Boating in a Coffin

A couple Sundays ago, all us kids (and yes, I include David and Keslie in "us kids"!) went down to the creek to enjoy the lovely day! The kids went boating! Here are the proceeds of the afternoon! Enjoy!

Benjamin in his stock trough! It worked! ;)

The girls watching the funny sight! Lydia is enjoying the water more this year than she did last year! She's ready to dive in! LOL! Not really!

Here comes David and Taylor in the coffin....er...boat Taylor made!

All I can say is that it worked!

And there is Gracie in her water trough!

Ben took Lydia for a little ride but at first she wasn't quite sure she liked it much!

It wasn't so bad after all!

Our lovely creek! This is what sold us on the property! It is stunning back there!

Then after dodging rock from a gracious sister David and Taylor tipped the boat and both guys went all the way under the water! I am afraid us girls were laugh till our sides hurt! It was so funny to see these guys rowing around having fun and then to watch them spill over backwards into cold spring water!

Trying to stay out of the water!


Finally the guys try to bail out the water!


Sarah on her floating device!


Then the guys thought they should try out the main channel of the creek! (Looks kinda like Lewis and Clark! Kinda!)

Take a look at the homemade oars!

My little princess!

If you look hard you can barely see them coming down the creek! I took the kids down the road to pick them up!

But they wanted to keep going!

So we went further and sat at this bend in the creek to wait for them!
They did come down but my camera ran out of batteries! Oh well, at least I got pictures of the earlier part of the afternoon!

Painting, lights, tile and a birthday!

Grandma E., daddy's mother, with Sarah and Lydia waiting for the party to begin.

Praying for Taylor our special 16 year old!!!

A real coon skin hat just like Benjamin's

Pretty smiles!

Mr. Hughes was kind enough to come over and help begin to lay the tile. He has done a lot of it and was a great help, thank you Mr. Hughes!!

Dad and Mom's room

Ben handing dad the tiles

Mr. Hughes and Dad deciding where to start the tile.

All the tiles that don't need cut are done in the master bath! Yeehaw!

Dad working on outlets in the mudroom. Thank you Y. for your incredible help, you have been quite the blessing!!!!

Do you see the canned lights on in the kitchen area????

The first of our belongings in the attic, just the beginning!

Heather learning to put in an outlet, she did 14 of them today, yea Heather!!!!

The wood flooring needs to have the ends opened so the air can get in and acclimate the wood to the room. Ben and I did most of it ourselves! That was a big job!

Mom took this of me opening the box ends! We were almost done at this point and boy were we cold and tired!

Then I saw Benjamin doing this!!!! LOL! He was opening the ends of some boxes that were under others. He was not posed!

LOOK!!! We have light in the powder room!

Taylor hooking up an outlet

Grandpa worked long and hard today hooking up the furnaces. He made lots of noise banging and pounding all day!!!

Can you believe he is 76? Amazing guy!!!

More of his beautiful handiwork!!!

Lights in the girl's bathroom.

We are so excited at the progress in the past several weeks and anticipate much more to come. We are thanking God daily for our permanent power and Mr. U. who was used of God to help us get it. We are just amazed at how God works and so very thankful!!

Taylor's Surgery

Monday, Taylor once again had surgery on his arm. I know some of you don’t know the reason why he has had 4 surgeries on his left arm, so I’ll give you a “short” account of the problem.

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When Taylor was just a young wiper-snapper at the age of 7 he was playing tag at church, tripped and fell into a post and broke his arm. After a frustrating ER experience we discovered he had a cyst in his left humerus bone that had hollowed out about a third of his bone. Naturally, since the bone was so weak he broke it a couple of other times so consequently the Dr. referred us to Shriners. Since then he has had 4 surgeries and many other check ups. After his last procedure in 2002 we continued to watch it to see if the bone marrow that is taken from his hip and injected into the cyst would begin to grow and fill the cyst area. Well, it didn’t, but we opted out of more surgeries until now since it has been so long and has not healed.

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Monday, mom started her day at 2:40am to get to Salem to pick up Mrs. A, who was so gracious to offer to go with them, and then get to Portland before 6am. The biggest thing about the surgeries for Taylor is the fact that he can’t eat from 2am that morning till after procedure is done. For a growing boy that can be pure torture! They did say he could have clear liquids such as juice. Basically, they sat and waited most of the morning, had 3 different nurses check his vitals, and answered the same questions several times. The people at Shriners are exceptionally nice, so it was a pleasant day.

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Taylor had to take a shower with special soap and the nurse was kind enough to give him scrubs to put on instead of the revealing gown, since he still had 1 ½ hrs to wait. Well, when the orderly, a little tiny gal, came in with the gurney to take him to surgery, she looked several times around the room, not seeing her patient. She thought he was one of them!! Then, she gave him one of those “special” gowns to put on. About 10 min. later he came out of the bathroom looking rather catty wampus. The gown had snaps all over the place and he couldn’t figure out how to put the thing on!! Like a guy, he didn’t ask directions!

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Taylor didn’t get prepped for surgery till about 11:30am. He came out of surgery about an hour later. Like normal, it took him a while to wake up and when he did he was feeling okay and ready to eat! But this time, since people were praying for this, he wasn’t TOO hungry but that doesn’t mean he didn’t eat a lot! They didn’t get out of Shriners till 5 pm and then there was the 1 hour and 45 minute drive home. Needless to say it was a very long day for all three of them.

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Taylor is hurting today. This last surgery they went in through his muscle, which we think is causing most of the pain. The other three he hardly felt anything after but this time it was done in a different spot. Poor guy. He has either been lying down on the couch or sleeping all day.

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We are still praying that this procedure will be effective and the bone marrow will grow and fill in his hollow bone. It hasn’t been a huge issue to deal with this the last 7 1/2 years but it would be good to be able to not worry about him breaking his arm.

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Thank you all for your prayers! They were and are much appreciated!

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(Thank you Mrs. Anderson for taking the picture!)