Tomorrow's the first day of school in Palo Alto [I know. It's August. It's ridiculous.] For Sam, the first day of 12th grade, and for Zack, the first day of middle school, and 6th grade. 

While it'll still be a couple of months or so until Sam can attend full time, he got the news from his care team yesterday that it's okay for him to attend in person for the first day at least, as long as he's careful, wears a painters' mask, etc. And he is SO HAPPY about it. He's excited just to be there, to be a high school senior with his classmates for a day to start a new year. And to meet his teachers in person and talk through what the next few months will be.

Medically speaking, everything continues to go really well. We're just waiting for one particular test result to improve -- called a Mitogen Induced Lymph Profiler - it's a test to measure how functional Sam's lymphocytes are, and by extension, how robust his immune system is. The test takes 3ish weeks to run, and the numbers from three weeks ago are still quite low (around 9k, and they need to be something like 70k) -- a result of the steroids that he was on until just recently. So we'll run the tests every few weeks, and should see rapid improvement now that he's off steroids. Hopefully September or October, but we think in any event he'll be back without much restriction this semester.

In the meantime, he's about to finish another senior year class (he's already done economics, and now is finishing art) online, and is about halfway through first semester calculus. College application work in full swing. 

He and Zack are both happy and looking forward to a new year. Kathy will definitely put up pictures tomorrow. It's really emotional for Kathy & me to anticipate -- it's honestly so overwhelming to have them both go to school tomorrow that it's hard to write about; hard to think about, even. 

Both boys are ready to go.

As they should be.