Greetings everyone, we've just returned from our first family trip to Europe. The last 11 days we had the opportunity to travel to Belgium, Paris and London with Katie's parents, brother and grandfather and had a wonderful trip.

Before the trip we were a little concerned about Lacy and how show would do on such a long trip overseas on the airplane. This was here third airplane ride though and she was wonderful. We were lucky in that we flew on an Airbus 330 which has tv's for every passenger. The TV's included several children's movies which Lacy loved. One the 9 hour trip over she probably slept for about 4 hours and watched movies for about 4 hours. During that time I don't think she cried once. And on the return trip it there were only a few tears, mainly because of being tired.

The trip was a blast and we got to see many places. Some of the highlights were climbing up towers of Notre Dame (466 steps) with Lacy, a boatride through the canals of Brugge, Belgium, Tours of the Ardenne Forest where Grandad Savage was captured on the Belgium/Germany border, a visit to the Louvre and the Eiffel Tower, and St. Pauls Cathedral in London.

One of the the highlights for Lacy were the train rides and metro and tube rides. She loved these and was telling Baxter all about our adventure when we got home. The first thing she did when she woke up Monday morning in her own bed and saw Baxter for the first time was tell him, "Baxie, I rode on a airplane in the sky, in the clouds, and a train and a boat." So we know what she remembers the most.

This post is a little short and scrambled but I'll post some photos and some more descriptions later.

About 2 months ago I still had a little toddler. She was a little quiet and curious, and a joy to be around, but she was still a toddler. Things changed the week of Christmas 2007. Starting on that Monday, Christmas Eve, it was like a flip switched somewhere and gone was my little toddler and she was replaced with a little girl. And boy is this little girl fun!

Starting on Christmas Eve she stayed up until 1:45 a.m. She loved dinner that night and was even eating with her special tied chopsticks, then she was really excited later that night when we opened presents. (She had already found this to be a ball when we opened presents the weekend before in Belzoni with my parents.) In fact she was so excited that she outlasted every one of her uncles that night. Quite an impressive feat, since I'm not sure I've outlasted any of them in the last 5-6 years.

Since then she has gotten bigger and bigger. Her best friend is still Baxter, she chases him around telling him she loves him and kissing him. And at times she even has to put him in the naughty corner if he misbehaves, or if he just thinks about misbehaving. She will come up to Katie and I and just throw her arms around us and kiss us as well.

It's also funny how she notices everything now. Just yesterday I got a new laptop and had it out doing some work. She just looked at me and said "Daddy is that your new puter?", and she never even new I was getting one. I didn't even know that she really knew what new meant. But that's the way it goes. She probably adds at least fifty new words a week to her vocabulary. She can tell you the capital of Mississippi, Tennessee and Arkansas, and sometimes Alabama and Florida. She's good at counting, puzzles, shapes and knows everything there is to know about animals I think. She also loves to drink from cups then request napkins, tell me when Baxter needs help, and at this very moment is wanting to play "baby games" on the computer with me.

I feel very lucky to have this little beautiful love around me all the time. It just feels perfect when her and Katie and I are together.

Lacy's 2nd Birthday Party!

Summe '07

This picture is from around the end of September

Today was an outstanding day!

Lacy has been out of school this week for fall break. And since Katie took the day off work on Tuesday to keep her it was my turn today to keep her. I'm so glad that I did. We had a great time together today. We went to a couple of parks today and walked Baxter and played on the playground and really had a good time. I don't think there was a tear the whole day, nothing but huge laughs and at one point Lacy actually looked up at missed and said "daddy kiss me", which was just adorable and melted my heart.

We also sang a lot today. Katie's parents have taught her a new song about a bumblebee which she loves, and she has a long list of other ones that she likes and sings all of the time. Some of which are the following:

• ABC Song
• Old MacDonald
• Twinkle Twinkle Little Star
• Peanut Sat on the Railroad Track
• The Itsy Bitsy Spider
• And several other songs from her Kindermusik class that I've forgotten right now.

