Let the Competition Begin!!!!

On Monday October 5, I will be participating in a Phat to Fit Challenge put on between two local radio stations. I have already worked with one of the trainers and I am really looking forward to this opportunity. The competion lasts for 10 weeks and all of it is free. There are two teams that are compeating against each other and everyone is trying to lose the most percentage of weight for the grand prize of $1000.00! Please pray for me to stay healthy and injury free as I participate in this and that I learn lots of great things to bring home to try out on the family!!! Chad and I recently bought a new treadmill and put it in the living room so that it is a daily reminder to get on and work out!!!

Update

On friday the 25th Ben was discharged from the hospital and is at a relatives house on the road to recovery. Before he left the hospital the doctor had him remove his neck brace and had him do a few exercises with his neck, because everything looked so well there they let him leave the brace off! He still has a back brace for the 4 compression fractures in his back, but everything else looks good. Please pray for a full recovery and no long term affects from this injury. Hopefully his youth will work to his advantage. He will have a long road ahead of him!

Please Pray

Yesterday at about 1pm one of our staff fell 17 ft off a forklift while trying to repair something on it. Something made the forks on the forklift move and he hit his head knocking him out before falling to the ground. He was taken to the hospital in Soldotna, and the doctors there found 4 compression fractures in his back. His head had a gash on it, and he has a severe concussion, but was responding to questions. They airlifted him to the Anchorage hospital for further testing and better scans and better equipment for this kind of injury. There so far they have found several facial fracture and another compression fracture in his neck. Please keep him and his wife in your prayers as this will be a long road to recovery. The couple has just come back to camp on staff after serving as short term staff in previous years. I will continue to update this post on his condition. They have lots of friends and family here to support them.

Things of Late

On Friday, Chad, James, George, and Ben were frantically getting all their things stuffed and packed into the vehicle that they were taking north for a 10 day hunting trip. When I say stuff....they literally stuffed it full, and us girls are still not sure how they really got all their belongings into that tight space. I asked Chad if they actually got any big game animals where they were going to put the meat, and he replied that they were building a rack for the top! Their main goal was to duck hunt, but all of them have their tags for moose, caribou, and bear....so who knows what they will come home with. At first they were headed to Tok, but once they got there they decided that it would not work for them so they all headed to Delta Junction. I hope that they will have better luck there! :)
So for the rest of our family we started Saturday off by getting the house clean, however by noon I knew that something was not right with Mason. (let me back up) On Friday I was feeding him beans from a soup and he ate them fine...I then put him on the floor and turned my back for one second and he started choking. I picked him up and did the patting on the back and swiping his mouth and all that, I found nothing and he seemed fine after that. Later that night he had found a few marshmallows, thanks to his sisters, but he was choking on them and I thought to myself that there had to be something else down in his throat because he should not be choking on little marshmallows!!! After they came out he was fine, and happy, and he was still drinking his bottle fine so I put him to bed and he slept the night. The next day at about 12pm he ate some cheerios and choked on them so I decided that it was time to go see the doc, because something was just not right. We get to the ER and Mason is alert has 100% oxygen, and is happy and laughing. I am thinking great you are just faking and we are going to have to wait forever because they are not going to believe that you have anything down your throat! After an hour we saw the ER doctor, and he ordered x-rays. When the tech came to take us for the x-rays, I hesitated and told her I was not sure he needed them because he looked fine, and she told me that we did not have to get them and it was our call. I decided that since she was already there we might as well just to make sure, and sure enough he had swallowed another penny!! The OR doc was called and we went down and got his penny removed! The doctor wrote in his notes that for Mason's diet he could have all normal food, but pennies were strictly forbidden!!! The staff at the hospital is getting to know me well and I am sure that this is not the last time we will be there to see them! 3 times in 7 weeks is enough for me, and I am just hoping that we are incident free for the rest of Chad's absence!

Field Trip to Spencer Glacier...A Whistle Stop!

On Tuesday I took Emma and Madison and our friend Gideon on a field trip with the homeschool group. We took a train from Portage Glacier train station to the "whistle stop" at Spencer Glacier (Alaska is one of the only if not the only state that lets you do these stops along the track to get off and then be picked up again when the train passes bye again.) We then walked 1.3 miles out to the glacier with a Forest Ranger as our guide. We stopped periodically for him to talk about where the galcier had been 100+ years ago and signs in nature that help them to track when the ice moved out. There were some other people that took a raft trip from Spencer Lake on the Placer River and when we got back to the train a few miles down the track we stopped again and picked them up! There is also a group camping site that you can reserve and camp at and some other trails that get closer to the glacier. Lots of fun things to ponder and definately want to try sometime in the future!

Remember that you are only looking at 10% of this iceburg!!! No the lake did not look that deep at all but they said that it was at least 100 feet deep!

I had to choose the best of four pics that we took because at least one of us was always closing our eyes!!! Madison was doing it on purpose so she is stuck with this picture! :)

Camping at Anchor Point, AK

Sunday evening our friends and us went camping! The weather finally cleared up enough for us to head out for an evening. This campground is right on the beach and so we had fun playing down there,discovering new creepy crawlies (baby shrimp hidden under rocks), finding sea shells and crab shells, taking home rocks for our gardens, and the general splashing in the water! We had hot dogs for dinner and hot chocolate for dessert (yes, we skipped the smores this time around :)). For most of us it was a restful night as most of the kids did really well sleeping in a new place, but for Mason he is still quite certain that he is not a camper!!! Again Chad drove him around off an on all night long, which I told him that if he would just let me drive around I might not be as inclined to think that camping with Mason is still fun! He drove anyway and we made it through the night with at least a little sleep. The kids road their bikes around the campground and had a great time. We are all ready to do it again soon....but this time we will let Mason stay at home, maybe with a sitter or with daddy! :)