The Noehren's

Halloween trick or treating was postponed this year due to a big storm so we headed out on Friday Nov. 1st instead.  The neighborhood was so full of people.  I love it!  This year I decided to not miss all the fun and headed out with Brian and the kids.  It was great.  They trick or treated the whole 2 hours over a mile and a half through the neighborhood.  It took the kids a bit to realize that the hand sticking out of the car covered in spider webs was the candy deliverer.  It was so funny.  Lots and lots of candy!  The kids actually decided to donate about 3/4 of their haul to Brian's lab, where I'm sure it won't last long!  They had so much candy that they still had plenty to keep too.  What a fun night. 

The kid's fall break just happened to be at the same time Brian had to meet with some collaborators at Wake Forest University in Winston Salem, North Carolina so naturally we tagged along!  After we dropped Brian off on campus, we headed to the children's museum.  I feel like I've seen my fair share of children's museums in all of our travels and I really enjoyed this one.  Not too huge, not too small, and full of things my kids actually enjoyed. This contraption is the coolest crocheted thing I've ever seen.  I guess it is made by a Canadian artist from Japan, but it is the first one in the United States.  You can climb in it to the top where it is a big open area and it hangs from the ceiling by ropes.  Once the day care kids cleared out I totally went in there too.  Pretty amazing.  Apparently the original Krispy Kreme is from Winston Salem so they had this little factory.  We spent hours here.  No joke.  So simple, yet...

For this year's lab appreciation night we hosted a pumpkin carving party and it turned out great!  Brian has some great students that work for him and it's so fun to get to know them better.  This year we had his post doc and her family, his Ph.D. student and his girlfriend, a bunch of PT graduate students that work in his lab, and even some of the undergrads that work in the lab too.  I seriously hope my kids grow up to be as smart, personable, and hardworking as the Noehren lab workers.  We loved the costumes and the pumpkins turned out great too!  It was a fun, fun night.

This year Brian ran in the Bourbon Chase with 11 other teammates.  It is a 24 hour 200 mile team race that goes through Bourbon country and ends in downtown Lexington.  He is friends with a guy from church that runs it each year with his Cardiology department and they needed another person so Brian joined up.     Each team has 2 vans that take turns running, so Brian ended up running at 10pm, 4am and 4:30pm the next day.  His sections ended up being about 16 miles or so and he ran them in record time - a sub 8 minute mile which is pretty speedy for him.  He had a great time - even sleeping in a park in Danville for 2 hours in his sleeping bag with his van-mates.  He was pretty sore, but super happy.    We came to cheer for him on his last leg just north of town.  I love a good race!  There were white vans everywhere.  This one was the...

Ok, this is still a little hurtful even to post!  We had such high hopes of exploding a watermellon with rubber bands and catching it on video. Let's just say we accomplished one of the two. We started this for our Monday Family Home Evening activity but quickly realized we needed a LOT more rubber bands so we called it a night and just let the watermellon sit on the table for two more days.  Here is round one: Here is round 2 a few days later with more rubber bands: Here is round 3 now getting dark on Friday night: As you can see the watermellon exploded. It shot super high into the air and came crashing down. It was cool. Me being distracted and not catching it on video at the exact second it exploded was not cool. So not cool that we all just kinda went inside and didn't really speak about it or clean it up for a few days. Oops. I was so mad at myself. There really wasn't anyone else to blame.  Now though, about 500 rubber bands later, we...

Poor Haley fainted on her civil war battlefield fieldtrip and fell on her face!  She stood too long in military position with her knees locked and went boom. I am just super grateful that she fell on grass and didn't bust out her front teeth and that her teeth didn't puncture all the way through her lip. It could have been so much worse!  She's a trooper...no pun intended :) We had an unusually warm weekend and went for a nice hike at Anglin Falls. This time we decided to try stream walking to the top instead of using the trail. It was fun except the top became super tricky because we had to climb huge boulders.  I was impressed Grants little legs did so well! We went to a women's UK volleyball match and had the best time!  Super fun. We are slowly trying to attend every sporting venue at UK. Haley got to pretend to be a physical therapist treating her patient Grant for an ad campaign the college of health sciences is doing. It is part of their ...