It's been a hot minute since I last posted (six years, give or take! Haha) In my last post, I had been married for one year, had a puppy for about 3 weeks, had yet to graduate and was still living in Pullman, Washington. Needless to say, A LOT has happened in the last six years. Here are some of the highlights since coming home from Italy.
2014- 2015
Came home to Francis and snuggled and studied our way through the rest of the year! I finished my Senior year while Nathan started grad school.
I was honored to receive the WSU Top Ten Senior Award for Arts! Nathan received a TA position and taught an undergraduate voice class- the beginning of his amazing music education career!
We also continued performing together! 2015 we were in The Addams Family as Wednesday Addams and Mal.
2016
Our last show together at WSU was the Merry Widow. This show will forever hold a special place in my heart. It was magical to sing the title role alongside my husband. One of my favorite arias ever, Vilja, brings so much joy to my heart to sing to this day. Now I sing it to our babies!
Our last year at WSU! Our official degrees finishing on-time and early were B.M. Music Education, M.A. Music Education and B.M. Voice Performance and M.A. Voice Performance. Glad to say we both still use our degrees- one of us more than the other! 😅💁
We finished the school year off with a bang and fundraised our way to South Korea for one final choir tour! It was an amazing trip! I wish I had blogged about singing in Korea too!
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Fast forward a few months a couple of pinks lines... Isla was on her way!!
2017
7.7.17 | 7lbs. | 19.26 in.
Isla Eiko Straub
Our sweet firstborn daughter was born!
2018
2018 was one of my favorite years of all time. We had a sweet, easy-going baby, we camped, we traveled, we bought chickens and we bought a company!!
Isla's early years were filled with amazing memories. Camping, pumpkin patches, summer fairs... Small little moments that have built our lives. We are so grateful for our family, our church family and friends!
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| Santa Monica |
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| LA Opera House | Candide |
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| Hollywood |
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| Pasco, Columbia River |
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| Three of our chickens from left to right, Kevin, Angela and Meredith. The Party Planning Committee :) |
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| On our way to the Olympic Peninsula for some luscious green camping! |
Puyallup Fair
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| Bob's Corn Maze |
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| Hayride at Bob's Corn Maze with the Shafto's! |
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| Our little energizer bunny! |
In August, we bought AWSOM and became small business owners of a school of music! What a huge blessing and dream come true that was! We were so blessed to have our wonderful friends, Andrew and Kim White, build an incredible business that we were able to buy. Nathan has been an incredible leader as the Director and Owner over the years. We are so blessed to have the AWSOM family in our lives and to be able to continue performing as well.
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Andrew, Kim and Cali!2019 |
The following year, 2019, will go down in Straub history as one of the hardest years we've gone through (to date!). January started with an awesome blessing- Nathan was a recipient of the 425 Business 30 under 30 Business Award. It was a great honor and he so deserved it!
The rest of the year, felt like a constant struggle. It was filled with challenges and heart ache. Through it all, our God was faithful. He carried us through when we felt like everything was falling apart. It started with the snowstorm of 2019. Snowpocalypse, many called it! What started out as a few fun snow days turned into a huge financial drain. Our school relies on teachers driving to student's homes for lessons and with road conditions the way they were we basically lost an entire month of income. Unfortunately, the IRS doesn't give a rip if you lost income in a snowstorm and they still want their money! We were already a little behind in business taxes, but the snowstorm added so much extra stress! Moving forward, we learned several things. 1) Have a better snow-day/inclement weather plan for the school. 2) Set aside more than you need for taxes as a small business owner!On February 15, perhaps one of the biggest hurdles we were to face in 2019 began. It was late at night, still during Snowpocalypse, I went to turn the lights off before going to bed. I noticed Francis, our sweet five-year old dog, was acting weird. His eyes were bulging (more than usual!) and he was whimpering in pain. I remember so distinctly he was at the top of the stairs and his back legs just gave out on him. He started wobbling and crying. It was heartbreaking to hear him in pain and so scary to see him in such a condition! I immediately called Nathan over and we watched him and researched for only a couple minutes before realizing this was an emergency situation. We looked around for a 24/7 emergency vet clinic that would be open in the midst of the crazy snowstorm too. Nathan loaded up the car and drove through the storm first to a clinic in Renton, then some blood work had to be sent all the way to Lynnwood! Again, road conditions were extremely dangerous and icy. Even the freeway was a mess.
It was so hard... Then to add a cherry on top of it all, we were supposed to be headed out on a cruise, that my parents had paid for, in three days. It was a seven day cruise out of Long Beach to Catalina, to Ensenada, Mexico. We had to decide whether we would still go, or if one of us should stay behind with Francis, or if we should all just stay. By the grace of God, we had a friend, Tessa, who was the kindest angel and agreed to come house sit and watch Francis for us so we could go. The amount of love and care she gave to Francis was heroic and selfless. Mind you, he couldn't stand to go to the bathroom so he would just soil himself and need to be cleaned up. He couldn't eat or drink without assistance.. Tessa is a saint!
