Roller Skating

I took Rylee on a Mommy/Rylee date to the skating rink and to dinner.  Our Sunday School class had a social and we all brought our daughters.  I did not think Reagan was quite big enough, so she and Jason went on a Daddy/Reagan date to Chick-fil-a and Best Buy.  Here are some pictures from Thunderbird Roller Rink.

After I got her skates on, Rylee stood up and immediately fell down.  I was skeptical at this point.

Several months ago, the women went skating and I had a very hard time.  Either I'm getting old or my CMT is to blame, but either way, I think my skating days are behind me.  My sweet friend, Carrie, offered to help Rylee out.  Carrie teaches Reagan's class with me every other Sunday at church.

Rylee quickly decided she needed no one to hold her hand.  She did really well considering this was her first time on real roller skates.

Carrie and Amy decided to help Rylee skate fast.

We had a great time and now it was time to return the skates.

Rylee had a great time with her friend, Kyla.

After no nap and then roller skating, it took Rylee all of about two minutes to fall asleep tonight.  We had another beautiful day.

Potbelly Sandwich Works

After going to the gym, we went to Potbelly for lunch. Jason and the girls enjoyed a vanilla shake.

-- Post From My iPhone

Peanut Update

We had the whole family at the doctor's office this morning for Rylee's peanut challenge.  She successfully ate three peanuts!  This was our original goal as this helps protect her from accidental exposure and a severe reaction.  Now, we had some decisions to make.  We met with the doctor (we usually see the nurse practitioner) and discussed our options for moving forward.  We have decided to go ahead and push on with the goal of eating ten peanuts.  This would mean she could probably eat a PB&J, PB cups, Peanut M&Ms and that sort of thing. So, we are looking at around ten more weeks of doctors appointments.  We will spend this week doing three peanuts twice a day as usual.  Then, next week, we will stop using Zyrtec.  She will continue with the three peanuts twice a day and then after a week, we will do a skin test and blood test to see how much improvement those tests show.  This is mostly information the doctor wants since we are "cutting edge" in his study.  It was nice to talk to him and see his excitement in the success we have had.  A few days after that, we will do another challenge with four peanuts and proceed adding one peanut a week until we get to ten.  We may have some more bumps in the road during the process, but we are hopeful.  The thought of her getting to eat all of her Halloween candy or Easter egg treats is very exciting!  Thank you all who have prayed with us on this journey.  Hopefully our experience can help other kids in the future.

Family Fun

Here is a video of the family having fun in the back yard.  Click the image below to watch the video.

Rhonda agreed to have me update her Facebook profile photo with image on the right below.  The original photo is on top, and I modified it to create the image on bottom in Photoshop Elements by duplicating the layer, applying a decent amount of Gaussian blur, overlaying the layer and changing its opacity to 50%.  The net effect is darker darks, lighter lights, and a softer image.

Craft Time

Robin told me about this craft using your broken crayons.  We have accumulated many broken crayons, so I thought this would be a good thing to do on Friday.  The girls had a good time sorting, tearing paper off (that was the hard part), breaking the crayons into 1" pieces, measuring out those pieces to equal four crayons, and putting them in a muffin tin.  I put them in the oven and the girls were amazed to see them melting.  It was a fun and educational craft.  We let them cool during nap time and then after they woke up, they had a great time coloring pictures for us.

Here is a picture of how ours turned out.  The only problem we are having is that Reagan is trying to hoard them and not share!

Here is a link for the instructions if you want to try it yourself (Aunt Ally!)

http://crafts.kaboose.com/fall_crayons.html

Updating the Blog

I was way behind on blogging, so I've been working to get it caught up.  I have done October and November.  You can use the list at the right to link to those months.  If you have a feed reader, it should update automatically.  Sorry for the delay.  I will be working over the next week or so to get December and January done.  I'll let you know when it is updated.

Playing in the Snow

We had record snow fall in the region, and the family and I took advantage of it by playing in the snow.  Click the image below to view a video I put together.

Playing with Photo Booth

We had a fun time playing with the Photo Booth application on our iMac.  Enjoy the two photos of Rhonda and I, and the two videos of the kids (mostly Reagan).

The fearless leader...

...and his lovely bride.

One Reagan just isn't enough.  Click photo above for video.

Our alien baby.  Click photo above for video.