Take me out to the ball game...

There are 4 clinics in the dental school that the students are split into and occasionally the individual clinics will get together for some fun outside of school. The last one was when we went bowling the night Avery had his little encounter with cough syrup and the ER...
On Wednesday we had another. We went to a Brewers baseball game, complete with the tail gate experience beforehand.
Thru the whole game Avery kept asking for fireworks (not sure how he remembered them from last May!) but those only happen on a home run and for a win. There were no scores until a Brewer hit a double for an RBI at the bottom of the eighth. The braves didn't respond, so Avery was stoked to see the winning game fireworks. I'm just thankful the Brewers won so I wouldn't have to hear Avery whining about not seeing any fireworks! Definitely worth staying to the end for us! (most friends had already taken off.)
Here's lots of pics...
As you can see, we had pretty good seats. Front row on the first balcony:
Sometimes it was a little loud (not really) tho:
The whole family:
The boys both watching the game:
Carson chillin' with Daddy:
Happy boy!
Clapping Carson:
Not sure what this Avery face is...
Avery hangin' with pal Sienna:
Avery taking a break from rough housing to clap with the crowd (see, not really so loud):
The boys running with all kids' favorites, the Klement's World Famous Racing Sausages! Seen here, The Polish Sausage, The Chorizo, and The Hot Dog.


Here are some of our friends we got to sit with this game:

Kieley, Aaron & Kristel:

Travis, Sienna & RaQuelle:

Kristin, Guy & Adam:

Just one add to Memorial Day

I really only got one pic back from friends with a member of our family that was worth sharing, but it's a good one, at least for speculating...

I don't know what was going on when this pic was taken, but I can make a good guess! Avery spent a lot of time in the sandbox in the pic below (I don't know what's going on it that pic either!) and according to Travis, Avery was rather a sand bully at times. Perhaps that's the reason everyone but Travis is laughing? (Yes, yes, I was there too even if I don't apparently know about anything that went on...)

Kids L to R: Spencer, Hailey & Avery
Guys L to R: Aaron, Jared, Travis, Guy, Todd & John.

Memorial Day

Today was a busy day, especially for Avery!
But I'm a negligent Mom and didn't do my duty with the camera, so I have very little of Avery or Carson to show you.
First Avery did a lot of playing and working outside. Travis helped out "Neighbor Greg" (who's also our landlord) with quite a few things - his lawn mower, yard work in our yard and theirs and I don't know what else. Avery stayed busy too, helping where he could. He has a little plastic wheelbarrow that saw a lot of use hauling dirt and lawn trimmings. When nap time came he was exhausted and as you can see from the one pic of him, he was nearly asleep before he even made it to bed. Travis had just cleaned him up from lunch and ended up having to carry him to bed.

Carson was lamenting being inside and only catching glimpses of the action out the front screen door (tho looking at this pic I wonder how he can see thru the filthy thing!)...

Later we had a BBQ with our dental school friends here. Again, I was negligent on camera duty. I will have to see if anyone was better than I and can email me some tidbits... The one I do have Kristel snapped of me with her cute little baby Kieley.

And here I just have to toot my horn for a second. Do you know how many years it's been since I've seen a pic of myself and not balked at the fat face, fat arms, etc? Quite a few. But, happily, I've conquered much of that with some decent weight loss finally. Although I am back on the upswing in weight again for this pregnancy, I still think I'm managing well. Hopefully I can keep it up and this baby doesn't set me back too far! (Yes, there is a baby belly under there!)

Maybe when we're ready to leave Wisconsin in a year, if I keep doing well, I'll finally get the courage to post a before and after shot of how far I've come from when we first moved here... We'll see, after all, I'll have an 8 month old then and maybe I won't have a decent enough "after" shot yet...

At least school is going well...

Poor Travis. Not a single vehicle is in proper working shape right now, and to top it off Travis' knee isn't even in working order AND Mr. Super-Human-Immune-System actually got the flu this week!

Our car is a bit of a never-ending story right now.