So, after getting everything set up for Tessa we started packing our bags. I went to grab our passports and Isla's birth certificate (she didn't have a passport yet, but the Carnival website said a birth certificate would work fine). Nathan's passport, check. My passport, check. Isla's birth certificate..... Crap. This story is one of our most embarrassing young-person lessons... All I could find was her hospital commemorative certificate. I knew that that wasn't her official birth certificate, but it was all I could find and all I could do! We decided we'd do a hail-mary and try anyway. Worst case-scenario, we'd have to stay in California with Nathan's parents, which is not a bad scenario! We tried our best to expedite a legitimate birth certificate, but our cruise left on the Tuesday after Presidents Day so everything was closed Sunday and Monday. What a mess!! Anyway, off we went on a much needed but ill-timed vacation. We were worn and absolutely exhausted. Hearts heavy about Francis, stressed about this birth certificate, but hopeful in having a good time on this trip.
To make a long story short, we went and did the hail-mary at the Carnival Cruise Port. It was the most stressful, sweaty palm experience ever. We went through three checkpoints with our crappy photocopied hospital commemorative "birth certificate" and nobody looked closely at it until the last checkpoint!! We thought we were about to get away with it! BUT, at the last checkpoint, we get stopped. The lady sends us to the help desk, the help desk lady looks at it (meanwhile I'm trying to butter her up as much as possible... "Oh I love your necklace!" "Oh, did you see my baby's great-grandparents are here with us too!"). She was so sweet, but she had to call over her manager... *induce panic attack* The manager looks at it and looks at me and says, "You know this isn't a real birth certificate right?" My response- play dumb... "Whaaaaat?? No way!! How can this be? Ohhhh noooo!" To this day, I'm impressed with my own acting skills. Haha :P The manager looked at our huge family and said, "I'll let it slide this time. You need to get a real birth certificate." PHEEEWWW... HUGE sigh of relief, tears of joy. We made it onto the cruise!!!
The cruise itself was great! Isla ate her weight in jello, we enjoyed entertainment and saw some beautiful sights. The weather was horrible- it was way too cold and rainy to use the pool or "sun bathe" (hard to do when there's no sun), but we had an amazing time as a family.
Some highlights include the evening dinners and dance parties, karaoke, buying chiclets from the little children in Mexico, walking around Catalina and hanging out with our favorite people in our staterooms. We had enough sunshine to snap one group pic! Lol
Just as we're thinking life is going to settle down, we get a phone call one day towards the end of March. Grandma Jinko, one of my heroes, had been in a kitchen fire and was in critical condition at the Harborview Burn Unit. She had to undergo tremendous amounts of pain and surgery and rehabilitation. Every time I visited the hospital though, the nurses would comment that my grandma was "one tough cookie!" I'm so proud of her. It was such a humbling and beautiful honor for me to be one of her two caretakers once she was brought home. My mom was her primary and she allowed me to be her secondary so my mom could rest and have a little normalcy in her life. Bathing her and tending her wounds took up to 4 hours. I helped a measly two days a week while my mom served her heart out the rest of the week. It was a family effort to care for my grandparents. We all took turns taking my Grandpa out to get his exercise and to visit Grandma at the hospital. It was a beautiful time of coming together as a family to bless and care for our patriarch and matriarch. Seeing Christ's love through the Kumai family at that time was incredible and something I won't soon forget.
So finally, after sh*t continually hit the fan all year, we were able to slow down and catch our breath. The rest of the year was challenging, but in a fun and meaningful way. Our marriage was strengthened more than ever before. We had to fight for every penny. We ate rice and beans everyday, spent a lot of time on our "Buy Nothing" group on Facebook and studied Dave Ramsey to figure out how we were to get out of our financial hole. We were paying for diapers for Isla AND Francis. We made a lot of sacrifices to spend money trying to keep Francis alive, comfortable and our house from smelling like dog pee and poop. It was rough to say the least. Thankfully, Isla took one for the team and potty trained at a record young age of a whopping 1 year and 9 months. Way to go, Isla!
Through it all though, we had some amazing memories in 2019. I'll always recall that year being one of our hardest, but also one of the most character-building and rewarding.
Towards the end of summer, we decided it was time to add another little Straub to the world. We knew money was tight, but we knew that we could make it work and we didn't want finances to be the reason we didn't have children. We trusted that we were on a path to make things better, things were looking up and God always has and always will provide for us as we trust and obey Him.
