Bobby's Sunday Summary

This week has been a crazy one.  I have not written in a long time, because of all the craziness that has been happening.  So a few weeks ago I went to CA for the second time in as many months.  I went for a conference, that I actually was talking at.  If you are interested you can watch it online. but I don't recommend it.  I am sure you can find a much better way to spend 40 mins.

As part of this trip Susan and the kids went with me.  We went to go visit some friends that left Illinois 5 years ago.  We also met up with a lot of other friends that are out in the bay area. I got to spend the weekend before and the weekend after doing touristy things with them.  We went to go see the Redwoods at Muir Woods.

But James was getting a new tooth and was a bit sick so it was less than a stellar experience.  Oh and we had to drive a lot to get there.  Then we had to wait in line for a bus to take us there, etc. Susan already talked about our trip so I am not going to duplicate things too much.  I just wanted to include some of my photos and add that we drove a lot.  When I got back after the conference the rental van had 700 more miles on it then when I had left.  Wow that is a lot of driving.

The next weekend we went to Tilden park.  The highlight of it for the kids was the Carousel.

James just enjoyed hanging out. 

After that the plan was to wait a week and then take off for a trip to Utah for a family reunion.  We were all way too exhausted to wait just a week so we pushed it may by another half of a week.

Last Saturday, after we had been back from the trip for a while, the kids decided that they wanted to spend their birthday money on a trip to IPower.  Alice had to do a few chores to get the money together.  The kids have done it a few times before, but this is the first time that I have been able to go.  It was a lot of fun.

Alice and Robert really progressed a lot between the beginning of the visit where you see Alice climbing into the pit carefully to the end where you see here jumping off of a high bar into the pit.  She would also walk across the balance beam and then jump into it all by herself.  She was very happy about it all.

Then this week happened.  On Friday I woke up with some pains in my gut, and I though it must be food poisoning.  But it steadily got worse so that by mid morning I went to the doctor, that proceeded to send me to the emergency room.  Long story short Friday at about 10 PM I was rolled into the OR to have my appendix removed.  I am doing fine, just a little sore.  So the trip to Utah that we were planning on is now suspended for at least a week, but we will have to wait and see.  Overall I consider it a real blessing.  It is bad enough to have this happen, but I can only imagine what it would have been like in the middle of wyoming on the way to Utah, or even in Utah saying with family.  It just would have been a lot more of an inconvenience.

But it is not all bad news either.  I got out of the hospital very quickly and yesterday, James decided that he was ready to start taking a few steps.  We did not capture is real first steps, but here are some that are very close to his absolute first steps on his own.