Happy 1st Birthday Brynn and Kaitlyn!

March 25, 2007

Brynn and Kaitlyn celebrated their 1st birthday today. How quickly the time has passed! I am very happy to be in 2007 and not back in 2006 with brand new babies, a house to sell, an impending move and Rich in the middle of his general surgery intern year. What a crazy time it was, but now all that has passed and it is just a memory.

Brynn and Kaitlyn have been the most enjoyable and sweet natured babies I have ever been around. They really are straight from heaven and just what I needed since we are going in every direction all day everyday and they just go with the flow! This past year has just been a joy having them in our family.

We had a very small celebration since Rich was on call last night and tonight as well. They got Cabbage Patch Newborns, doll strollers, cards, money and two different walkers from Rich's parents. It's so fun to have baby dolls around and girl toys in the toy box.

Happy Birthday to my sweet angels. I love you!

March Madness

Here is an update on all the crazy fun the 2007 NCAA basketball has brought to our family.

We have had so much fun this week with the NCAA tournament. It was like all the planets aligned and we got Stanford, BYU and Louisville here in Lexington and it was Rich's vacation week. What are the odds?! It must be as rare as having 2 sets of twins. It was crazy! On Wednesday we went to the open practices at Rupp Arena. It was so much fun. It is free, we parked for free and you get to see all the teams ups close. Each team can practice for 45 min, so it goes quickly. We watched Stanford, Penn and Louisville and then had to go pick up Trey from school. We went back that evening and saw Ohio State, BYU and Central Connecticut.
We did make it to the Stanford game the next day. That session was the Louisville/Stanford game and the Penn/ Texas A&M game. Rich was able to get 7 complimentary tickets from the Stanford Basketball office so we all went. Even the baby girls needed their own ticket when they just sat on our laps. Oh well, luckily we didn't have to pay. Parking was insane with all the Louisville fans and we sat in bumper to bumper traffic for 45 min. That is unheard of here. I felt like we were at Thunder Over Louisville. Josh and Tyler Madsen came too. Josh had only gotten 1 hour of sleep and Tyler drove while Josh slept. On the row behind us was Josh and Tyler plus Matt McCune, Paul Matheson and Gary Wortz. Gary did medical school at U of L and is now an ophthalmology resident here at UK. Josh, Matt and Paul are all anesthesiology resdients at U of L. We were joking that there were no anesthesiologists from U of L left. We asked Todd Hamilton if he could come, but unfortunately he was the only one stuck in the hospital.

I have to tell you that Rupp Arena is an amazing place to play. It holds 23,000 fans and feels a bit like the Marriot Center but with more real seats vs benches. The Louisville fans were out in FULL FORCE! The newspaper today estimated that there were 18,000 Louisville die hard fans at the game. Rich has been to many, many tournament games and he said he had never seen such a home court advantage like that. It was so incredibly loud. The paper said the place hadn't been like that for years. They said that to praise Pitino and make a dig at Tubby Smith. He has just been under fire around here for not getting Kentucky further in the tournament. These Kentucky folk just live and die with their basketball.

We all wore our Stanford gear to the game and the girls had little Stanford stuff on too. Brynn wore a little cheerleading outfit and Kaitlyn had more of a basketball jersey on. Rich's Mom sent them to us years ago and we never had a reason to use them. We even made signs that said C an't B eat S tanford for CBS, but Stanford got down so early on that the signs were soon put away. While our tickets were great (row H or about row 10) we weren't going to get on TV that far up anyway. I was hoping so the grandparents could see the kids, but oh well. The girls were amzaing and were angels through both games. We left our house at 11:15 am (we had to pick up the boys at their schools) and got back to our house at 5:30 pm. The girls lived off an early morning nap and a 30 min cat naps in our arms during the second game. The boys were great and after 2 large diet Cokes, 2 large popcorns, 1 nacho and 1 hot dog they were full too. We got one shirt for them to share. Josh wore it yesterday and Trey wore it today.

Rich was also able to get 4 free tickets for the BYU game from Brian Santiago. Rich knew him when Brian played basketball at Provo High and we got to talk to him after the BYU practice and he asked Rich if he needed tickets. Once again, what luck! Rich, my Josh, Big Josh (Madsen) and Tyler went to those games. Those tickets were even better. They were on the 3rd row directly behind the BYU bench. Danny Ainge was right in front of Tyler. When they showed Danny Ainge during the game you could see Tyler's legs and shirt. It was funny. They also sat by 2 men from our Lexington Ward (Kevin Hyde and Glen Krebs) and a few people from our Lousville ward (Jamie Alford, Steve Casos and Serge Martinez). So it was like a big reunion of all the LDS fans in Kentucky. They saw the Ohio State game before the BYU/ Xavier game. My Josh was loving all of it. The BYU game tipped off at nearly 10 PM so he thought he was one of the big boys. He kept asking Big Josh about the mascots. BYU played so hard and it was just so sad to see it slip away. They had them and just couldn't get the baskets at the end. The deserved to win! We'll hope for better things next year for the Cougars and Cardinal.