I was a couple days from being able to take a pregnancy test, when I had some bleeding. I was bummed and was convinced it was my period. I cried about it a bit and prayed with a friend at church. I prayed God would give us a child and a healthy pregnancy. A couple more days went by and the bleeding subsided. I don't know why, but I felt this nudge to take a pregnancy test- it was on a whim, really! I did my thing... waited a couple seconds and looked at the test. POSITIVE. What kind of awful, confusing bleeding that was, I'll never know... but we had a positive! We were pregnant! Woohoo!
Just as you think, "Oh good, they're on the up and up! Out of the woods!" PSYCH. 2019 was our personal 2020. I went to my first OBGYN appointment and the nurse mentioned my thyroid felt large. She suggested I have the doctor look at it at our next appointment. "Hmm. Ok, whatever" I thought. Next month, we go and hear sweet Piper's heart beat! A magical experience no matter how many kids you've had. I was about to go and Dr. Wittman noticed the little note on my chart and felt my thyroid just before I left. She said it indeed felt large and suggested I have an endocrinologist check it out... Again, "Hmm. Alright, whatever" I thought. I didn't even know what an endocrinologist was. So, I make a few calls and by this we're getting into the holiday season. It didn't seem like a huge pressing issue so it wasn't at the top of my list. The doctor's office was pretty busy, hard to get through to without a referral and I was pretty busy with holiday stuff too (I love the holidays). Eventually, Dr. Patil was able to see me on Christmas Eve. I was tempted to wait until January, but figured it was better to go get this mysterious lump checked out sooner than later.
So, off I went. Dr. Patil was amazing and so friendly. Before she did a physical palpation, we talked about how common nodules are, how 95% of the time (or something like that) they're benign and don't grow, they just keep an eye on them, ya-dah-ya-dah. I remember my eyes did grow wide when she mentioned the slight, unlikely possibility of it being cancer. Like, "Whoa, lady! Why did you use the "C" word? I'm only 26. No way we just had a conversation where that was even a slight possibility." Then she felt it. Her tone immediately changed. She went from non-chalant to all of a sudden quite serious and said, "Wow. Actually that is quite large. I would guess at least 3 cm. I'm going to call in for an ultrasound and we'll go from there. I want you to get in as soon as possible, I know tomorrow is Christmas but how about the day after?" Whooaaa... Ok! That escalated quickly.
I remember coming home to Nathan. He called from the other room as soon as I opened the door, "Hey hon! Everything go ok? It was nothing, right?" ... I just stood at the entrance, kind of unsure of what to say. My silence was enough for Nathan to know something was up and he came running to the kitchen. I looked up at him and all of a sudden got choked up. "It might be something... It might be cancer." I managed to squeak out.
Christmas Eve and Day were fun and memorable, but also challenging. I felt like I had this huge weight on my shoulders that I couldn't really talk about with anyone yet. Between white elephant gift exchanges, meals and small talk with family members, Nathan and I were secretly researching the crap out of thyroid cancer and its symptoms. I didn't have any, I felt great (minus being constantly sick from pregnancy). Nathan became an expert at spotting cancer cells on an ultrasound so that he would know at the appointment. The ultrasound itself was fast and easy. It was funny getting an ultrasound on my neck since my gender reveal ultrasound was just two days later! I was tempted to ask her to take a peak at my tummy too! :P As we were walking out of the hospital we got a call from Dr. Patil explaining what she saw in the ultrasound photos. That was when we knew that A) She's an amazing doctor and cares so much for her patients. and B) We were reassured that this was most likely not cancer, but just to be sure Dr. Patil wanted to do a Fine Needle Aspiration (FNA).
Back to the hospital we went. The FNA was fairly painless, but still suspenseful. We had to wait a few more days to get the results. I had a slightly bruised neck from the FNA and that was when I decided it was time to tell my parents. Well, I wanted to tell only my mom (she's much more cool-headed about this sort of thing) but my dad noticed the bruise on my neck so I just told him. They both took it as I imagined they would, Mom being very chill and not panicked, Dad was brave but also very worried for me. So we all held our breath for several days. We did learn two days later that we were having another baby girl! What a blessing for so many reasons.
December 31. New Years Eve, I get a phone call around four o'clock.
"Is this Hanae Straub?"
"Yes."
"I'm so very sorry to tell you, but the lab results from the FNA have come back positive for Papillary Thyroid Cancer."
"Oh! Oh. Ok. Well, thank you for letting me know."
"I'm so sorry."
"It's ok! It's not your fault! We'll get through this. What are my next steps?"
And thus began our cancer journey. Happy New Year, you have cancer.
2020
We rang in the New Year with some of our best friends, Brett and Kayla and their daughter Mia. We told them the news in their kitchen and they were so kind and supportive. It was an emotional day and a weird way to start a new year, but it's true that when things get rough you know who's in your corner. We celebrated anyway and ate mochi to our hearts content!