The Explorer's stock 4x4 hubs have gone bad (apparently a common thing) so it'll randomly have issues with slipping in and out of 4x4 but never really engaging and it produces a noise kind of like a card stuck in the spokes of a kids bike.
In trying to find this problem Travis realized the front left u joint and ball joints needed to be replaced, and the 2 u joints on the front right did too - he thought hopefully that would solve it, but no, it was the hubs. Come to find out bad u joints can cause the 4x4 hubs to go faulty. sigh.
These pics were actually back from the day of Avery's surgery and are from when he was doing the left side. The first one really only shows tire off and tools laying around, the second pic I found and it shows some u joints - so for the majority of us that don't understand what I've regurgitated from Travis - you can hopefully see what I'm talking about, and the third one shows him actually working on the u joint.
When the left side was done he took it in for an alignment. No go. The ball joints he was sold were faulty. Unfortunately, it's the ball joints that are the hard job, not the u joints. So he had to take apart the whole thing and redo it the following week when he did the right side u joints. At least it was much quicker the second time for not having to go thru all the rusty bolts again etc. They all really needed to be done too. On the left side one of the directions on the u joint was really sticky and on the right side one of the u joints had a direction that was completely locked! Anyway, yea, done. Now we have to figure out what route we're going to go with the hubs.

Last vehicle: Travis motorcycle. When he went out to go to school earlier this week there was a little pool of oil under the front tire. Blew a fork oil seal. Now he's going to rebuild the the forks. At least with his bike we can say it's run perfectly for the near 11,000 miles he's had it for and riding it has done nothing but save us money. When he takes the bike everyday to school instead of the car, it's about a third the gas cost.

On the upside, at least these fixes are in agreeable weather. Last time he did a fix was on the car and he was out in 3 degree weather for 3 hours. And for now he's not dripping sweat working in the humidity in the full summer here...

As to Travis' knee, he hurt it playing Airsoft with cousins on New Year's Day. Yes, that long ago. We pretty well know the basic problem (you never know the extent of the circumstance until you get in and take a look, but I know it's his meniscus), but finally over the May break he's had the doctors appointments needed to move on with the dumb thing. X-rays and an MRI have been taken and he finally has an appt. with an orthopedic surgeon next Monday. Unfortunately, waiting this long, who knows what/how many chunks have been floating around in there chewing up the joint and now he's got a rather sharp pain where something has probably currently lodged to poke at him. If you get the right kind of chunk in the right place, it can make your knee start locking too... Can you tell I'm happy about this typical man procrastination thing... I told him tonight I'm disappointed in his knee for not offering up the sharp pain much earlier so he would have prioritized it a little higher...

Still, in the end, not much (outside of school) is working very well for Travis right now and I can certainly have sympathy for that.

Motorcycles and Cookies

This weekend Avery "helped" Daddy wash his bike. Which obviously meant they went thru a lot of water and Travis was left with a thoroughly clean bike seat. Here's video of it.



Today Avery and I made cookies. No, I'm not a great homemaker who makes cookies all the time, far from it, but I did see a picture pop up of my Mom and Avery making them and it just struck my fancy.
Sad part: when Travis got home I heard him and came out to see his reaction. I was hoping for his sort of man squeal of "oooh" that he does, but no. He looks a little happy, but then looks at me and says all dejectedly, "but they're not for me, are they." What a kill joy. Yeah, I'm giving away 5 dozen cookies and not letting you have any! I did pack some off to book club tonight, but only 5 got eaten, which is probably quite a few less than Travis ate himself while I was gone! Of course, once he found out they weren't designed specifically to go anywhere, he was much happier, but still I didn't get the "oooh" I wanted :(
Back to the making of...
I didn't have enough chocolate chips upstairs, so I left Avery licking the paddle and went downstairs to get more. Of course when I got back up Avery had dipped the paddle into the bowl and scooped up more dough but with some chocolate chips this time! It's kinda hard to see that he's done this in this pic, but you can at least see that the tip isn't all scrapped off like the rest of the paddle.

In response to "No, Higher!"

Actually this is another post I've been wanting to share, but it seemed a good spot to put in a little response to comments from the post "No, Higher!" (where Avery went up on a boom lift).

Honestly, it never occurred to me to be worried or anxious. After reading the comments my first thought was "Oh, should I have been? Bad Mom moment?" But I decided I was okay after some thought.
Avery is a very safety conscientious kid. From seat belts and holding hands in parking lots, to strangers and so on. He's also had lots of opportunities (horses, tractors, 4 wheelers, etc.) where safety explanations are needed and perhaps that's why he's so concerned about it.
When we went to neighbor Rick's and he saw the chain saw sitting there he's the one who started explaining to me about how "it's very sharp and we don't touch it and when I'm big like Daddy I'll be very careful." So he knows he's way too little and even when he gets big he will still have to be very careful.
I then remembered that he started in on the boom lift too before going up. I can't remember if he rattled on about lift safety before or after Rick offered to take him up, but either way there was no need to worry, he explained it all for me.
I know I would have been nervous (I'm assuming I'm a good enough Mom here...) if Avery wasn't such a cautious kid, but I realized he never gave me the chance. :)

