Reminder to keep and eye on my brothers travel blog...

This is a reminder to keep an eye on my brothers travel blog. They are almost two months into their 18 month round the world trip and have thus far visited Egypt, India and Nepal. Running commentary and cool pics can be read and observed on the front page but lots of photos can be viewed by clicking through the photos link at the top of the page.....

Warning....it's a lot more interesting than these pages right now so remember where you heard of this site, do come back to us....

 

 

Progress with Walking

We are enjoying one of the few holiday weekends here in the US, Monday is Labor Day. Isabel and I chilled out a little this morning (Lynne and Anja braved Wal-Mart) but this afternoon we went over to Lisa and Brads for a BBQ.
I took a few photos of Isabel this morning which I will post over the coming days but I also managed a perfect short video clip of her walking. Since getting her cast off it has taken her a few days to gain a little confidence but she is making great progress again. I do realize that we are only a few days from missing the more sluggish Isabel.

Kristina.....

A quick shot of the girls and Kristina. This is what I saw when I came out for a coffee from the office Friday morning. I simply couldn't resist grabbing the camera. Each of the girls tightly snuggled into Kristina's lap, each competing for space, her attentions and affections. We are so pleased with how the girls so enjoy being with Kristina, all of which is due to her approach with them. She is extremely kind, caring, trustworthy, firm when needed and we trust her implicitly with them. Like our previous nannies, Michelle and Lindsay, we are very lucky to have somebody who cares for them as much as we do.

Thanks Kristina.

 

Girls Appearances Changing ?

We all change appearances as we age, of course some more than others (no comments please). Children change continually and often it's the parents that notice the least. I think Isabel and Anja have changed a lot recently however. I started flicking through some photos this evening and I noticed it a lot more.

They are growing up.....

(Anja is very proud in her nurses uniform)

 

 

Wabash River Cycle Ride

On Saturday morning we, together with Randy, Lorraine, Kevin & Kaisa and the kids of course, all participated in our local annual bike ride.

Each year the Wabash River Cycle Club put on a century bike ride through the backroads of the Lafayette area with several distances for all levels of participation. In previous years I have done the full 100 miles, we have even done the 64 mile distance (100Km). They also generally have a 40 and 23 mile distance for families to enjoy as a group. On Saturday we all took a leisurely 23 mile ride, stopping half way at the SAG stop in Mulberry for a picnic. The weather was absolutely perfect and we had a great day!

A few years back we were members of this club, the WRCC. They are very dedicated and as normal they did a fantastic organizing job and we'd all like to express our thanks for their volunteering efforts.

I'm also trying something new here, embedding a picture slideshow so hopefully it works well.

 

Post Olympic Update!

I do realize that it has been a few days...there was a small matter of the Olympics! We have this digital video recorder which allows one to tape a whole host of TV which I did to great effect during the Olympics. I watched hours of coverage, probably the most I have ever done. There were many late nights and this poor blog suffered. Sorry!

So, many little items have occured over the last two weeks. I will try detailing them over the coming evenings. Of note, Isabel now has her leg back. She had her cast removed last week and was probably best pleased to be back in the sand box and of course the bath and the pool!

Watermelon Carving!

Friday night, prior to Isabel's party, Lynne decided to get creative and decided to do something different. She found a few ideas online and settled upon a watermelon carving and selected a pig as her first effort. It's amazing what can be found online on this topic. If you search online for Watermelon Carving under images, the results are spectacular.

Lynne's pig turned out really well I thought.

 

 

 

Isabels First Birthday

Isabel will turn one year on Monday and since that day is normally not conducive to having relaxed gatherings with friends, we celebrated her first birthday yesterday. The weather was absolutely perfect, very unlike August in Indiana. Warm (75F) and not at all humid.

Friends came and went throughout the day and generally a good time was had by all. She managed to just about squeeze into the dress my Mum sent over for the occasion. Lynne carved a watermelon party pig; we had lots of grilled items and the mandatory cake and ice cream of course. As is customary on first birthdays, I think the adults and older kids enjoyed the treats better than Isabel.

Lots of photos were taken of course, many of which are posted to our web album space and naturally a few selected below. When she was crawling about with her cast, she was continually getting caught up in her dress and it is for this reason that she appears in many photos without it.

Many thanks to everybody who came and made this a special day for Isabel, we all enjoyed it.

 

 

 

 

Contact from an Old Friend and Neighbour

A couple of days ago I received an email from an old friend, Fiona Lunt. She was a neighbor of ours when we were growing up in Ballybride, which is a small township outside the town of Roscommon.

She is now living in Boston, married and calling herself Fiona Duncan. She didn’t happen to mention her husband’s name but she did send some pictures of her two lovely kids, Tara who is almost 4 and Rory who is 2.

It was great to hear from her. We traded emails and of course I’m due to email her back (this is pretty typical). She offered her house for a visit sometime to Boston, something that we may indeed take her up on since I’ve never actually been. Thanks for emailing Fiona, hope the girls are doing well and the move went smoothly.

All is well on other fronts here in Indiana. I took Isabel for a one week X-ray check up this morning. She appears to be healing well and is actually starting to sleep a little better again. She is also moving around as if she had never anything wrong with her! Yes, you guessed it, she is climbing on all sorts of stuff again.

 

 

Update on Isabel's Broken Leg

Isabel is now in her permanent cast, which I think looks incredibly cute! As you all know, however, I'm pretty biased! She is doing well, relying less on pain relieving drugs and back to her normal jovial self. She keeps wanting to stand (and climb) which of course is strictly not allowed. We anticipate having this cast on for 3 weeks.