These days Lacy isn't a baby really anymore. She talks to us and understands pretty much everything. She's super observant and wants to know what everything is. She'll grab our hands and take off telling us to follow her or to come on. I know it's so cliche to say this, but it really is true, you just can't imagine life without her and don't know how you made it before she came along.

This day began with me getting her out of bed and her being in a great mood this morning and ended with her falling asleep in my arms on the couch right after she was giving me kisses and holding my hands smiling and laughing. In between we hugged each other, went on walks, played and told each other how much we loved the other one "I love you much daddy", and got to hang out with Katie in the afternoon and play after she got off work and before she went to a wedding shower. It was a perfect day!

Happy Birthday Lacy!

I love you.

Holy moly is Lacy getting big. I think the four of us (including Bax) crack each other up all the time.

Here are some things that make me smile:

• Watching Lacy trying to jump. - She can't quite do it yet and she wants to badly. But she tries valiantly over and over again and loves for Katie and I to help her try.
• Dancing. - The three of us still get together at night and dance together. It's a ball and Lacy loves it.
• Curls - Lacy has tons of them and they are just too cute. (It's also funny when you have little old ladies telling you how much she is going to hate it when she gets older. Well, it really only happened once and the lady kind of followed us around the frozen section of the grocery store.)
• Singing - We all love to do it. Some of Lacy's are the ABC song and Twinkle Twinkle Little Star.
• Doing Flips - The other night when MaeMae and Daddo where over Lacy made Katie, Daddo and I do a flip after her in the middle of our living room floor and MaeMae had to do a log roll.
• Pretty much anything she does.

Lacy continues to be an unbelievable child. She's really sweet and gentle and loves doing anything with us. She's always up for a ride or a trip or doing something outside, it's really great.

She also talks a lot to us now. I mean a lot, right now she's watching me type and laughing at me while I type. I'm surprised she isn't asking me "what's that?" That's her big phrase now. She wants to know what everything is.

She can count to fourteen now without much of a problem. She loves all of the characters on Sesame Street, Mickey Mouse Clubhouse, Handy Manny and Winnie the Pooh.

We're still working on colors. It seems that almost everything in the world is pink. She finds it very funny that everything is pink.

Also, she has a fantastic imagination. We wen't for a long walk on Sunday and Katie and I were playing with her and the whole time we were looking at Pooh in the trees, handy manny fixing houses, Big Bird hiding and tons of other characters. And occasionally she tell us to run to catch Elmo or someone else. So we'd have to take off running while pushing her and holding Baxter and the whole time she's be pumping her arms and kicking her feet to help us run while she was in her stroller.

She also sees all her grandparents whenever she and I are driving anywhere and points them out in other cars, the trees, the side of the road and etc and says "There's insert grandparent name". And she laughs like crazy when I tell her "no it isn't"

I love this little girl.

Long Time - No Blog?

It looks as if I have again dove into the abyss when it comes to my blogging. Things have been exciting and busy around my office lately and the three of us have also been on the road a lot. That combination has kept me from getting a chance to do any blogging. But I'll try to tell a little of what has been going on.

One of Lacy's newest developments has been her pointing and asking "what dat?" at everything. She has gotten very inquisitive and wants to know what everything is. Another thing that she is doing is almost dressing herself. She can't quite get it yet, but she is pulling her shirt over her head and putting her pants on 2/3 of the way. She also has started calling Kate's dad daddo, but that's subject to change at any time.