Now, on to something I've been wanting to post - definitely one of those occasions where lots of safety talks were had.
Over this last Christmas break when we were home in Oregon we went shooting. (You can just go up in the coast range and shoot into the side of a hill as long as you're on gov't land and not logging land - if you're familiar, think AxMen from the History channel, except we're further south than the bunch they film on that show)
Anyway, this was Avery's first experience. He absorbed all the safety stuff, was great, and loved shooting the .22 (with lots of help from Daddy of course).
It was misting horribly on us up there that day, so I was eventually fighting that with the camera lens, hence the fuzziness by the time Avery wanted to try and I took his pic:
You can see here the trees just below the slope are very hazy through the mist. Top to bottom shooting: Travis' sis-in-law Katrina, Travis, T's sis Angela and sis Megan. L to R trading guns are T's dad Ben and Angela's husband Shane.Now, going shooting is always fun, but it was a necessary trip this Christmas due to gifts received. Travis' Dad bought himself an AK-47 and then got one for his boys Travis and Kevin. Therefore, shooting trip scheduled. :)
----edit: Why the need for such guns, you ask? For ones like that, it's a entirely a fun thing, like for exactly this trip. Travis says there's no such thing as too many guns, and believe you me, between all those guys there are plenty! They've all taken gun safety courses, have gun safes, etc.
Oh, and the AKs are not full automatic, that's very illegal (Travis wants me to explain the difference:
full auto: you pull the trigger and rounds just keep coming out;
semi auto: one round per pull of the trigger with no cocking required, you can just keep hitting the trigger;
after that there's the different kind of actions where after each trigger you have to do something before you can trigger it again.)
The AKs can only be semi auto in the US so in the video below they're just shooting as fast as they can. So you actually could go hunting with them. A .22 wouldn't do a very good job of taking out a deer anyway, hunters use a larger caliber rifle. Travis informs me that the AK round would actually be a really good one for deer hunting, you just have to use a 5 round clip if you want to do that. Glad I asked him, I didn't know that part about using guns like that for hunting.
The guy on the couch not hoisting a gun is Shane, Travis' bro-in-law, and he already had an AK-47, so when we were done shooting Ben decided I needed to video the 4 AKs in a final shoot out, so here's that: Top to bottom: Kevin, Travis, Ben, Shane


Now, after all that, how about something sweet on a much softer side. :)
This was a bit of some plant poking it's way through the snow on the mountainside up there that day:

Ups and Downs

Thanks for coming Grandma Hunsaker!!

So Avery may have been plying like normal later the same day as surgery, but that doesn't mean it's been peachy keen non-stop from them. Never underestimate the power of drugs! We've been on a very clear 4 hour cycle of ups and downs related to the pain meds. I think we're finally over the accompanying fever as of last night, but that had been making the "downs" worse with some serious lethargy and general yuckiness. Even when the meds are kicked in and he plays like normal, we've found that he's still just not quite right. He's definitly more on edge and closer to meltdowns and so forth.
Sunday was 3 days post-op, so I was hoping this morning would mean we could move on from the drugs or switch to Tylenol, but you know that won't work when the poor kid is moaning from pain before he even fully wakes up...
So hopefully we can get past that soon...

Oh, and I don't think I ever mentioned one of the temporary side effects of this surgery... Avery has the nastiest breath you've ever smelled! It permeates. You can catch whiffs of it from across the room. Sitting with him is torturous especially since he's been breathing through his mouth! And he will have this for a couple weeks! I'll still take torturous stink-breath sitting nicely with me over frustrated fits tho...

Surgery Day!

Yesterday Avery had his adenoidectomy and his tubes put in. All went well, although the Dr. said Avery's tonsils were definitely bigger than he liked to see. He didn't do anything about it at the time because the recovery times are drastically different than just getting the adenoids out. So we'll monitor them for now.
Here's Avery modeling the clingy hospital gown:
His bracelets:
Post-op recovery. Avery was totally stoned. He was very lethargic and started passing out again after a little while:
Time to get the IV out and the oxygen monitor off:
I took 3 pics back to back, this being the first with eyelids at half mast, the second was 3/4 mast and the last was him knocked out. His eyelids had been half mast for a while and Travis had just finished buckling him up so I wasn't expecting to catch that!
When we got home, Grandma and Carson had gone shopping and had balloons, a tractor and a truck book waiting for Avery. Of course, this is Avery looking at them much later. When we got home he appreciated the balloons, but was still very floppy and just sat with Grandma and watched a movie for awhile. After about an hour he was up and going!
And I really mean going. He was back to normal in no time and outside playing! Which was a little weird since his pain meds were supposed to make him sleepy. Here's a couple of him yesterday afternoon:

Welcome Grandma Hunsaker!

