Family, Friends, Fun, Festivals, and Frogs

All right, so I haven't really posted in a while, so I have a lot of catching up to do. This post might be a little long. Lets start by going back to last Saturday, April 19. Becca had a girl's lunch with her four cousin's and sister and all of the kids. Cody had lots of fun playing with the other kids, but his favorite part was playing with the yellow lab. I guess we need to get him a dog. Here is a picture of all the kids that were there. Can you tell which kids are ours?

Since it was just for the girls and kids, I decided to spend the day kayaking. I went up sea kayaking to the Thimble Islands off of the coast of Conneticut. It is about a 2.5 hour drive from our house. It was a fabulous day for kayaking, clear skies and 70 degrees. The Thimble Islands are made up of hundreds of little islands all within a mile or two of the coast. Some of them are just little rocks above the ocean, some are big enough for one house, and some hold several houses. Here are a few of the pictures I took while kayaking.

The picture below was a little bridge that went between two of the islands.

That night after I got back from kayaking, we all went over to the Dueker's house for Mellisa's birthday. Here is a picture of the kids there.

The rest of the week went pretty well. Here are a few of the highlights below. First off is Cody slaughtering me at a game of chess. I haven't quite figured it out, but somehow everytime we play, he kills all of my guys before I can even make a move. If you ever play him watch out, he's good.
Let's see...Next I guess we'll talk about Jade's feeding test. So Jade went to New Brunswick to St. Peter's Hospital. They put Barium in her milk and used different flow nipples to feed her while they X-Rayed to see where the liquid ended up. Well, it turns out that when they used the fast flow nipple all of the milk went directly into her lungs. Basically, her epiglottis (a lid-like flap of elastic cartildge tissue covered with a mucous membrane, attached to the root of the tongue), wasn't protecting her airway when she swallows. The dangerous thing about it is that when it happens, she doesn't cough or choke. With the slow flow nipples, none of it went into her lungs, but they could tell she was still having difficulty. What we have ended up doing now is putting rice cereal in her milk to thicken it up, that way she is better able to swallow it, without it going into her lungs. She has also started to eat rice cereal a little bit, and seems to be doing well with that.


That was pretty much all we did for the week. Let's move on to the weekend. Yesterday we went to the New Jersey Folk Festival and the Rutgers Agricultural day, which was being held at Rutger's University. It was a ton of fun. They had all kinds of stuff going on there. Cody got to see some cockroach races and pet some cows and pigs. The Folk festival had a lot of good music, food and free kid's activities. Here are some of the picture's below. First up is him getting his face painted.

If you can't tell, it's a snake.

Here Cody is sharing his balloon animal with Jade, while she gets a tube feeding.

Here is Cody bouncing at one of the games they had set up for the kids.

Here is Jade, chilling in the sun at the Festival.
And finally, here are Becs and Cody chillin on a tree.

Well, that's about all for now. My parting shot below is me holding a frog that Cody and I caught this week. Cody told me he wanted to keep it and feed it flies, but Becca would have none of that in our house. I told Cody the frog would miss his family, so he let me go release him. Have a great week!