The biggest news is that she has now learned how to climb out of her baby bed. We found that out two nights ago on the 18th. That night she was a little wired and was uncharacteristically hard to get down to bed. Well, Katie and I put her in bed. She usually cries for a little while then eventually falls to sleep when she acts like this. But this night was different. This time after a while katie was walking by her room and heard a noise. The next thing we know Lacy is hitting on the door and screaming. Katie was scared so she screamed to me and we ran in and got her. Everything was okay and she wasn't hurt at all, but she was pretty freaked out I think. We'll we held her and calmed her down and made sure everything was okay then we eventually put her back down. After putting her down I made it outside her room and shut the door and stood there with Katie. Then she started crying again and before we knew it we heard a "thump". That thump was Lacy hitting the ground again. We were all three scared now and picked her up and held her for a long time. Thank goodness she wasn't hurt at all. The rest of the night she spent in her mom's arms in their chair together until she was deeply asleep. I'm not sure what we're going to do now about her bed. She went down easily last night. But when I heard her wake up this morning I was extremely quick to get her out of bed before another "escape" occured.

Where have you guys been, you might ask? Well since the last blog entry we've been to Orlando to visit Karen and Eric for a long weekend, we've been to Belzoni, we've been to Chattanooga and we've been to Starkville. Next weekend we'll be here in Memphis visiting with our friends Brian and Kelly (which we're really looking forward to). Then who knows where the traveling Ferrell's will be.

ORLANDO

• We stayed at the Beach Club Resort in Orlando and we really enjoyed it. The hotel was great. It had a pool that was really nice and we hung out there a lot. Lacy and I spent the night together on Friday night and had a blast. Katie had spent that night with Karen and it rained that entire evening because a tropical storm was coming through. so we spent a lot of time that evening on our balcony looking for ducks. Lacy had seen some earlier was hunting them down the rest of the weekend. It was a lot of fun. She looked great in her little Minnie Mouse outfit and got tons of compliments from everyoone as we walked around the hotel.
• The next day Karen and Eric came to our resort and we all ate at the Swan and then hung by the pool and had a lot of fun. Sunday was our one day in the park and we hit them hard. In the morning we did Animal Kingdom (big hit with Lacy, especially the playgrounds and safari ride), followed by Disney-MGM studios (another hit at the playgrounds and muppetvision 3d), then we had dinner that night at Chefs de France in Epcot (Lacy was out by that time, but she did wake up the last few minutes of the fireworks as we were walking out).
• Our flight down there and back went great. We were on the very last seat and Lacy sat in Katie's lap while I held her portable dvd player and watched movies. She hardly made a sound the whole trip. I do have to confess that I actually left the dvd player on the plane on our first leg. Luckily for us the attendants turned it into lost and found and I called them and they had it ready for me to pick up when we went back to the airport. I think portable dvd players may be one of the greatest inventions ever for long trips!

CHATTANOOGA

• We drove down to Chattanooga in order to drop off supplies for the title company on Friday. While there though we were able to visit their riverwalk area and go to the aquarium and imax. The aquarium was a huge hit! Lacy loved the entire thing. She really liked the penquins, tropical fish and butterflies. It took us over three hours to go through the aquarium and that was blowing by a lot of the exhibits. Earlier that morning we had gone to see some imax deep sea 3d movie. For the first part Lacy actually kept her glasses on and she was adorable because she kept reaching out to touch the 3d objects like the jellyfish. But after a while she grew bored of it. The movie was probably a little too educational and slow so we walked out after about 45 minutes.
• I'd also like to ask what is up with people who enter a huge movie theater and decide that they need to sit immediatly next to and beside us? There was a whole family of about ten people who came in and sat next to us (yeah the only ones with a toddler). Eight of them sat immediately behind us and then two others climbed over us and sat right next to us. All the while about 200 empty seats were open. I'm I that attractive? Does my personality have that much magnetism?
• Overall that trip went great as well. We also took a little visit up to the Ocoee river to look around and enjoyed that as well as having a great pizza at the Mellow Mushroom (chicken cordon bleu, minus the ham and substituting mushrooms).

Oh well, I think I'm about blogged out. It really takes a while to write a decent post. Unfortunately I don't have a lot of time.

I'll update pictures when we get them downloaded.

Lacy loved riding the bully statue.

Lacy & Katie on the steps of Lee Hall at MSU

Lacy & Amber on campus for Amber's Graduation day

I figured that it has been a little while since my last post so I needed to give some updates. Things are going well here, but very busy. (As Katie likes to say "isn't everybody busy").

