Terry Cook, an 8-year-old student at Dunlap Seventh Day Adventist School, and his 4-year-old brother Connor are excited big-time these days.

The two boys are counting the minutes until Christmas.

But their mother, Kadie Cook, has already gotten her most important gift: Terry and Connor back home, happy and healthy.

Just 10 months ago, on Feb. 9, the two boys were playing with a gas can outside the family’s isolated home on Brockdale Mountain in Bledsoe County.

The can exploded. Terry was burned over 75 percent of his body and Connor suffered severe burns to his face and body.

Terry ran into the house to his mother, who began working to put out the flames enveloping him.

It was the boy’s brother, then-6-year-old Zachary, who alerted his mother that Connor also had been burned, but could not find his way to her because of the flames in his face.

During the 45 to 60 minutes that it took a LifeForce helicopter to get to the family’s isolated home on Brockdale Mountain in Bledsoe County, Mrs. Cook worked frantically to help her sons. And during the long months they spent in Georgia burn centers, she stayed with them, monitoring their every move for signs of improvement.

The boys spent 80 days in induced comas in Doctors’ Hospital in Augusta, Ga., which specializes in treating burn patients, she said. They were transferred to Children’s Hospital in Atlanta for rehabilitation.

“I was starting to feel like I lived in Georgia,” she recalled.

But on June 12, she was allowed to bring the boys back home to Tennessee.

But not to the home on Brockdale Mountain, which the family had purchased less than a year before the fire.

Heat from the exploding gas can melted the siding on the structure, which was left damaged and contaminated by mold. It was declared inhabitable.

Hopefully, though, their new home will be ready to move into during the holidays, Mrs. Cook said.

Both Terry and Connor still face more surgery – they were back in Augusta just this past week for outpatient surgery – as well as extensive medical treatments such as steroid shots intended to help smooth and soften their scarred skin.

But at home, she said, they are the same active, happy boys they were before the fire.

“Every time we go to Augusta, we take them in to see the nurses who treated them while they were there,” Mrs. Cook said. “They remember them when they were in comas, and they can hardly believe they’re running and playing like they are now.”