Focht Family Blog

We stayed at some pretty campgrounds on this part of the trip so I thought I would share a few pictures. The first two are of the campground in Minnesota, Dakotah Meadows. It is at an Indian Casino.

After leaving Minnesota we spent a week in Iowa at a nice campground on the river called Upper Iowa Resort and Rentals. They are directly on the Upper Iowa River and they are nestled in a valley so this was truly camping. We had no cell phones, no internet, very little satellite TV and no antennae TV. It was a very nice, quiet campground and we caught up on a lot of reading. We also finished school and started our book burnings. Here is a view of the river across from our site.

We found some interesting animal tracks by a fallen tree at the edge of the river. Not sure what made them, though.

Samantha decided it was very interesting that the flowers that grew by the river were much bigger then the flowers growing by the campsites. Here is Samantha showing the difference and then a picture of all three of the children with the flowers.

Since we finished Mall of America in one day we decided to check out the Science Museum with the kids the next day. Here is a part where they get to pretend they are on TV. Timmy is behind Samantha and Josh being silly.

There was a large section about world health and the body systems. Here is Samantha examining a patient.

Joshua decided he would rather discuss the world’s health problems over the phone.

Samantha was old enough that she was able to do some experiments on her own body. She was able to swab her cheek and examine the cells under a microscope.

Later the children talked grandma into sitting down and playing with puzzles with them.

The relaxation didn’t last long. Soon, Timmy found a section with dinosaurs that had a head that you could move the jaw on. Here is Timmy trying to get the jaw to open and close.

Next the children found a section that had to do with weather. They got a little carried away with the wind machine.

They ended their visit with some more puzzles with daddy and grandma.

After leaving Branson, we drove with Nathan’s parents to Minnesota so we could go to the Mall of America. We were concerned that two days would not be enough to properly do Mall of America but we managed to walk the whole mall in one day. Here are the kids when we started the day..

Here is a picture of the amusement park that is in the middle of the mall. We did not go on any of the rides.

At one point, Nathan’s mom took Samantha and Timmy into a game store to buy a game and my mom and Josh were watching the elevators going up and down while sharing a shake.

Samantha and Timmy discovered a wall of water by one of the elevators.

Needless to say, by the end of the day most of us felt like Josh did….

However, Nathan and I both made discoveries that we ended up having to go back to Mall of America to get more of before leaving Minnesota. Nathan’s discovery was chocolate covered raspberries from Godiva and I discovered some amazing apples from Rocky Mountain Candy Company. They all started out as caramel covered and then were dipped into different combinations.

While in Branson we didn’t do much. Mostly we stayed at camp and got caught up with schoolwork and cleaning. We went there because Nathan’s parents were going through. They went to a bunch of shows. Mom went to Andy Williams with them on one of the nights.

The one thing we did do was take a ride on the Branson Scenic Railway.

We rode the whole way in one of the cars that has the windows surrounding it. Here is a view out of one of the windows.

We bought the kids some snacks to eat while on the train and they got a little bit messy with crumbs. Mom volunteered to clean it so the people working on the train didn’t have to clean so hard. They decided to put her to work.

Downstairs they had a small room that had a toy train set up for the kids to play with. While downstairs playing one of the conductors came down to talk to us and the kids took turns trying on his hat. Here is Samantha, Timmy and Josh in the hat as well as a picture of all of them playing with the train set.

This must be the month. First, Andrea received good news. The lymph node contained tissue that is supposed to be gone in adults. I heard sinus tissue, mom heard thymus tissue… not sure which it was. Anyways, no malignancy was found. They are meeting with the oncologist this week to decide if they need to do anything with it. The thoracic surgeon wants her to have another CT scan in three months and if it has grown he will want to remove it at that point.

Today we had to take Misty to an emergency vet and she ended up with a biopsy. On Monday or so she had a small dime sized raw spot on her front paw behind the pad (like at her wrist area). Thursday morning we woke up to blood everywhere. She had chewed on it until it was a 3-4″ square of raw skin. I have been rinsing it with peroxide and bandaging it but she has been crying a lot and she has been wanting to lay outside. Nathan thinks that might be because nobody is bumping into her outside. However, she hasn’t eaten anything for 2 days and ate very light the 2 days before that. She is barely drinking water and today she was breathing strangely with shivers.

The vet looked at it. She was concerned it might have been a mast cell tumor. They gave her pain meds, sedated her slightly and cleaned out the wound. She prepared a slide from what was in the wound and said she thought she saw mast cells so then we had to wait longer so she could take a biopsy to send to the lab and also do a chest x-ray to see if there was anything in her lungs. Her lungs are clear. We will know by Tuesday if Misty’s biopsy shows cancer.