The past couple days

Woody and Bo
The 'Shoe
We held the cruise-in for ALS on Sunday afternoon and despite a slow start due to bad weather, we raised $1400 for the ALS Association thanks to the generous people in London Ohio! Above were a couple of drawings that were auctioned off drawn by a friend of my sister's-I now wish I would of bidded on the one of the horseshoe!





Of course, there is always some type of excitement when Liz, Cathy, Mom and myself are together. I think I mentioned that Evan and I stayed overnight in London both Sunday and Monday night. Well, we were out on the porch counting money Sunday night, just relaxing and having a beer when all of a sudden Cathy said she smelled skunk and a second later, Liz's dog started barking out back. Yep, he got sprayed. The smell was soooo strong that at first we couldn't tell if it was actually on him or just permeating thru the house (as it's done before-oh, like Christmas 2003). Gotta love country living. Anyhow, it got him right in the face so Liz cleaned him up as best as she could with V-8 (that's all they had!) for the night but by then the smell was all thru the house. So, the next morning, I took Jordan to the vet to get a skunk bath and then proceeded to wash all our clothes that we had out there because someone told Cathy at work yesterday morning that she smelled like skunk. My purse STILL smells like skunk. Nice.




Today was our visit to the voice clinic.Well, I wanted to cry yet again during the scope up the nose but it's because Evan was so incredibly brave. It started with him telling the nurse that he could take care of squirting the medicine up his nose by himself (that set him off the last two times we've been there) and then he practically pushed the dr. out of the way so he could see everything on the TV screen! He started out by saying that he could sit by himself and I could sit across from him. About two minutes later he ended up in my lap which was fine. The kid didn't even flinch when the camera (on what seems to be a big cable at least compared to the size of his nose) went up and in-he thought it was great when the dr. pointed out the boogers in his nose. Anyhow, there were no tears and no screaming this time-he did exactly what they told him to do as far as what noises to make, etc. It was interesting to watch-the last two times I was too busy holding him down! No great surprises but the good news is that he's not using his false vocal cords as frequently as he had been-the bottom line is that he has function in about 1/3 of his cords. There is nothing that can be done surgically at this time which I knew but we're all hoping that the game plan that they are going to develop specifically for Evan will at least help him maximize the voice he does have. I feel as though the team is more on the ball than last time-I really, really like the ENT. He's doing a research study on voice quality/disorder after a child has had airway reconstruction like Evan-I told him he could do whatever he needed to do and use any of Evan's info so he's not now a part of it. The dr. even took the time afterwards to burn a copy of the scope on a DVD just because Evan asked him to!