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No offense to our own fathers, who are pretty great, but Greg is the bestest best dad of all the best dads.  So to celebrate him for the first official Greg Father’s Day, Lloyd and I gave Greg a very fancy Kelty Baby Backpack! 

Here they are on their inaugural backpack walk:

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During my sister and Reggie’s visit to Michigan, there was a major rain storm, that ended up washing away my parents’ driveway!  Their driveway has only truly flooded one other time in its existence, and that was just a few weeks ago… leading us to believe the culprit is GLOBAL WARMING!  

Here’s the driveway flooding:

Greg had to come to the end of my parents’ driveway to pick up Reggie and take him to the train station, since no cars were going to be able to drive through this.  The water is about three feet deep here!  Caitlin stayed an extra day to wait for the flood to subside so she could drive their car back to Wisconsin.

Here is the driveway after the water receded:

My Mom and Dad had a special meeting of the Crawford Brain Trust to figure out how to build a bridge with their limited resources around the house.  The brought up every spare piece of plywood from the basement, and then proceeded to take apart our mini-shed (the was scheduled for demo anyway) and used those pieces of wood and bricks to build a bridge. 

Here is Mom at work on their temporary solution:

Stay tuned for the permanent solution!  The first true project of the Woodlands Sawmil!

So much has been going on with our little family in the past week!  In just seven days we got a visit from our good friend  Nic Lutton, beloved siblings Caitlin and Reggie came into town, we celebrated my awesome mom’s birthday, my parents’ driveway turned into a moat, we did father’s day up right, greg installed a ceiling fan, my friend dawn came to stay with us for two days, and Lloyd and I joined Mom on a day-trip to Detroit to attend my dad’s retirement party at work.   That’s a lot!  Many blog posts with pictures detailing a couple of these events to come. 

But here’s a picture of our new ceiling fan!  To quote the dude, I really think it ties the room together.

Lloyd’s cyst has surgery scheduled for sometime in the morning on Friday, August 7th.  They’ll be giving us a call on Thursday with the exact time. We were promised it’d be early in the morning, approximately 5 minutes before Jenna goes in to cardiac arrest.  Mark your calendars!

Lloyd had his consultation with the Pediatric Plastic Surgeon over at Mott’s today.  It is in fact a dermatoid cyst, which is what we’ve been assuming all along.   There were some cells that were meant to develop into skin that just never got around to it when Lloyd was in utero, resulting in the development of the cyst. The doctor said he sees them a lot and it’s a very easy surgery to go in and pluck the waterballoon out.   There could even be hair in it!  I’m hoping for a toe-nail, too. 

He recommended we do the surgery sooner rather than later, because over time the cyst can travel up Lloyd’s forehead, leaving little tentacles along its journey.  That means that when it would be time to do surgery, they’d have to cut up his whole forehead to get all the pieces.  Much better to do it now when it’s just one little sack.  It’ll just be a small incision right about his brow.  

The scariest part is the anesthesia.  Luckily, Mott’s Children’s Hospital at U of M has their own pediatric anesthesiologists, and of course, the hospital is one of the best in the world.  Anyway, not only is the whole concept of baby anesthesia scary, but there’s the added stress of having to make Lloyd fast for 6 hours prior to surgery.  Joy of joys.  Luckily, they say they will try and get us the earliest surgery possible, so he’ll be asleep for much of the fasting time.   

Although the actual consultation went fine, the waiting room period was a disaster.  We were waiting for TWO HOURS before we were seen, along with about 30 other families lining the hallways.   Nothing better than a doctor’s waiting room experience enhanced with the presence of several screaming toddlers, many with saddening physical issues like cleft lips and burn wounds. 

But Lloyd earned a million awesomeness points.  During the whole waiting and consultation experiences he never lost his cool.  In fact, he shouted out exclamations of excitement at the other children, and actually had a couple giggle fits.  We are really lucky to have such an amazing little cyst head, soon to be stitch head.