Weston Smiles!

Weston began smiling a few days ago. Here are some pictures...

Foundation

Many of you know that we recently bought a lot to begin construction on our new house. Well, we signed the final papers and began the construction process las week. Here is the first of many "picture stories" of the process.

First, here is the bare lot.

Within a few days of signing, they were already digging out the area to level it for our foundation.

Within two days of that, they put up the forms for the footings...

...and poured the footings...

...then put up forms for the stem walls of the foundation...

...then poured the stem walls...

...and then it snowed!

It looks like the framers will start on the sub-floor by Monday. We'll keep you updated!

The car trip from you know where...

We spent 6 days in California visiting family and friends over this last week. We arrived last Thursday and we were planning on leaving early on Wednesday morning (yesterday) so that we could be back in Bend for worship team practice. We went to bed Tuesday evening around 11:00 so that we would have enough rest for the 7 hour drive home.

Riley startled us all awake when he started crying around 1:00am. Ryan got out of bed to check on him when all of a sudden Riley started vomiting. He threw up all over the bedding and himself. It was so bad that I had to give him a full bath and throw all of the bedding, his jammies, and the pillows that we had borrowed from my mother into the washing machine. So now Riley was naked, cold, sick, and extremely tired. The entire time in the bath he was crying and repeating "I go bed" over and over again. I felt so bad for him. We were trying very hard to keep Riley quiet so that he wouldn't wake up Hannah, Weston, or anyone else in the house. Not an easy task for a 2 year old, as one might imagine.

So, between the hours of 1am and 4am, Riley threw up a total of 3 times. During that time Ryan and I were having to take turns helping Riley (who kept saying that he was going to throw up, but only did so 2 out of the 10 times that he told us he needed to). Weston woke up twice to eat, and since Ryan obviously can't help him with that, I had to switch back and forth between West and Riley. Ryan was a big help, but I still wasn't able to actually get to sleep until somewhere around 4:30am when Riley was practically passed out on the bedroom floor after having such a hard couple of hours. We were supposed to wake up at 6:30am so that we could get up, get dressed, and start the drive back home.

Unfortunately, after our very long night, we couldn't drag ourselves out of bed until around 7:30am. Hannah now had a fever of 102 and was looking very pale and tired. She said that she didn't have a stomach ache at all so were glad about that. We gave her Motrin and told her to try to sleep in the car on our way home. Finally, around 9:30am we began driving down highway 20 in California on our way back to Bend. At this point, by our calculations, we would arrive by 4:30pm (7 hours later), just in time for Ryan to start worship practice at 5:30.

In Redding, Ryan and I switched, and I drove so that he could rest. Haha! We made it about 20 minutes down the road when it happened...

Riley got a little fussy so I looked in the rear view mirror just in time to see a little bit of vomit on his shirt and the car seat straps. I pulled to the side of the road, Ryan hopped out and got Riley out of his seat so that he wouldn't throw up any more in the car. We sat there for a few minutes and nothing more happened so we changed his shirt, wiped off his seat straps, put him back in the car and started driving again. Not 5 minutes down the road, Riley suddenly announced that he was going to throw up. Again, I pulled off to the side, Ryan got Riley out of the car, and we waited...and waited..... and waited.... and nothing again. After a long few minutes, we put Riley back in the car, buckled his car seat, and started driving again. Sure enough, as soon as we pulled back into traffic, Riley vomited all over himself and his car seat. UGHHHHHHH!

We are now in Middle-Of-Nowhere, California with a very sick child and a very stinky car. To add to all of this, we realized that we had nowhere to wash our hands if we got vomit on them when we changed Riley and cleaned up the car. So, I came up with, what I believe to be, a genius idea of using the disposable diaper bags as make-shift gloves. It didn't work quite as well as I had imagined but it was okay and saved us from a big mess. Fortunately (catch my sarcasm), when we packed, we put the suitcases ON THE BOTTOM! We weren't about to take everything out of the back of the car just to get to the suitcase for new clothes, so we wiped Riley down THOROUGHLY and left him in just his underwear. Thankfully, Riley got potty trained 2 weeks ago, and I had put a towel in the car just in case of an "accident." We used the towel for Riley to sit on seat so that he wasn't sitting in the vomit that was already in his seat. Ryan decided that "resting" was probably not in the cards, so he took over driving again.

Because of the time that it took us to clean and change Riley the first time, and to clean him and his seat up the second time, we were now at least an hour behind schedule and realized that we would be getting into Bend a few minutes late of the 5:30pm practice time. Ryan called the church office and cancelled worship team practice and arranged for one of the choir members to get things ready for the 7:00pm choir practice so that he didn't have to spend more time after we got into town preparing choir music. Now we could breathe a little because we knew that we would be home way before 7:00 to start the practice.

To sum up the rest of this very long story, after a lot of false vomit and potty stops, and a couple of nursing stops for West, we finally pulled into Bend at 7:45pm. A 7 hour drive had now taken us 10 hours and 15 minutes. We were all exhausted and a bit overwhelmed by the drama of the day. I got the kids out of the car, gave them a bath and changed them into their jammies while Ryan took the car seat apart and threw it, and the "puke-soaked" (at this point we were done using the decent words) clothing into the washing machine. We finally put the older two kids to bed around 8:45 and by then it was time to feed West again. Whew!!! Ryan had homework that he wasn't able to finish earlier, but he decided that it would be far better to get a few less points on an assignment than be up for another 3-4 hours working on them. We crawled into our nice, warm, comfortable bed around 10:30pm and thanked God that we even made it home at all.

We had a great visit with family and friends, but boy are we glad to be home!