Camp Beppy!

Aunt Beppy spent several days in good ole Rochester to spoil her adopted daughter (ME!) and her adopted grandbabies (but "aunt" seems to fit her better than "grandma!"). Jackson and Beppy made forts together, cooked together, read together, sewed together, and played puzzles together.

Scott was out of town for the week, so I had her all to myself! We splurged on ourselves on Friday and hired a sitter so that we could see a matinee (Blind Side - AMAZING!) and go snowshoeing (AMAZING TOO!).

Thanks for everything, Beppy. We love you greatly!

My 10-month old is a monkey!

MLK weekend

Jenn and Sullivan - they were buddies!

Scott, Steve, and Jackson attempting to sled with a "deer sled" (designed to pull the dead body of a hunted-down deer... "regular" sleds sold out... I laughed hard at this!)

Jackson and Steve

Jenn and Jackson

We had Steve and Jenn, our dear friends and cousins, in town for the MLK holiday weekend. They are engaged and will be married this April. They spoil our boys GREATLY and are deemed "Aunt Jenn and Uncle Steve." We ate a lot, relaxed a lot, competed in American Idol's karaoke game a lot, and had an all-around good time. THANKS GUYS!

Betty the Snowman

Jackson and I spent some quality above-32-degree-temperature time outdoors today. In our front yard, our very first snowoman was created. Betty was her name. She was beautiful for about 20 minutes, at which point the wind whipped her over. She started out as a snowMAN, but the accessory selection included only femanine options. Hence, BETTY!

Sullivan was napping.

Scott was swimming (did I mention he's training for a triathalon?!).

Florida Fun!

Warm to Freezing

It was hard enough to leave our family and delightfully comfortable temperatures (of 60s and low 70s) in Florida (where we celebrated Christmas), knowing the final destination (back home in good ole MN) on New Year's Eve would yield highs in the single digits.... but to walk in the house from the garage last night at 8:00pm STILL seeing our breaths. Well, that was a shocker!

It took a few more steps indoors to decide that it wasn't our imaginations : OUR HOUSE WAS FREEZING! The thermostat ultimately concluded just how freezing: 39 degrees Fahrenheit (so, technically above "freezing"). The boys had fallen asleep on the way home from the Minneapolis airport, where we flew in from Tampa, so here we were - still in our coats - walking in circles in a confuddled state of confusion as to what to do next... strip the boys down and put on their PJs (cruel!)? Try to put them to bed under a mountain of blankets (rustic!)? I decided, YES and YES to those questions. Thankfully, they each have electric heaters in their rooms, so we got those puppies cranking. Needless to say, frigid air certainly didn't aid the "drift seamlessly back into dreamworld" transition. But, with a little lovin, they went down. Meanwhile, Scott is playing detective with the furnace (mental image: Ralphy's dad in Christmas story)... actually, everyone we know is playing detective via phone (because, as we all know - God love him - Scott is not the handiest of handymen when it comes to home maintanence). The pilot light was out: originator of problem. How to get back on and stay on: still the problem at that point.

Scott is a cut-to-the-chase kind of guy (thank goodness I chose a spouse to balance me out!), so, when nothing else was working, he dialed up our favorite heating and plumbing guy, Mike ("favorite" by default, since he's helped us out of a couple of emergency plumbing and furnace troubles), at 8:30pm on New Year's Eve. Mike was convinced the description warranted a service call, so the Saint-of-a-man got his butt to our doorstep just hours before the dawn of 2010 to save us from frost bitten toes last night.

Problem fixed by 9:00pm.

Warmth restored to its fullest by 5:00am. That's how long it took to warm this mother up! Hot water heaters apparently are notorious for taking their sweet time. I'm guessing temps outdoors dropping to negative 2 (on a side note, would "temps" in its plural form be appropriate when we are talking about a number not MORE than one, but less than zero?) didn't help matters.

The Arthurs are up and running again. YEY!

This scenerio was all too familiar, as the return from our Christmas vacation of 2005 (pre-kids and in Ohio) provided us with the same freezing reception. Except WAY WORSE... the heat was off, a pipe had burst, and our home was in need of a 3-month lon restoration project from the water damage caused by the flooding.

One could say we were quite lucky our indoor temps didn't dip below that magical number (32) this time... still not sure exactly when the pilot light extinguished...

More later on our AMAZING trip! Love to all on this New Years Day 2010~

Quick update on Mr. Van's kidneys

We had two appointments this week. On Tuesday, Sullivan had an ultra sound performed on his kidneys (rough trip to Mayo, in light of our aforementioned state of sickness!).

On Wednesday, Scott went to meet with Dr. Kramer to get the results. Van's kidney's are not worse and no better than before. This means that we will just continue to have them checked in on by ultra sound every 6 months. In the meantime, we will be on the look-out for UTIs - fevers and smelly pee - which he is prone to have. No biggy! So, the response will continue to be NO SURGERY as long as the scans show no worsening signs.

Yey!

We are happy. Of course, we kind of retain that hope that the problem will eventually correct itself - the narrowed uriter, that is, will grow to become un-narrow - (the BEST case scenereo) but we're happy with keeping a close eye on it too!