Jonathan Hand  today completed the London Marathon in 3 hours despite being unwell and was running on our behalf!! Well done Jonathan on an amazing time and thank you so much again for considering us in the first place !!

Well….I say spring and we have been having hail again today!!! Roll on summer.

Its been a while since I have written anything on here as Nic continues to do well and we as a family try to keep a normality about everything. We do get bad days where something will strike a chord with Nic and bring it all home as to how fragile our situation is, but on the whole Nic is super strong. One of life’s fighters. She wants to be here to see her  or our kids grow up and experience everything. One person who we met at the beginning of all this taught us a valuable lesson and that was to plan ahead. Not just to what are we doing tomorrow, not even next week…but things like, where do you fancy going for your 40th?? What shall we do for the kids 18th parties. It sounds mad when at the beginning we were given such minute odds of the treatment Nic was going to have  would even have an effect!! She’s still here and fighting. An amazing lady, annoying at times, but I wouldn’t have it any other way.

Nics re-scan from about 8 weeks ago is on Thursday this week and we are hoping what they saw on there last time was as they thought a positional change in the angle that Nic had her head. You have to tell yourself that if it was anything that they were worried about, they would have had her back in straight away. So we will have the results again on 3rd April so we  would be so grateful if you could cross your fingers again. We are so lucky with all the messages of support that we always get. It’s incredible the amount of love out there for Nic. Thank you all again for your support….Ceri

Well, it’s been a busy time for us as a family over Christmas for a number of reasons so we don’t really feel like our feet have hit the ground properly yet. Saying that, we did have a lovley time as a family despite the awful weather. Lots of mince pies were eaten, a few sneaky sherries and lots of film wathcing all snuggled up on sofas.

We want to thank everybody again for all the super human efforts that have been made over the past 12 months for the fundraising for Nic. Nic continues to be doing well and we try to live as normally as we possibly can. Her next scan is on the 22nd January and we will have the results on the 30th. We never look forward to this but know we have to just get on ad do it.

Over the next month or two we will be getting our heads together for more fun fundraising events for this year and will be posting them up on the events section of the website and the Faceboof pages. There were so many things going on last year and we are so proud that even though we are all novices at these things, we had so many happy fulfilled people at the end of whatever it was they had been to. So, please keep an eye open for this years ideas on how to help.

Finally we wish you all a very happy and healthy fun New Year…..Ceri

We are very, very close now to the £90,000 mark on this amazing journey to raise funds.

Once again the only thing we can do is say thank you to everyone who has been supporting us and doing runs, sky dives, swims etc to raise money. We are so humbled by everyones efforts and the kind messages we receive.

Nic continues to be fine at the moment and so we stay put. It’s an awful thing to be waiting to see how things go, but its literally like we live day by day here and try to keep things as normal as possible for our beautiful kids. They are such a great focus for us both, watching them grow and develop.

Nic has a meeting on the 24th October with her Oncologist to discuss how she is feeling within herself and from there they will set a date for the next 6 month scan sometime after Christmas. And so we just keep muddling through as best we can and try and keep smiling our way through this.

Thank you all so much again from us all…..Ceri

Well….we all  had a great night of dancing and eating on Saturday. A huge thank you to Hazel and Claire for organising it all and for Helen for making some lovely food again!!!

I discovered again that my breakdancing youth was not enough to take me through the night. You definitely require some semblance of coordination when instructions are being called out. It was great fun anyway and at the end of the night, the pot was just a tiny bit short of £700!!! I failed to get Finn and Mae up to dance but Finn was spotted on a number of occasions with his feet flitting about n time to the music.

Thank you to all who came and supported us, the band for some great music and the ladies for organising and feeding us all!!

Ever since we got back from camping it was all systems go to play catch up to Kelly and Reece’s amazing plans for the concert they had been planing at Delamere Manor.

