Carson's first haircut

These are pics of Carson getting his first haircut at the beginning of the month. He was very brave and did not shed one tear. He looks so much older with all of his little curls gone. Excuse the lovely picture of me as I was also getting my hair permed at the same time;o)

After Carson got his haircut we went to visit Grandpa Williams. It had rained that day so of course Carson had to jump in the puddles on Grandpa's driveway. He had so much fun and he was so cute to watch. We should learn to be more carefree ,like our children, sometimes.

Mom and her Brothers

Bill, Mom, Jim and Bob
In August we had a family reunion for my Mom's family. It was fun to get to see everyone. This is my Mom with her brother's. There were 8 kids in her family and 4 have already passed away.

The Latest Pics

Sending out a big hey to our friends down in North Carolina. We are missing you guys and thought you might enjoy an update of our lives. We survived the wind storm. We were without power for two days, but others were out for much longer. Ryan has been vey busy with football. He loves it and is having a lot of fun. Brandon isn't playing any sports right now, but is looking forward to playing basketball in the winter. Paul and Steve have pretty much recovered from their 4-wheeler injuries. I finally found a job here in Troy at a family care physicians office. I started on Monday, and it feels good to be back to nursing. I knew that I missed it, but I didn't realize just how much. I do miss Carson terribly, though. It helps knowing that he is with our family and that he is being well cared for. I was busy learning how to draw blood this week. This was something that they didn't teach us when I went to nursing school. It has been a fun and interesting experience. I will be working two to two and a half days a week.(which is what I was hoping for) Paul and I have been talking about making a trip to NC to visit and get some of our things. Hopefully we will be able to do this in the next couple of weeks. That's about it for now. I will post some pics so you can see how much Carson has grown and some that may show just how onery he is!! Talk to ya later;o)

This picture was taken at Chapel at School when Ryan was chosen as "Student in the Sonlight"

We found Carson sitting on top of his highchair the other day. He had climbed up the front of it all by himself. You can tell by the look on his face that he was really proud of himself. I am just glad that he didn't tip it over on top of himself while climbing it.

This was Brandon's Chapel Day as "Student in the Sonlight"

Brandon and Carson

Ryan is the one in green closest to the screen with his hand up in the air.

Here they are.....

Sorry about the sideways pics. I forgot to flip them and now it is too late!

A quick update

I know it has been a very long time since I have posted. Most of you already know that the last month has been a whirlwind to us. Since my last post so many things have happened that I am not sure where to begin.

Brandon celebrated his 7th birthday. What a special little man he is. God has shown alot of grace on our precious boy. He is a fighter and has been since the beginning. It seems like forever ago that we were sitting at his bedside in Childrens NICU wondering what would happen. What did God have in store for us. Would Brandon survive, would he be a normal healthy child, or would he suffer severe damage from all of the trauma that he suffered. Well, I guess God has bigger and better plans than we could have ever imagined. Brandon is the healthiest, normal, happy boy we could have asked for. and believe me we did. We prayed alot and so did hundreds of others. Isn't it amazing what prayer can do;')

We spent July 4th at the beach with Steve and his family. We had lots of fun.

Prior to leaving that week for the beach we got the big surprise of the summer. The V.P. called Paul and asked him to move back to Ohio to take the position as Customer service manager. Wow, talk about surprise. We were not expecting this at all. So two weeks later and a lot of help from my parents, we moved back to Ohio and Paul started his new job. He loves it! We love being back with our family, but we do miss our friends back in N.C. a lot.

The boys have started back to school at Troy Christian. What a blessing this school is to our family. It feels like the boys are right back where they belong and that they never missed a beat. Ryan has sunk right back in with his old friends and is doing great. Brandon got the teacher that he was praying for and is making new friends. Brandon was even picked the first week of school to be "student of the week for his class." Way to go Brandon. We are soooo proud of you! We even have a special friend at TCS this year. Lauryn, my niece is going to school there now and we are just thrilled. It has been a lot of fun picking her up after school. Everybody calls my car the "big white bus" because some days all seven seats are full, and I love it.

Ryan is playing little league football. I can't believe how much fun he is having. This is his first year playing and he is doing awesome. His first game was last Saturday. He sacked the quarter back once and knocked him down hard twice. We just love watching him play. Paul just can't sit down the entire game and I am sure I am the loudest Mom on the team, not to mention the proudest. Way to go Ryan.

The rest of our time here has been spent enjoying our families.

I am going to try to post a slideshow of pictures but my internet doesn't always cooperate so keep checking back.

Company and more baseball

My brother Eric and his family stopped by on their way to Myrtle Beach on Friday and stayed the night with us. We went out to Outback for dinner and just hung out at the house. We had a lot of fun.

