on the way

we are almost on the way to cambodia! please visit this blog over the next month to see what is up in our world!

http://cambodiaglobalx.blogspot.com/

my life

so i am writing to apologize for the lack of posting. my life has been insane the past few months. we hired an amazing woman to be my new boss and we are knocking projects out of the park BUT we have been busy busy busy!

the next little bit of my life looks like this:

• training for my outside volunteers this coming weekend
• assimilating those volunteers and the ones who trained last weekend onto teams
• my bug is turning 3 in a couple of weeks
• planning for and going to cambodia march 18-29
• planning for good friday, easter AND strategic service sunday (the biggest sunday of the year) BEFORE i go to cambodia bc i get back from cambodia on march 29
• strategic service sunday happens while i am OUT OF TOWN! UGH!! i LOVE strategic service!!
• good friday is april 2; i dont think i need to do the math for you but that is only about 96 hours from when i get back. not too mention that i will still be in a fog from the time change
• easter is april 4!
• emailing and following up with the 150+ new volunteers we will get from strategic service
• the amazing Drive conference is may 3-5
  

while i have all of these things going on that have dates attached to them i also have a marriage, a 3 year old, a house to keep clean, 3 blogs to keep up with here, here and here, i volunteer my time with redeemed (a ministry that helps women come out of the bondage of human trafficking) and we just recently went through a merger with wellspring living and i am the one making the schedule for march housing. i also work for a church and sunday is always coming!

so if i have been a bad friend or a bad blogger or a bad twitterer or a bad facebooker, hang in there with me and ill surface in mid may after i contact all of the amazing new volunteers that will want to join our teams!

things are so crazy i have TWO episodes of Lost on DVR and ONE Grays that i have not even thought about watching.

still love me?

ps. check back in about a week or so and i will have posted the link to our cambodia blog!

rose and pit stop 1

rose and the bra truck. i was never sure the purpose of this truck but it made for a good photo op :)


















pit stop 1...finally!!























there are no words to describe this necklace

day 1 of the 3day 09

the banner that bobbies mom made for my mom


















the survivor circle on the morning of the walk


















the LONG row of people as we started the walk


















the 1st pit stop sign























2 awesome ladies from the buttercups


















the buttercup team

day one eve and day one morning

these first few pictures are of us at dinner. mom opening a scrap book that bobbie made for her from the past two 3 day walks that becky and bobbie did. the rest of the pics from dinner are of my, my mom, becky, bobbie, rose, my grandmother and my bug :)

the ones further down are of us at opening ceremonies friday morning. wow, what a powerful moment!

why i walk

for my favorite girls :)

he holds her purse

Dad, OB, David. Thanks for holding moms purse over the years. You are the best :) We love you!!

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Will he hold your purse?

"Everything I know about marriage I learned in my cancer clinic." I've been known to say this to my friends, maybe more than once, maybe even causing some of them to grind their teeth and grumble about Robin and Her Infernal Life Lessons.

I can't help myself. I've worked as a breast cancer doctor for 20 years, I've watched thousands of couples cope with every conceivable (and sometimes unimaginable) kind of crisis, and I've seen all kinds of marriages, including those that rise like a beacon out of the scorched-earth terror that is a cancer clinic.

It's a privilege to witness these couples, but the downside is I find myself muttering under my breath when my single female friends show me their ads for online dating. "Must like long walks on beach at sunset, cats," they write, or "French food, kayaking, travel." Or a perennial favorite: "Looking for fishing buddy; must be good with bait." These ads make me want to climb onto my cancer doctor soapbox and proclaim, "Finding friends with fine fishing poles may be great in the short term. But what you really want to look for is somebody who will hold your purse in the cancer clinic."

It's one of the biggest take-home lessons from my years as an oncologist: When you're a single woman picturing the guy of your dreams, what matters a heck of lot more than how he handles a kayak is how he handles things when you're sick. And one shining example of this is how a guy deals with your purse.

I became acquainted with what I've come to call great "purse partners" at a cancer clinic in Waltham. Every day these husbands drove their wives in for their radiation treatments, and every day these couples sat side by side in the waiting room, without much fuss and without much chitchat. Each wife, when her name was called, would stand, take a breath, and hand her purse over to her husband. Then she'd disappear into the recesses of the radiation room, leaving behind a stony-faced man holding what was typically a white vinyl pocketbook. On his lap. The guy -- usually retired from the trades, a grandfather a dozen times over, a Sox fan since date of conception -- sat there silently with that purse. He didn't read, he didn't talk, he just sat there with the knowledge that 20 feet away technologists were preparing to program an unimaginably complicated X-ray machine and aim it at the mother of his kids.

I'd walk by and catch him staring into space, holding hard onto the pocketbook, his big gnarled knuckles clamped around the clasp, and think, "What a prince."

I've worked at cancer clinics all around Boston since then, and I've seen purse partners from every walk of life, every age and stage. Of course, not every great guy accompanies his wife to her oncology appointment every day -- some husbands are home holding down the fort, or out earning a paycheck and paying the health insurance premiums -- but I continue to have a soft spot for the pocketbook guy. Men like him make me want to rewrite dating ads from scratch.