positive.  The last thing you want to hear is how it worked, for what seemed like everyone, but you, however in reality that is not the case.  If you want to give a cancer patient hope, show them faith.  Faith will get them much further on the journey then stories of a friend you knew who had some cancer who survived.  Faith gets them through doctor's appointments, faith soothes them after chemo, faith keeps them positive that there is greater things in the world.  That is priceless.