John Deere Trip

This past weekend we took the boys up to Moline, IL, to visit the John Deere Headquarters. You know your kids are your top priority in life when you take a vacation to visit a tractor factory! Of course Tyler was in heaven, and Cole seemed to love it as well.

My parents actually met us for the weekend as well, and we stayed across the street from the John Deere Pavilion. The Pavilion is just a huge room with several tractors on display....most of which the kids can climb on. We also visited the John Deere Headquarters, which had additional tractors on display....unfortunately Tyler was too young to go on the factory tour.

The boys had an absolute blast, and honestly we did too....watching them have fun is just contagious! It was a great winter outing as there was plenty of space for them to run around. We were supposed to go from Moline on up to Galena, IL, to go skiing, (Tony really wanted to get Tyler on skis this year) unfortunately this had to be postponed since the boys both got sick....shocking for our boys to be sick I know! At least we got to enjoy the weekend!



Tyler holding up his new combine he got at the John Deere store.

Tyler and Mamaw making a soil project at the John Deere Pavilion. Of course Tyler was the only kid that got to dump in his own soil....persistence pays off! Oh, and the soil got dumped all over the hotel room floor....oops!

Outside of John Deere Headquarters

Tony is loving it!

Priceless!

First Snow of 2010

Fall 2010 Family Pictures

Here are the family pictures we had taken back in October. We were very pleased with how they turned out!

Sick Little Cole

As most of you probably know, Cole was in the hospital for several days last week. He gave us quite a scare, but is home and doing much, much better. He had been battling a nasty case of C. Diff and despite all the antibiotics wasn't improving...then he spiked a high temp and that's when we got nervous (and so did his pediatrician). The GI Specialist decided that a colonscopy and upper endoscopy was the best route since his white count was high along with a few other tests. She told us that his entire colon was lined with large white lymph nodes (I don't think they are really lymph nodes but that is the analogy she gave). Anyway, the C. Diff is gone and now he is taking steroids, prevacid and a colitis medication. Hopefully he can get off the steroids in 2 more weeks, but the colitis medication continues for 6 months. He was a very sick little guy, but they are able to rebound quick at this age.

Thank you to everyone for all the prayers. And an even bigger thank you to my Mom and Dad...I am pretty sure that approximately 10 minutes after I called her and told her we were on the way to the hospital, they were in the car and headed down here. They stayed all week and took care of Tyler and helped us tremendously. I'm very thankful to have such a wonderful Mom as a role model.

Here are a couple of pictures we took in the hospital. These were all taken after he started feeling better.