DocBand and Cousins!

We had Clara's DocBand (helmet) fitting on Tuesday.  She had to wear it for 3-4 hours the first and second day and if any red spots (pressure points) were found, we had to wait for the redness to completely disappear before putting the helmet back on.  If any spot took more than an hour to go away, we needed to go back into the clinic to have them adjust it.  She only had one spot needing adjustment, so we went in on Thursday morning.  By Thursday evening, she was now cleared to start wearing it 23 hours a day.  So far, she's been tolerating it well.  Today is the first day she seems to be annoyed by it, but we think she also might be a little tired from a fun weekend.

Brian's cousin, Rachel and her family, came up on Saturday around dinner time and left around 4:30 on Sunday.  We had a GREAT time with them!  You may remember them from this post: Country Living.  They were taking a vacation in the Chicago area and we were very excited they decided to spend some of their vacation with us!  We got deep dish pizza (Giordano's) for dinner and chatted while the kids played together.  After breakfast on Sunday, we headed over to our neighborhood park to let the kids play, Bob and Brian went down to fish in the lake after lunch, and Rachel and I chatted while keeping the kids entertained.  The funniest point of the visit was Saturday night when we had all three girls attempting to go to sleep in Hailey's room.  Lots of chit chat happening!!  Rachel and Brian ended up in Hailey's room attempting to get them to calm down.  They were all so wired with excitement!  Hailey was so sad when they left.  She said, "But they only got to stay for one sleepover."  We promised we'd get together with them again soon.

On Monday night this week, Hailey had hidden 3 of Clara's bottles.  We asked her where she had hid them and she couldn't remember that she actually did hide them.  So, here it was 9:45 pm, both girls are asleep and in bed, and Brian and I are combing the house trying to locate the bottles.  At one point, Brian's outside with a flashlight searching the sand box and back yard, because she had been out there playing earlier.  Then he was in the basement looking.  While down there, he went to plug in a rechargeable battery for his flashlight when he noticed the power strip was off.  That power strip was also plugged into the same outlet as our chest freezer.  And yes, you guessed it...that had also shut off.  Thankfully we were able to salvage some stuff that was at the very bottom and still covered in ice, but we lost probably close to $100 worth of food.  Ugh!  We saw that the breaker had been tripped, but we're not sure if the freezer caused it to trip (it's going on 9 years old) or if something else did.  We're going to clean it out and plug it back in to see if it's still working.  If it's not, we'll probably have to go and buy a new freezer.  We did eventually find the bottles, and while we were annoyed that we had to spend so much time looking for them, we were grateful she hid them.  We would have never discovered the freezer was off in time to salvage anything in there if that sequence of events hadn't happened.

Brian is not traveling for work this week, so it will be nice to have him home!

This was taken on March 20th when the temperature was 80 degrees!

 At the park at the top of the slides...Grace, Gabrielle, and Hailey.

Walking back from the park.

Playing with the GeoTrax trains.

Second cousins...Gabrielle, Gavin, Grace, Hailey, and Clara.

  The whole family...Bob, Rachel, Gavin, Grace, and Gabrielle.