Today was the first day of the 2010 Tour De France. Christine and I really love to watch the tour every year, it is kind of one of our special things we have with one another. Lance Armstrong beat his main rival Alberto Contador by 5 seconds in the opening time trial. This may not seem like a big margin, but it is a big confidence boost for Lance as he failed to beat Alberto last year in the first stage time trial. It looks like it will be another really interesting year.

As for us, we had a super busy day today. Two of the other families really wanted to go to Playland today, but we were quite reluctant as it is a Saturday. We made no commitments to going, but when we woke up and saw that the weather was quite cloudy, we decided to go, as we hoped there would be fewer people there. As it turns out, we almost had the place to ourselves, there were very few people there, and we all ended up having a blast. We have really been blessed with great house-mates. We have all been able to share a lot of the expenses of most of the things that we do, and as we do them together, the RMH lends us a van, so we also split parking as well. As it turns out, Playland is a pretty reasonable place to go when you have kids. The adults get in as a accompanying parent, so we don't have to pay to go on rides, and the kids are cheap to. The only thing that could get expensive is the games, and thankfully my kids just want to go on the rides. It was really fun, we had 5 adults, and 4 kids. The oldest kid was 9, and she really wanted to go on all the good rides, the next oldest was 6, and he just wanted to hang out with his mom, Brenn, and Samantha wanted to go on all the little kid rides, with Brenn wanting to go on any ride that she could. We all washed our hands about a thousand times today, after every ride, we made sure that we used hand sanitizer, it may have been overkill, but when you have two kids with cancer, and three paranoid parents, I guess that is what you get.

Brenn did get pretty tired at Playland, we stayed for about 3 hours, and both Brenn and Ryan went from wanting to stay to needing to go within about 10 minutes. As soon as we all noticed that they were starting to fade, we headed for the exit. It really is remarkable how much energy they have these days, just a couple weeks ago, they were not able to even walk up a flight of stairs, now they are running around, and playing, and really having fun, like all kids should! This has really changed my outlook on the kids. Whenever there is a chance for them to be having a great time, there is no problem now. We may indulge to much, but once Brenn was diagnosed with cancer, a lot of things went out the window. We are a much stronger family, we pray a lot more together, and we try to have fun every day. That really sums up everything that we do now. Life has changed so much over the past couple months that it is hard to even recognize our past life, there are so many things that have lost priority. Life really feels different.

Thank God we are together

Scott