Brandon and Makenzie acting silly!!

Eric and Tracey

All of us at Outback

A kid who thinks he is cool!!!!! :')


Ryan's team won the league championship in his age group. This is a pic of their team receiving their trophy.

Ryan was also selected to the 2008 11 year old Allstar team. This is him running up after they called his name.

The 2008 Allstar team

Brandon's team made it to the finals in tournaments. They didn't win, but it was still a great accomplishment to make it that far. They came in 2nd place.




One of the Grandparents of one of Ryan's teammates got them a limo to ride to the closing ceremonies in. Thay all thought that was cool.


Carson and his friend Zoe that he plays with at Brandon's ball game.

I think he was born with baseball in his blood.

Carson taught Zoe to put the helmet on her head. How cute!

Where's my CAR??????

We walked out to our driveway at 5:30 this morning and something just wasn't right. There was something missing. No way, my car was gone. It had been stolen. Can you belive it. Someone just walked into our driveway and took our car. I spent all morning on the phone with sherriff detectives and the bank, as my purse was also in my car. The thief took my debit cards and dumped the rest of the stuff out of my purse into the bushes. So, at about 8:30 we got a call from the Kernersville police that they had located my car about 4 miles from our house. Wow, I couldn't beieve it. So, anyway, Paul started talking to all of the neighbors and found out that one of them seen some guy trying to break into another car down the road. He had gotten the license plate # and had reported it to 911. Anyway, to make a very long story short, they have him in custody, we got our car back and they recovered some other items stolen out of our car. It appears that he wasn't able to use our debit cards either. He also stole our neighbors wallet out of his car.

I think we both have learned a lesson from this. I don't think we will be leaving anything of any value in our vehicles and they will be locked from now on!


Hope your day started better than ours and ends as good as ours did.

Talk to ya later!

Random pics

Hey,
Nothing new happening here. Ryan finished up his baseball season last night and Brandon will finish up this weekend. Then we move on to football. This will be the boy's first year of playing football and they are very excited. They have already done one football camp and have more before official practice starts on Aug. 1. Unfortunately that means no Ohio visits for a while. I miss everybody tons and can't wait to get a weekend back to visit. I am posting a few random pics from the last few weeks. Have a great week!


Hanging out before bath time....


Brandon helping me make strawberry jam.....


Now I would call that stuck in a tight place.....


Anyone for some oreo cookies???????


What a whopper....:>)

Kindergarten Graduation!

Last week Brandon graduated from kindergarten. They did a very cute play and then had graduation ceremonies. We had a lot of fun watching Brandon.




This play was written by the music teacher at school. The name was Zario and Squigi. It was taken from Mario. She did a very good job and the costumes were adorable. Brandon played one of the bad guys, Dupa.

This is Brandon receiving his graduation diploma. How cute. I don't think I got a Kindergarten diploma;0)





My parents came down for the holiday weekend. It was great getting to see them. We had a lot of fun. I just love company!

Tornado

Last Thursday we had some very severe storms move through our area. It was so scarry. It started about 8pm and lasted to about 12:30 am. We were watching the storms on the news and saw that the worst part was moving right through our town, so I cleaned out our coat closet. It is the only downstairs interior room that we have in our house without windows. I made the boys spend about a half hour in the closet as the weatherman said that they could see a tornado forming just south of us. I even spent about 10 minutes in the closet. It was just raining and lightening and then the sounds changed,the direction of the wind changed and the wind started blowing very hard. Our cable went out for about ten min. Then everything just stopped. The rain, the wind and all. It was over just like that. Well, the next morning Paul left for work and his normal 20 min drive turned into an hour drive and the same thing on the way home. The farmers market, which is only 2-3 miles from our home was hit by an EF3 tornado. It suffered extensive damage and many of the vendors lost most or all of their produce/flowers/bushes. The gas station across from it had the canopy over the pumps blown clear off. A truck driver in that area was asleep in his semi which was hit by the tornado and he was killed. Our area was fortunate as it hit an industrial park and it was night so there was not anyone working at htat time. Areas south of us, 20- 30 min., were hit much harder and some people lost their homes. We are so fortunate. We thank God for protecting us. We drove around the other day to look at some of the damage. I took some pics which really don't show how severe the damage was but it might give you somewhat of an idea. A lot of the damage had already been cleaned up.

A lot of trees were just snapped in half like this one. Others you could see where the tornado had twisted the broken branches around.

If you look closely at this picture you can see where the entire tree has been uprooted out of the ground. We couldn't count how many trees were like these.


This huge tree was ripped down in someones front yard. They live about 1-2 miles from our house. Thank God that it went the direction that it did or it would have landed on their house.