Yesterday she did manage to get out of it, yes pulled her leg out of it so that required yet another trip over to the doctor for another cast to be put on....she is starting to be a popular little girl at the doctor's office.

 

 

Isabel in the Wars Again....a Broken Leg

Once I posted that comment last week about letting her fall, I may have jinxed Isabel. From the excitement this week of Isabel’s first steps video, to her black eye, she has now added another twist.

Yesterday, after climbing on a chair and subsequently falling, she landed awkwardly and broke her leg. Lynne took her to the emergency room and an X-Ray confirmed this. She currently has a temporary cast on but tomorrow she will see the pediatric orthopedic surgeon. Life as a parent goes on…

 

 

 

 

Isabel's Black Eye

Isabel picked up a nice black eye over the weekend! I must state for the record that this was not accrued or associated with my previous post, the videos where I let her wander off on her own:)

This was a simple non walking related incident, she climbed on our small trampoline and came down hard from it on the side of her face! Unlike Anja, she wants to climb everything. If it exists, she wishes to be on top of it!!

Today we visited our local state park, Prophetstown State Park. Funny how one always visits stuff when away and never ones local attractions. We were guilty of this so we took a spin out there this morning. It has the Indiana native prairie grasses as its focus so it was quite different.

Have a good week everybody!

 

 

Isabel Walking

I have finally got a few short videos of Isabel walking. They are short so it shouldn't take that long to load. In the first, Isabel is walking from Kristina to Lynne and Anja and in the second, well, she thought she was going to be caught by her obviously unreliable Daddy....

Week's Vacation on the Bike

This last week was our second week of vacation of the year. We decided to stay at home and try doing some fun stuff together. Kristina came to work last week so she was looking after the girls (Kristina, thank you, I'm sure it wasn't easy last week with us hanging around).

We intended doing a bike ride each day but our plans were slightly thwarted earlier in the week with Anja's sickness.

My last post indicated that we were waiting for the results of a mouth swab to confirm Strep Throat. Well it was negative so the next day we trotted back to the doctor to sequentially pursue a urine test in the morning and a chest X-Ray in the afternoon to evaluate whether she had a bacterial infection in either her urinary tract or lungs. Neither as it turned out, but she was still spiking a fever well into Wednesday, after which it mysteriously abated. So after almost a week of fever and several doctor visits and tests, it was viral and passed in its own time, after lots of fever reducing medication.

We were able to get back to some relaxation on Wednesday, Thursday and Friday, did a few 40 mile rides together. All told I managed to cycle 197 miles through the back roads of Indiana over the week (Lynne took Friday off). It was lots of fun.

Also managed lots of smaller chores during teh week...dentist visit, haircuts all round, trip to the bank and local health authority to collect Isabels birth cert and lots more..even got to read the paper each day.

The picture below, one of my favourites, is from a bike ride event we did in 2003 in Bloomington Indiana, The Hilly Hundred, before the girls were born. We did a lot of biking together back then so it was nice to be out on the roads together again this week.

 

Weekend Update

Isabel is now walking. I don't really have any photos of her doing this yet since she's not exactly running around the place. She will take very deliberate steps between two people with outstretched hands. She can easily accomplish 5-10 steps before she inevitably comes crashing down. She is so excited when doing this, it's so much fun to see.

Anja is sick, I had her at urgent care this morning. She has had a spiking fever all weekend in addition to complaints of a sore tummy and mouth. Her throat has been swabbed and the results of this test await before we pull the trigger on treating Strep Throat tomorrow with antibiotics....life goes on!

We had Steef, Ginette & Marissa over for dinner last night. We had a great evening, the weather was perfect, we simply sat outside and chatted about life and the kids of course. Marissa is getting so big and so aware of her environment. We enjoyed the evening guys, thanks for coming over. I just noticed that they had posted lots of excellent pictures from the evening on their blog

We all spoke with uncle Davey this morning. I installed Skype again yesterday in anticipation of catching him online and sure enough this morning he was sitting in a wireless area in Cairo. We all got to say hello, he even saw the kids since we have a webcam with a built in speaker. It was great to speak with him, it was funny having him recount the story of how they were conned yesterday. You can get all the details on their blog.

 

 

 

 

Yellow Themes

Shown below are a few pictures that never made it to these pages from a few weeks back.

Not much going on this end. Lynne is travelling today, left at an unholy hour this morning and will not return until after 11pm tonight. A one day business trip to the East coast is not much fun, and she will do it again this Friday!

Davey and Sam landed OK in Egypt, be sure to keep an eye on their blog as they tour the world (there is a link in the sidebar).

Sheri - I will ask Lynne for the Blackcurrant jam recipe, however, I'm pretty sure it's as simple as: 1-1.25lbs sugar for each pound of fruit. Then she added about 1 pint of water for the 4lbs she made into jam. This was boiled for about 1.5 hours and then jarred up!! That's the rough outline anyhow!!

Hope your week is going well everybody!

 

 

 

 

Jam from the Garden

Lynne, our house Martha Stewart, was busy making jam this morning (and this was all before 8 am). Yesterday she picked 2.5lbs of blackcurrants from the garden which were added to the pound from last week. Delia Smith was consulted, she is a famous English cook who has published several classic cooking texts, and quite a few pots of Blackcurrant Jam were ready before I had even finished my morning coffee (by which time she had also whipped up two batches of banana muffins (yum), using another receipe from no other than Delia!!