Weekly update for April 23rd, 2001
Well this is the first official weekly update file that I am putting on this website. It has been longer than expected for me to get this out and I will have to discipline myself to do this in a timely manner. Enough said lets get to it.
As many of you (my family) know, Christopher has been in the hospital for a week in February and another week in March. This all started with his iron level in his blood being at .9 and quite honestly he looked dead, which was not far from the truth. The average human has an iron count of 80 to 100, so you can see he didn’t have any. Well just to quickly update you on him, the doctors have ruled out cystic fibrosis and celiac disease and have focused on other possibilities like Crohns disease. We still don’t know what caused his iron to drop off and we may never get a clear answer. Nonetheless we will be doing more testing and poking and prodding just to have fun with him. (Not that Christopher likes it much) Currently his iron count continues to climb and the doctors have said he can go back to a regular diet, as Chris has been on a gluten free diet since the end of February. We will of course keep you posted if we find anything new on this.
Then there is Matthew, we have had him on a gluten free / casein free diet since November of last year with great results. He continues to be much more social and is making more direct eye contact with us. Of course this has been ongoing and we do not expect to be leaving this diet for many years if not the rest of his life. (For those of you not sure what I am talking about, just click Here for the link to Matthews Story)
However Matthew has had me busy on another project for him which seemed simple when I started but became much harder than I ever thought. This was building (putting together) a swing set. Simple enough task I said, I go down to the store, buy a swing set and put it together. Great I’m done? Nope, I was informed that it would look much nicer in a playground area, OK…. I guess I can build that, but there is a minor issue I must bring up and that is my backyard isn’t even close to being level so I will have to do a little digging.
Well I started to dig and after about 3 shovel scoops I realized 2 things. One, I am very much out of shape and am sure the neighbors were just laughing at the sight of me trying to use this shovel. And two, I have a lot more digging to do than what this shovel is going to do by itself. So I borrowed a friends rotor tiller and proceeded to break up the 8’ X 24’ playground. Ah success (well sort of) I completed tilling this section in just 4 days and was now ready to start moving the dirt down and around to make this a level playground.
It was then brought to my attention by my wife that this seemed just a bit too small for the swing set and in fact would look a bit goofy. So she said to just double the size, I looked quizzically at her and said, “you want me to make this playground 16’ X 24’? She said yes and I said you till it. I lost the battle and continued to double the size to 16’ X 24’. In any case not to drag this story on, this is what I ended up with. I ended up using 10 railroad ties, lots of plastic sheeting for the ground, and 4 yards of pine bark wood chips. Also in anchoring down the swing I still needed 4 bags of cement as well.
Now
the picture to the left does not provide a good view of how much
my backyard slopes, so you will have to trust me when I say it
slopes a lot. This turned out to be a fun project once I
got it finished and provided me with the beginnings of some much
needed exercise. You can see in the bottom right hand side
of the picture one of those cozy yard swings. This swing
is not level either and I have decided to build a lower level
deck to accommodate the swing, but this is another project for
another day. I will put a couple more pictures of the
playground below so you can see it from different angles.
I know these last 2 are a bit smaller but you get the idea.
Well its getting late and I must get my beauty rest so I will leave you with these pictures and will try to put together another update and the end of this week for you all to enjoy.
See ya Tim