Below are a couple of photos from the twins “promotion ceremony”. They official finished Middle School and will move on to High School starting July 7th with their summer program.
aaron_promotion, originally uploaded by *Cindy*.
eric_promotionjpg, originally uploaded by *Cindy*.
Below are a couple of videos and photo slide shows from the Third Tracheostomy.com Pediatric Conference. This year’s conference was June 12-14, 2008 in Cincinnati, OH. Aaron (who is the inspiration behind tracheostomy.com) and I had a wonderful time. Rich stayed home with Eric and Anthony, as they don’t travel very well. That said, I was amazed by the many families who managed to bring their trach kids to the conference. One mom drove all the way from Florida with her son who uses a power wheelchair and is ventilator dependent. Another family had 4 kids including a newborn, another brought 6 kids, including 4 with special needs.
In addition to the many interesting speakers and vendors, we had lots of fun! Thursday night we rented the entire Newport Aquarium and had the whole place to ourselves. Friday night was the “Gala”; a wonderful dinner, music and dancing. Saturday we went to the Cincinnati Zoo. There was lots of fun for the kids, including Build-a-Bear, face painting and a magician.
We came home tired, but had a great time, lots of fun, learning and networking. Special thanks to our conference coordinator Ann Schrooten! Below is a video that Ann put together that was shown at the Friday night Gala:
Aaron’s speech:
Congratulations to Barack Obama! What a historic and exciting race this has been. It’s too bad that Al Gore didn’t fight as hard as Hillary. Bush would have lost the election back in 2000 and the world would be a better place today. But that didn’t happen and we have a lot of work to do in order to get our country back on track.
Now it’s time for the democratic party to come together behind our nominee Barack Obama. While I’ve been a Hillary supporter, the fact is that there is little difference between these two candidates and where they stand on the important issues facing our country today. However, the differences between Obama and McCain – and the two parties – are immense. And so, it’s an easy call for democrats to back Obama in the general election. On to victory in November and a new beginning for the United States of America!
The higher the better, because it’s the only way that Americans will wake up to the problems facing our planet today and the only way we will put time and money into alternative energy sources. We are in for more hard times here in the US if we don’t do something now. We are addicted to oil and what oil is left on the planet is getting harder and more expensive to get at; not to mention our dependence on the Middle East where they currently have more oil than other parts of the world. Remember the gas crisis in the 1970’s? That is when we used up much of the easy to mine oil here in the US. Jimmy Carter told us to conserve, but we didn’t listen. We should have begun research back in the 70’s, since research and implementation can take decades.
We need to act now with urgency and that doesn’t mean screwing up the environment more by drilling in Alaska, it means finding clean renewable alternatives.
