summer catch up

My dad, Cindy, Roni and her family were here for a week. We headed out to the Diamond T guest ranch in Clark Fork to stay. We had 2 cabins and Roni and Doug had their trailer. It happened to be the hottest week of the summer but we made it work. We went to the beach, went to Ross Cedar, hung out at the farm, had a girls day making baskets, played some horse shoes, let the kids pet the animals and enjoyed each others company. Hopefully next year will be more moderate in the weather.

While we were there I had another call from our local orthopedic doctor wanting me to schedule the casting. So I got a chance to talk with him and he doesn't want to wait for an evaluation from Shriners. So we are going to just do Luke's orthopedic work at Shriners. I am disappointed that he couldn't wait for that evaluation so we could have him as an option but I guess that is his choice. However, I am looking forward to going to Shriners now that the choice has been made. The professionals working with Luke are very postive about them and highly recommend them. Plus they are geared totally to kids and families. We should hear from them in the next couple of weeks.

We found a hole in Luke's palate repair. Our plastic surgeon isn't too concerned about it. It is near the donor site and so it may heal up on its own or we may have to do a repair at another later date. Everything else is healing nicely. We still have a very soft food diet which is getting old but we continue to try to do new soft food things. We have pretty much run out of OT/PT money and so we will be working with the school district mainly. After talking with our PT and our plastic surgeon they both feel it is going to work out fine for him. I still have some reservations but am willing to fight for what I want.

We had a great fishing trip to Koocanusa, Montana Sunday to Tuesday this week. The kids fished one morning and caught a mess of fish and one large trout. It was pretty cool to see Ben pulling in this fish, see one jump off the back of the boat and then when we got it to the boat, the fish that jumped was the one we hauled in. We swam, we hung out with Papa Steve and Grandma Mary. I am finding that the more we do things together as a family the better things are going relationship-wise. There are times we need to spend special time with each kid--for sure but as we spend more time as a family the kids are getting along better and better. Hopefully, this will continue as we build our family of 5.

I will try to post some pictures soon. I took a lot so one or two should turn out :)