We got all the kids up early on Monday to get ready for a road trip. “Trip-in-a-trip” to the girls. The first thing we had to do is de-mold our candy. It didn’t taste great, it was kind of like super rubbery jello. It was more fun just to play with them! Next time, we will just make more chocolate ones!

The drive to the Grand Canyon should take about 3hrs and 45minutes from our house. Put four kids in the car and add all the potty stops, medical breaks, food runs, and other pauses, we made it in 5 hours!
Brendan didn’t want to sit for a picture!

Cousins!

We entered at the east side, by the historic watchtower.

We did the rim drive and found several neat lookouts along the way.

There were several hard stops for traffic jams due to people trying to photograph huge elk grazing by the road! We did not add to the chaos, we had to settle for “elk butt” shot as we drove by.

No trip to the Grand Canyon is complete without an ice cream cone.

Brendan did not want a lick.

We got a hotel in Williams, AZ for the night! The boys were so excited about the adjoining rooms with the cousins. They had a picnic dinner.

The boys loved the heat/air controllers.

Trevor gave Brendan a detailed education about how it worked. What he said was totally nonsense, but it sounded authoritative. 🙂

Indoor saltwater pool!

Even Brendan got to go “in the pool”. He wanted to dive right in and swim with his cousins. When his trach is out, he is going to be a little water boy.

He says a hotel owl says, “Hoo hoo! Swimming pool! Hoo hoo! Swimming pool!”

Each bed had four poofy pillows, so the boys made an “owl nest”.

Breakfast in bed!

Breakfast for Brendan is a little different.

In the morning, we took all of the kids to the Deer Farm. I think Kayla was the most excited about it.

The boys liked the deer, except that they kept coming up and were trying to chew on shirts, shoelaces and bottoms of shorts. It made Trevor a bit nervous.

The deer like having pictures taken.

Kayla kissed a camel!!!

Kayla led deer parades!

Group shot, with deer

We took the scenic route home and drove through Oak Creek Canyon and Sedona. We stopped at “The Teal M” for a potty stop, but didn’t make any more stops. We had to get Brendan home in time to see his pediatrician. He had another cyst on his nose that grew huge and painful and I wanted him to be seen. Turns out, the doctor believes it to be the same MRSA infection that Trevor had, which I expected all along. That means Brendan actually had it first. Brendan is on the Bactrim now, and the whole family, including company, has an ointment that we all have to put in our nostrils to try to make sure we are not carriers.
The doctor lanced and drained Brendan’s nose to send for cultures. He was not a happy guy. But today, it is already looking much much better.

Something else EPIC happened today. The medical company picked up the ventilator. Bye-bye vent!!

Something else EPIC happened today. The hospital called and said that they had a cancellation in their clinic for Brendan’s aero-digestive specialists appointment.
Instead of having to wait until July 20th as originally scheduled, they will now see him on Monday June 15th!
This will be the pulmonologist, ENT, and GI doctor all meeting together to determine Brendan’s needs for procedures to get his trach out.
He will now be scheduled for his bronchoscopy for July 21st. (tentatively)

I called again and finally got the results of the sleep study. The results said “normal capped trach patterns, approval to decannulate”.

He may need additional work like removal of tonsils before the final steps, but at least it is moving now.

Whew! I feel like I have to read this again just to process all of this information myself.

Wrapping up with something cute, Brendan had speech therapy today. The last 10 minutes of a session, the therapist usually brings a toy to reward Brendan for participating. Today, she brought a firetruck set of building blocks made by Best-Lok. Trevor comes up to the table and says, “Are these knock-off Legos?”
I was pretty embarrassed but we all had a good laugh. I can’t really place where he got that idea. I am raising a Lego snob!

Our home seems to have become the Legoland of Arizona. 🙂

Thanks to Amazon’s same day shipping on a Sunday, we got a handful of cool candy molds. There has been a viral video going around of a guy making Lego gummy candies and we tried to follow his instructions. We mixed four colors of candy mix.

Gelatin is really goopy

Mixing in the flavors, stirring is serious business

Injecting the molds. Our stock of 60ml syringes comes in handy!

(Brendan had his helmet on for bike riding)

This made a colorful and very sticky mess on my oven

The kids gave up on candy making and Aunt Heather decided to pull out the “big momma” Lego kit that we got in our biggest bulk bucket buy. First they broke up chunks and organized the pieces.

Legos are no match for the full Komac-attack

Ashley did stop to fill some molds too

Kayla filled her molds with melted chocolate because her braces won’t allow her to eat gummies.

The chocolate ones came out great. The gummy ones are still setting up.

Brendan just loves his real Lego ninja guy.

Kayla bailed on the group Lego project and decided to work on her own. She found a box in our collection that she was very excited about.

One hour and forty five minutes later….

The big reveal! (With Kayla’s finished project too!)

The boys loved the wheel with the special motor. We only had to scrounge about 16 pieces out of the buckets. Not bad for a set with over 1000 pieces!

This isn’t part of the kit. Ashley made this beach addition herself. There are little tiny surfers being chased by sharks, a nice cafe to grab some snacks, and beautiful white sandy beaches.

The wheel was the centerpiece at dinner tonight.

The girls did manage to get in about an hour of swimming today. We have a giant list and not enough time to do it all!!

I don’t have too many pictures from this week. On Thursday, we tried making a trip to the Science Center. We just happened to pick the one day that they had some kind of record attendance from Summer Camps and out of town groups. One of the employees told me that there were 700 groups of kids.
It was pure chaos. I have never seen anything so out of control and noisy! We tried to find quiet areas. There were so many people, I felt like it was violating fire code.

But almost everywhere we went, we were getting swarmed with little ones in matching t-shirts. It was like stepping on an anthill and having them overrun your shoes.

We bailed on the museum and had lunch at Red Robin, then went back to Lego building. Kayla is almost done with the third large Star Wars ship in the bucket. Bill took Kayla to Brendan’s favorite game store where she could pick and choose a bucket of her own legos.

Bill had to change out some small parts in the truck.

We met Brendan’s PT at a playground today so that he could really put Brendan to the test, jumping and climbing and crawling. He did it all with enthusiasm!

The playground has this mini zipline. Kayla tried it first.

Trevor got brave and did it too! He said it was “so so so so so so much fun!” He waited in line and did it twice.

Aunt Heather and Ashley got in safely this afternoon. We rode the SkyTrain and met them in the terminal. Brendan had been asking for two days to go to the airport again.

Tonight, Bill had to work – and had a conference call right at 8PM when the boys are going to bed. Since Bill was not available and Heather was helping Ashley get ready for bed, Kayla had to rock Trevor. 🙂

We have big plans for an action packed week. I hope it all goes well!