Good-bye to Nicole

Our babysitter, Nicole, will watch Sheinah for the last time on Thursday. We knew this day would eventually come since Nicole is one of Melissa's students so she eventually has to move on...although it would be cool if she could just babysit forever! Nicole has started her fourth professional year which means she will be in Washington state and Wisconsin completing her experiential rotations. We won't see her again until graduation next May :( Thus, in her honor, we are posting the only video we have of her and Sheinah (how sad is that). We took this video back in January when Sheinah was going through a phase where she liked to bounce on the exercise ball. This was just two weeks after we got Samson when Sheinah had justed started using words (like puppy). We will greatly miss Nicole!! http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-8109910179289671569&hl=en

Bedtime Story

Part of our nighttime routine with Sheinah is to read her several bedtime stories. One of her favorites is a book called "I Love You Through and Through." It is a story with a little boy and his bear. It was a gift from the staff at the Vineyard when Sheinah was born, but we only found it a few months ago. Anyway, we created a bunch of "actions" to go with the story to help Sheinah be more interested in the book. Now that she is talking more, we decided to video tape the reading of the story. We're actually going to have to do it again because Travis accidentally skipped a page (fingers and toes page). For now, enjoy the video! http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=7596049320176076710&hl=en

P.S. When we turn the book upside down it is because the Teddy Bear is upside down in the picture. Sheinah always wants to turn him right-side-up.

Lots of stones

Melissa just got out of the hospital for the second surgery in two weeks. Melissa had her gall bladder yanked or if it makes you feel better you can say removed. Anywho, the surgeon said the gall balder need to come out because it was full of stones. Travis asked the surgeon for the stones and voila (see picture) a bag of stones arrived. The pathologist broke a few for reasons unbeknown to us. Melissa and Travis counted the stones and depending on how you count the broken ones came up with at least 12 BIG STONES. We are not sure how Melissa was not in much more pain. According to wikipedia, the gall bladder is 3 to 4 inches long. Travis is threatening to have a bracelet made out of the stones. We put a dime to give reference to the size of the stones.

Cholecystectomy

That's the medical term for gallbladder removal which Melissa is scheduled for tomorrow morning at 8:30am. She had a flair of gallstones last month and the surgeon thinks it would be best to just take out the whole gallbladder now. They will do it laproscopically (just three small incisions in the abdomen) if possible which means Melissa will only be in the hospital overnight. We appreciate your prayers :)

da bums

Class of 2007

The whole Bumgardner family went down to Minneapolis for two days to celebration the graduation of the first Duluth class from the University of Minnesota College of Pharmacy. We had a little pre-graduation celebration on Thursday night. This picture of Travis and Sheinah is from that night.

The actual graduation was Friday night. We decided to go check out the waterpark down by the Mall of America. Here is Minnesota they have tthese indoor waterparks inside hotels. Since Travis and Sheinah were stuck at the hotel while Melissa was at work, we figured a waterpark hotel would be a good idea. Sheinah LOVED IT!! We'll post some videos of the waterpark as soon as we get to work with a better internet connection.

In the meantime...you can enjoy this picture of Sheinah and Lucy the Pharmacist. The guy who used to write the Peanuts comic strip (can't remember his name) is from Minnesota. There are statues of the peanuts characters all over the state. This one is right outside the school of pharmacy.

Waterpark

As promised, we finally got the videos from the waterpark edited so that they can be posted on the blog. This first one is of Sheinah going down the waterslides with her daddy. The quality is not that great because we have to make the file small enough to be uploaded. http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=2870656625993224677&hl=en

This second one is Travis trying to "surf" in the simulated wave machine. He made it a whole 30 seconds :) http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-2117434446733912852&hl=en

Enjoy the videos!

Welcome to da bums blog!

It seems that "blogging" is the way to go in today's high-tech world. For those of you who have no idea what this blog thing is...a blog is short for "web log"...it's kind of like a diary, where the entries are shown in reverse chronological order. With us being so far away from the "fam," we decided to go ahead and start using one of these thing-a-ma-jiggies to keep everyone up to speed with what is happening in our lives. The coolest part is that we can apparently post videos here which means you guys (the blog readers) can see what Sheinah is doing BEFORE Christmas when we make our annual "year in the life of Sheinah" video :)

So, here's the deal, we promise to do our best to post something once a week if you promise to read it. We figured out that we can back date our postings so things will be written in pseudo real time. Oh, and it takes a gazillion hours to upload on video because our editing software is malfunctioning, our files are just gianormous, and our internet upload speed leaves much to be desired. We'll get a video or two linked up as soon as we can.