My little girl is really growing up in front of me every single day. And she is sucking me in with each and every hug of my leg when I'm standing by the kitchen sink, and every time she calls out from another room "daddy, where are you?", or when she comes up and says "Pop, I love you". It is so cute and lovable.

It seems like in the last two weeks (it's now May 23) she has truly grown from an infant to a little kid. She talks so much better now, she understands pretty much everything and she can even sing if we ask her to (if she isn't already doing it on her own). She loves to open and shut the doors in our house and knock on them while saying "knock - knock", she loves to push her baby stroller around the house (and often she likes to sit in it herself and lock the lap straps). She has been able to climb down from the bed by herself for probably almost two months now. And we have a very tall bed. She loves baths and will run to the bathroom if we tell her it's bath time. She still loves Baxter. She still loves to get into the pots and pans and wear the oven mits that make her look like a little lobster. She likes to put both mine and her socks on her hands and make sock puppets. She absolutely loves to laugh and will crack up if I even mention the tickle monster or the kiss monster is coming. She pulls up her shoulders, shrugs and runs away laughing with anticipation. She is absolutely amazing!

I have to put down some of these things sometimes. This blog is really just a place for me to jot down my memories. Kind of a piggy bank for my thoughts. If sometimes my thoughts seem a little incoherent please understand that the blog is really a place where I can go back one day and relieve my memories of having an unbeliabley great time raising my daughter with Katie. It try to make it readable to those of you out there who are actually still reading, but that's not my number one reason for posting.

....................

Just a quick recap of what's been going on lately. We were down in Starkville a couple of weekends ago to do some work on the condo. We also got to go around town and through campus with my sister Amber on her graduation day. We had a lot of fun with her and took quite a few pictures. Unfortunately none were of her in her cap and gown as she didn't sign up to walk ( I can't believe you didn't walk that was so weak).

We then went the next week to Belzoni for Amber's graduation party. And this weekend we will be going to Starkville to help Amber move and to drop off Lacy to stay with my parents.

more later...

Katie and Lacy had just shared some lip gloss while we were waiting for our pizza at Giordano's (the best pizza ever) in Chicago.

The first day we were in Chicago it was pretty chilly with temps in the mid 40's most of the day. But on Saturday it was pushing 80. Here we are in the Chicago Loop (we call it a downtown here in Memphis).

These two pictures are of the Chicago "Bean". That's not its official name but everyone calls it that. It's located in the new Millenium Park (the aptly named Millenium Park was actually runnig four years behind on construction and didn't open until 2004). Lacy loved this thing and kept running around it over and over again. You can't tell from this pick, but there were tons of people around it and taking pictures.

The huge building you see in this picture is the Aon Building in Chicago, it's the third tallest building in the U.S.. Our hotel room was right next door to this building (I think I put something about it in one of my posts below).

This picture and the one above it were taken a few weeks ago when my parents came to town.

Here are Lacy and Katie in Chicago on Navy Pier.

This was taken in our hotel room in Chicago last weekend. Katie and I had been trying to see how big we could get her hair.

My two loves sharing a kiss.

We're back from Rochester. We had a pretty good trip and and a pretty good report on Katie. The good news is that she doesn't have to go through surgery right now, which is a huge relief. Here erosion of the esophogaus has gone from a grade C to a grade A which is good news. The bad news is that her previous surgery (called a belsey procedure) where they took out the tumor and wrapped something around her esophogaus didn't take very well and acid is still coming up even with a double dose of nexium. This means that unless this corrects itself or the new medicine really helps sometime in the future she quite possibly will have to go through the surgery again. But the good news is that we don't have to do it this summer. Hooray!