By the time it came to the day I was shattered from all the running round, printing, promoting etc. Kelly has had no previous experience as us all in carrying off something like this and to be truthful, even till about a week and a half before there were frantic texts to from France to whether we should postpone this due to weather and ticket sales. We decided we had to plough on and have faith in both. Kelly Williams is to be truthful that we are all in awe of in our family and extended family and friends. With Reece Lightning by her side acts upon acts were lined up, a very professional PA system and lighting system were organised, security booked, portaloos booked, event application logged with local authorities…….absolutely amazing. I spoke to people on the night who had thought we had had a professional team in to do all the organising!!! Take a well deserved bow Kelly and Reece.

All we can say is it was a spectacular day and night of entertainment in the stunning grounds of Delamere Manor, that had been kindly donated by its owners, Michelle Stubbs and Alan Murtagh, and to cap it all the sun shone all day!! I shall post some photos on here so you can see us all dancing, laughing rolling down hills, setting up our tents, keeping warm around open fires…..it was fantastic and everybody without exception had a fantastic time!!The pictures speak a thousand words of how good it was. Enough for Reece to start planning the next one and he wants it to be bigger and better.

Thank you to everybody who made the effort to travel down to the concert and camp or just enjoy the music and a huge thank you to all the acts and look-a-likes who were there for the day and the PA guys, Michael Smillie for lighting up the manor at night, the security team, Alan and Michelle and most of all Kelly and Reece for having the vision and following through with it through all the obstacles…

At the end of all the night we didn’t make as much as we had initially hoped due to costs of a security team, toilets, PA system and bands etc but we were just short of £500 and are hoping for a cheque of £200 to top it up. It has been a massive undertaking and a big learing curve, but we are all so proud of what we achieved and so pleased that everybody who came had a great time!! Looking forward to the next one!!!

While we were away, some of Nic’s great old school buddies, mainly the main man Simmo, organised a great Race Night. Due to us being away and Simmo as well, we haven’t had a chance to catch up yet. But as soon as we do, we shall be posting some pics on here and let you know how he got on. I can safely assume there would have been some fuzzy heads the following morning!!

It’s been a lovely summer for us as a family and so lucky to spend the time all together. Both Nic and I were so fortunate as kids to have both sets of parents being teachers so we have fantastic memories of lovely long summer holidays spent together as a family….no doubt camping somewhere….so that’s what we did this year following Nic’s results coming back showing the tumour as still being stable. It gave us the confidence to think we could go camping in France  for a lovely long holiday.

Well it was an adventure at the end of the holiday when we just started our journey home. An electrical fault prevented our brake lights working on the caravan resulting in us having to leave it in some obscure place near the alps! So our caravan is hopefully still enjoying a holiday and not being used as a posh chicken coup by the campsite owner.

It was a break that we all needed after such a stressful year and a shame it didn’t end as it should of done. But we are so lucky that we were able to get away at all. Now we just carry on as normal again. It’s 3 months till Nic’s follow up appointment with our Oncologist and a further 3 months then till the next scan. In the meantime we still keep looking for things we hear about that might help keep this thing at bay or reduce its size. Living in limbo but making the most of it……

We have been asked a lot recently how Nic is doing from people that dont see her on a daily basis and can report that Nic is still doing really well at the minute. She has her next scan this monday 23rd and we get the results on 25th. We are keeping our fingers crossed that everything is still stable and that we can then enjoy the summer holidays as a family again. Totally different to this time last year when Nic had just finished her radiotherapy and was on steriods and really not well at all. So, we carry on as normal or as normal as normal is these days. As Nics tumour remains stable the specialists are advising us not to go to Texas right now as the treatment is most effective with active tumours and luckily nics remains inactive at this point.

We still cant begin to tell everybody how grateful we are for all the continued help and support that we are given. We have been dealt a really bad hand in termso of good luck, but on the flipside are so fortunate to have such amazing friends and family to help us through this trying journey. Thank you all so much again!!!