Well this is what my left arm looks like and pretty much depicts the look of the rest of my body also. I am covered from head to toe and have no idea what is causing this. It started last week, I notticed some spots coming again so I called te doctor and they put me on a dose of steroids again to go along with the zyrtec I take every night. It seems every few months, it comes back and then I take steroids and it goes away again, but it has become more and more frequent and getting worse every time. On Tuesday, I got up and they were back with a vengance and were goign down my legs and arms which I never had before. Today, was horrible so i went to the doctor this morning and she put me on prednisone and hopefully that will supress whatever is causing this till i can see the allergy specialist on November 12th for a consultation and see how to proceed. As mom indicated on top of all this i am back with the diarhea and vomitting again also. The doctor doesn't think this is related but did blood work today and i have to bring in a stool sample tomorrow so they can test it. (yuck, but if it will make me better I am all for it) So today the windows are all open in the apartment so I stay cool and I ahve covered myself with calamine lotion. So the itchiness isn't as bad right now, but the spots haven't left yet either? So, that is my life - now on to some much more exciting lives.

Danielle, very happy for you that the job has come through and what a pervect schedule for you to have. It might have taken abit but don't think you could have really asked for much more. Love the pictures of Zoe. She is getting so grown up and those facial expressions are priceless.

Shane and Jody - I know the answer to your question of where people are usually bleeding from and what you deal with on he GI floor. Loved the story, and glad your levels were all ok Shane but makes me laugh I can just see nurse Jody trying to stop this hang nail from bleeding, Shane going with the flow (no pun intended) and walking around with his arm up in the air to please his wife. On a serious note Shane, I hope you are still wearing your medical id bracelet that says you are on Coumadin. I used to work in a hospital too and although I chuckle at the story you can imagine what would happen if you were in an accident and didn't have your bracelt on. Ok, enought preaching from me on that subject.

Nothing much else to write about --Good luck in tournaments Delaine as they have a volleyball game on Friday night and Jana glad to hear you are feeling better also for your game on friday and Saturday night.

What is new with the rest of the Vander Woude's ???? hint, hint :)

Vonda

Vonda was to the doctor again this morning as she is all broke out with hives again.She also has a somewhat upset stomach and diarrhea--had this a few weeks ago too and was off work for 4 days then.Hopefully she will add to this. Mom

plans changed

Well i[caroline] am home tonight instead of being with Arla and Vonda at Jana's B ball game in Madison S D.Arla and i were going to stay overnight by Vonda but since Jana is sick Arla stayed in S center with her and after spending the day in S falls i came home and listened to the game on the radio!!!! Get well soon Jana.love grandma

Soccer continued

Heather passing the ball to Jeremy.

The 3 of them look on as the other team scored a goal.

Look closely and you can see all 3 of them on the one picture.

Jeremy defending the Chandler goal during a game.

Jason chasin the ball..... good hustle!

Jeremy watching closely during the shoot out.

Jasons shot to tie us up in the shoot out and take it to a double shoot out~~~~

2nd place finish!

soccer games

It was so much fun watching the 3 cousins on the field together. All 3 of them played great. If I don't have this all straight, I am sorry Jason, Jeremy and Heather but I watched alot of volleyball and soccer that day. You already know how the volleyball team did and the soccer team also placed second. They won the first game 5-1 and Jason had 3 goals and Jeremy had 1 goal in that game. The second game they lost in a shoot out. The third game was tied at the end of regulation. They played 5 more minutes and it was still tied. They went into a shoot out and Jason was the last one to shoot on our team and we were behind 2-1 but he made it and this sent it to a double shoot out. The thing is that in the second shoot out the same players can't kick again so that meant the girls had to do the shoot out and Chandler won! YEAH Jason ended the tournament with 6 goals and Jeremy had 2 or 3 and also did a great job at goalie. Heather surprised everyone with her aggressiveness out there and did awesome attacking the ball. (No joke everyone, you would have been surprised "sweet little Heather" didn't let those boys push her around)

Look at that concentration... Travis would be so proud...

THE POWER!!

More soccer pictures and videos will be posted tomorrow night. I can't put them all on at once as this way it will keep you checking back :)

******A special note to Deidra Danae and Travis Jay********I want to apologize for not getting to many of your games this year but the ones I did it sure was fun to watch. It just seemed like between the teeth, flu and a game or two of yours getting cancelled it just wasn't meant to be. I promise to be at more basketball games.

Good luck in tournaments Delaine. I hope you have many games ahead of you yet.

Vonda

Heathers volleyball games

The medal she won for second place in the volleyball tournament.

I think she had a total of 7 ace serves during the tournament. Tomorrow night I will post soccer tournament pictures. I am feeling better and will be returning to work tomorrow.

