The Bryan Family Sampler

All State Art & Junior Prom

Abby's art teacher encouraged her to enter a piece into the Springville High School Art Show.

She sent in one of her bird pieces and found out a little while later that she had received an honorable mention award.

They had an awards ceremony down in Springville so Andy took her down while I held down the fort here and also did prom flowers at Laura's.

While doing flowers I noticed a bunch of texts from both Andy and Abby asking what my friend Karen's daughter's name is...

How cool is that, that out of 5 honorable mentions in our district, two of them were Abby and Aubrey!

Aubrey didn't go down that day because it was their girl's choice dance but when I texted Karen she said Aubrey was planning on going to the event at the capitol later in the month. (More on that later)

Abby receiving her award...

Abby and her friend Ellie who won a different award

The piece on the left is Ellie's and the one on the right is Aubrey's.

Very neat! I'm so glad Abby and Andy went down and I wish I could have been there with them!

Meanwhile...back at the ranch...

Abby was going to be the chauffeur for Matt and Lindy for all their prom needs but because of her Art event Ben and I had the pleasure of driving them for their day date. I had never met Lindy before. She was super sweet.

We dropped them off at the bowling alley and then their friends brought them back here and Ben and I drove them back to Lindy's house.

Matt and his friend Gabe...

I was excited to do his first flowers for him but one of the other moms said she wanted to do everyone's flowers...so...what do ya do?

Abby was home in time to drive them to their pictures and then go to the dance herself.

Matt's group's "professional pics"

Super cute!

I think they both had a lot of fun :)

Addition Progression

In January I had texted the contractor that had originally referred us to Chase.

I just asked him how well he knew Chase and what he knew of him.

Cole had responded that he had known him a long time and he knew a lot of the projects he was working on and he hired quality subs and did good work.

My intent had been to maybe suggest he stop referring people to him but since they sounded like such good buddies and at the time we were not wanting Chase to know we were checking up on him, so I just thanked him and moved on.

A couple of weeks later, the very end of January, Cole emailed me and said he heard that Chase was working for us and wanted to know how it was going.

Since he asked, I told him everything. I did not hold back.

He was sick! He couldn't believe what Chase was doing and said he thought he knew him better than that.

He felt so bad and asked what he could do to help us.

About the same time, Dustin was wanting to frame in our fireplace but was told by the inspector that he needed to get engineering to check off on our roof before we could proceed.

Apparently, when we added the triangle windows, it changed the pitch of the roof (which we were aware of) and it also ended up changing the trusses to stick built.

Unbeknownst to us, Chase never had it all reengineered.

When we had it checked by our engineering company, they told us we had to rip out our center roof beam and put in a much larger one!

We were just sick about that since Dustin had spent all that time, effort and our money on finally getting the roof on so that we could have everything dry underneath (minus the 4 inches of ice in the basement of course). Dustin came up with another solution that they agreed to of putting in a post in the middle to support the beam we did have.

In the midst of all of this, Cole came over and we met him for the first time (when he had given us a bid the previous year he had done it all by email)

He was very nice and gave us more background and into concerning the Chase saga. Apparently, Chase had recently used Cole's account to buy the lumber for the other job in Nibley. Soon after, a friend of ours that Andy had talked to at church about our woes talked to his builder (he is building a house down the road from us) who ended up being Cole and suggested he check in with us. That's how Cole found out what was going on with Chase.

After our talk with him, he had us leaning toward changing the roof beam.

However, soon after, he brought his framer over to look at the situation...and he strongly suggested we do the post support.

Here are a couple of pictures of us holding up a piece of wood trying to envision the beam and if we could live with that.

We also talked to Merill about it and finally decided that was the route we were wanting to go.

There would have been a lot of unknowns with changing out the beam and it would have cost about three times as much so we figured we could make the post work.

The problem is, the post needs to go in the basement as well and since we have so much ice down there and it involved pouring a new cement footing we were at a stand still until it warmed up a bit.

I am writing this on March 1st and we are still waiting.

Honestly, this has been a record winter for temps and amounts of snow. Of course it has.

We are really grateful for everyone that is helping us out though.

We ended up parting ways with Dustin since he can't frame the fireplace until our repairs are made and we didn't want to drag it out for him.

Some day this will be done. :)

February Odds and Ends

I'll start with a little Ben update for you...

He had another couple of seizures back to back days that threw him to the kitchen floor.

He had bruising like he did when he broke it the other two times last year.

These pictures don't show it at its worst but it gives you an idea.

I took him in to see Dr Brown to decide if we needed to do anything about it.

Ben was still in a seizure state that day and was very active and out of it.

It was a circus trying to get him into the hospital and up to the second floor.

Dr Brown saw the bruising and definitely thought it looked broken and wanted an xray.

I did not want to wrestle him again going down to the xray and then back up to look at results so I asked for a wheelchair. The problem was that he was so active that he kept trying to get out of it while I was moving him. The nurse gave me some of that stretchy tape to wrap around and hopefully keep him in. Didn't work so well and I ended up wheeling him with one hand while the other hand was on his chest trying to keep him in. This was in the elevator going down...

Dr Brown had a hard time deciphering the xray once we got back upstairs and wanted us to see another specialist just to make sure we didn't need to do anything about it.

This is us the next week at the Budge seeing Dr. Murray.

I was grateful that Andy was able was able to be there this time although Ben was in a much better state.

Dr Murray confirmed that there was a new break in the area where it had healed from several months ago.

This is a side by side pic of the xray from last year (right) and that day (left)

He suggested we get him on some Calcium and Vitamin D supplements to strengthen his bones since we aren't going to be able to stop him from falling and breaking things.