On the Lacy front, she is as cute as ever. Last week she began saying a new phrase out of the blue. I was holding her and she lunged to Katie and said "I aunt choo mommy" or I want you mommy. Since then she's been saying it like crazy. She also has learned how to climb into and out of her stroller by herself. This is quite an event because to do this she has to climb over the little food and drink bar on the front. The first time she did this last week in Rochester I told her "you did it". She looked at me with a huge grin and shouted "I did it!". It was adorable and since this she climbed in and out of it all week shouting "I did it!". Today she started something else, I was singing and she looked at me and told me "daddy sing". She also started putting socks on her hands last week and playing with the little sock puppets. Today she put my socks on her hand and chased me around with them while laughing hysterically.

Oh yeah, we ended up driving back through Chicago from our trip to Mayo. We were lucky enough to have no tests or appointments on Friday so on Thursday night we drove the 5-6 hours from Rochester to Chicago and stayed their until Saturday night. I'm glad we did. It was a lot of fun. I've never been to Chicago and really enjoyed it. All we really did was walk around all of the downtown and near downtown neighborhoods and just soak everything in. We calculated that we walked about 12-15 miles both Friday and Saturday. The one thing I can say about Chicago is that they have an amazing number of high end shopping places. I was also impressed by the number of skyscrapers. They were everywhere, in fact right outside the hotel that we stayed in (the Hyatt Regency Chicago) was the third largest skyscraper in the U.S. (the Aon Building). To give you an idea of how tall it was, we were on the 31st floor of the hotel and had a floor to ceiling window. I could stand at the window and look up and from our room I could not see the top of the building. (Did you know that Chicago has more of the 50 tallest skyscrapers than any other city in the world?)

As big as the city was, it still seemed small in the downtown area at the same time. What I mean by this is that you could walk all over the downtown and near downtown areas fairly easily. We walked all over the place, from the Sears Tower to Navy Pier, to the Magnificent Mile to Old Towne Chicago. All in all we had a great time.

Hello everyone! Lacy and I are sitting here in the waiting room at the Mayo Clinic for Katie to come out from her endoscopic ultrasound. Which should be any second now. Lacy is playing with everything she can get her hands on which right now is the id labels for a printer that is next to me..... A nice little lady from Mayo just came by and handed lacy a little handmade kitten doll and now she is playing away with it.... After the ultrasound we're scheduled to go downstairs and get a CT. Tomorrow has us starting at 8:00 a.m. and going through most of the day with follow up appointments after todays rounds of tests. Then if all goes well we will be heading home on Friday, but there is still a lot of things we need to figure out before then.

Everyone take care.

P.S. Lacy sat in the booster seat at a restaurant for the first time (for me at least, but not Katie) and was a big girl. She's sat in just the normal chairs before, but I've never seen here in a booster seat before.

Lacy loves playing the piano. Here she is with her MaeMae playing with her at their house.

The picture with just Lacy is from Super Bulldog Weekend 2007. She loves climbing into the cabinets in the kitchen of our condo and shutting the door. The other picture is of the two of us on Easter.

Katie, Lacy, Baxter and I will all be leaving tomorrow night (monday) to go back to Rochester, MN for Katie's one year post surgery check up. We'll be staying in Hannibal, MO (home of Sameual Langhorn Clemens, aka Mark Twain for all of you Huckelberry Finn fans) on Monday and then will arrive in Rochester on Tuesday. She has several rounds of tests scheduled for Wednesday and Thursday, and if all goes well we should be leaving on Friday.

The worst case scenario (we think) is that Katie would need another surgery to fix the valve that connects her esoph0gaus to her stomach. Unfortunately to do that she would have to have the same surgery that she had last year. Which means that they would have to go in again and cut out her rib, pretty much crush the lower six and crack some of the upper ones, cut an 14-15 inch gash from her back to her chest, deflate her lungs, insert two chest tubes, all which we are told is worse the second time around. So we are really, really hoping that she won't need this. All prayers and thoughts are greatly appreciated.

On the plus side is the fact that we get to eat at a little sandwhich shop in downtown Rochester named City Market which is the best little sandwich shop that I've ever eaten in.