Grandma Hunsaker is in town! Tomorrow's the big day for Avery, he's having surgery to get his adenoids removed and tubes put in his ears. I'm really looking forward to him being able to hear much better, but I know we might have some time where a lot of things are just too loud for him. (I remember it was that way for my sister, Morgan, after she had a hole in her eardrum fixed and she could suddenly hear so much more - at the age I was I remember being quite annoyed)
Anyway, Grandma's here to visit and help out. They told us some kids are back to normal right away after the surgery, or it could take 3 days, but still nothing major, so more than anything Grandma's a nice comfort visit. :)

The Cabes are in the New Era this month!

Check out my cousins Cameron and Jenna Cabe in the magazine New Era this month! Click "view" at the top to view it as a pdf and see the pics. It's not quite an up to date article as the project got put on the back burner when the person overseeing it switched jobs, so Cameron has since graduated and Jenna is now a junior with younger sister Julia now at the school as a freshman.

No, Higher!

Friday through Sunday our neighbor "Fireman Rick" has been cutting down a few trees that needed to come down. This has kept the boys pretty glued to the window and Avery fascinated when he would go out on the front porch to play. We like the new History channel show AxMen, and Avery loved this real life show. After getting back from church and putting Carson down for a nap, Avery and I went over to say hi since a few neighbors were just hanging out (the trees were finally down and much of the brush had been carted off.)
Rick was nice enough to offer to take Avery up the on the boom lift. He stopped a few times to check if Avery thought they were high enough... "No, higher!" Avery loved it. So of course I had to go get the camera. At some point I think Avery did say "okay, that's high enough" but he was quite happy there. Rick swung the bucket around and showed Avery how it extended, and they looked for things and how they were different from that vantage.
Avery also loves John Deere's (or any other tractor, big equipment, etc. - he just knows the Deere colors and logo) and has many times pointed out Rick's little one to us. After pretending to drive (and practically learning how to with all the questions!) Rick took Avery for a ride and even let him steer. After checking out how big the tree stumps were, playing with the big rope and figuring out how to maneuver the wheel barrow and cart things around in it, Avery even got a wheel barrow ride!
What a great time for Avery, especially since this kind of fun, until now, has only happened for him when we're back home in Oregon!
Thanks for entertaining him, Rick!

Goose Eggs and Muffins

Travis has a patient who lives on a farm. A while back she told him she wanted to bring him some goose eggs. At a subsequent appointment she did in fact bring him 2. Check out the size of these suckers next to a regular large chicken egg!
She told him they're worth about 3 chicken eggs.. So on Friday I decided to make some whole wheat muffins from a yummy recipe my Mom always used. That goose egg has a thick shell! I really had to whack it to break it. When I did, I couldn't help but wonder if it was really only 3 eggs! At least, the yolk seemed much bigger than that! It was very impressive.

Okay, so when I think "whole wheat muffins" I definitely don't think of Travis, but he really loves these too, (and they did turn out great with the goose egg) so I thought I'd share the recipe. (It's super easy)

Whole Wheat Muffins
1 c. oil
2 eggs
2 c. milk
2 t. vanilla
4 c. wheat flour
2 c. brown sugar
1 t. salt
2 t. baking soda

Sift together dry ingredients. Make a well in the center. Combine remaining ingredients and pour into the well. Stir just enough to moisten the dry ingredients. Fill greased muffin tin 2/3 full. Bake at 375 for 20 minutes.

My recipe doesn't say how many it's supposed to make, but my batch and a half made 4 dozen, and a single batch making 2 and a half dozen doesn't make that much sense, but there you have it.

It's just too bad Travis won't see his generous patient again for a month or so, so I won't be able to send along anything to share made with the eggs!

A Passing

My Great Uncle Albert passed away recently and his funeral was today. My cousin Cyndi made a great slide show for the service and I'm glad she shared it since I couldn't be there. It's always fun to see old pictures, and I don't know that I had seen many of what a younger Albert looked like! That was great. Plus it's fun to see my Mom as a girl in some pics. :)
Uncle Albert's Slideshow