Vonda

Northwestern Game

Hi everyone,
So I don't think I've written on here in forever and I decided I needed a break from studying so I thought I would. First of all thanks to everyone for coming to my games! It's so nice to have a cheering section. I can't quite hear grandma in the games but I watched the videos on the blog and I can definitely hear her yell.:) And Sharla thanks for the salsa. We've had quite a few salsa study breaks and my friends all want to meet you because they love your salsa so much! We play Northwestern on Saturday night, the 31st I think. Hopefully I get to see a lot of you there again and this time I promise it will be a better game than the last time we played! I just wanted to let you all know about the fund raiser we're putting on that night. The volleyball team wanted to do some kind of outreach program this year and we started talking about Amani Baby Cottage where me and my mom went last summer. So we're having a bake sale on the night of the Northwestern game and then people can buy our baked goods or give free will donations and all of the money will go to Amani. Amani still needs money to buy the property that they are on right now so hopefully the money we make will help a little bit for that. So I just wanted to let everyone know about that if you want to check it out before the game. I think I'm going to make a poster with some picture of the kids and everything. Other than that nothing too exciting is going on here. Lots of studying and volleyball. The countdown is already happening for Thanksgiving...only 4 and a half weeks!! Hope everything is going well in Chandler. Good luck in all your sports games Travis, Jeremy, Jason, Heather, and Deidra. I'm planning on coming to watch some basketball once volleyball gets done! Have a good week and hopefully see you all in a week! love, jana

Jana's game

Here are some videos taken of Jana last weekend.

TAKE THAT!

...
AND THAT!!

AND THAT TOO!

No wonder she is tired after the game, look at that footwork when she isn't hitting the ball.

I am not really feeling any better but wanted to get this on the blog. Deidra, if I feel better I will be at your game on Thursday.

Vonda

Good Luck Deidra and Delaine

I was suppose to be at their volleyball game in Sioux Falls tonight but I left work at 10am this morning as I was throwing up at work. I now have ear aches and sore throat. So wishing them good luck from my apartment.

Travis, thanks for not only posting the pictures of your mohawk but placing a comment to Arlas blog. See blogging isn't so hard and would love to have you do it some more.

The videos and pictures of this weekend will be updated at a later time as don't feel up to it now.

Love you all and stay healthy, this isn't much fun.

Vonda

Quick note --

Grandma and I (Vonda) went to Jana's game last night and saw in AWESOME game. WOW, they won in 5 and Jana had a rockin game. Arvins, Lorens, Leons, Grandpa and Grandma and myself will be all at the game tonight. Mom and I are about to leave for Worthington as the Chandler Christian School has a tournament there so we will be watching a bunch of HEathers volleyballs games and Jason and Jeremys soccer games. I don't know if Heather will be playing soccer or not since they don't have enough boys for a team. I will post pictures and videos of everything Sunday night. Love ya all, Vonda

1/4 of the way through the last year... :-(

Hi All,

It has been a while since I have written on here and it has been quite a while since I have seen many of you (or been to Chandler), so I thought I would update you all on our life in OC, IA.

As you can tell by the title, it is now midterm break, so that means I have only 3/4 of a year left at Northwestern. I am having mixed emotions about this as I really love everything about NWC (especially my friends, professors, and psychology courses) but I am still excited about where Jess and I will be a year from now.

I have been super busy this semester with classes, work, applying to graduate school, and, most importantly right now, conducting my senior thesis research. This is a semester long research project, which will hopefully end with a thorough and lengthy (around 40-50 pages total) research report which may be publishable. I will not bore you with the details, but if you are interested just ask because I love to talk about it! While some of you may view this as a stressful situation, I just want you to know that I absolutely love every part of it (even though it can be stressful at points). I guess I picked the right field and career path after all...

I have also been applying to graduate schools, but there is not a lot of news about that situation as applications are not due until Dec. and Jan. I will be sure to keep you all updated when I know more.

Jess has been staying busy with work and fixing up the 1979 Lund fishing boat we got at the beginning of Sept. Now that the weather is getting chilly, he is definitely looking forward to ice fishing season. For now he has stayed busy a couple of weekends going home and helping his dad on the farm, which he always enjoys.

Unfortunately, we have not been able to go to as many of Jana's volleyball games as we would have liked, but we hope to get to a few more before the regular season comes to a close. Maybe we will see some of you there! We have been able to watch our sisters play volleyball at the Unity/MOC tournament about a month ago. We wish we could watch them more, but I guess something is better than nothing!

Well, as it is fall break and I have not left Iowa in 7 weeks (very sad, I know), we decided that we would take a road trip. We are heading up to Seth and Rebecca (Jess' brother and his wife) in Bemidji, MN for a long weekend (Friday to Monday). It is their daughter's (Rhianna) first birthday on Oct. 27, so we are going a little early to celebrate with them (it is crazy to think she is a year old already). Speaking of nieces... it occurred to me that Zoe turned 6 months old on Wednesday! Time really flies and she just gets cuter every day! I don't know about the rest of you, but she is one of the reasons (a big reason) I am already getting excited for Christmas!

That is about it from here (at least all I have time to write). I hope you all have a wonderful weekend, and hopefully see you soon!

Love,
Darci

p.s. Does anyone know how many days there are until Christmas? ;-)

Tuesdays soccer game

It was cold and snowy so I took one quick video and these 2 pictures and called it good. After the game went inside and defrosted while we watched Deidras jv team and the varsity team win. I'll be warmer on Monday and post pictures of Deidras game that night. SouthWest plays in Sioux Falls Monday night :) YEAH!

Hi from the VZ

Hi everyone.

Sorry no pictures of me with a mohawk! :) Travis, I'm sorry the mohawks didn't help get you a victory. Oh well....it was worth a try right?! :) Grandma said you got hurt at the game. Are you doing ok?

Deidra, I heard you guys won again...way to go!

Delaine how is your team doing? Sounds according to Mom that all is going well....that's good. When do tournaments start for you?

The weather has been cool and damp here but, the good news is that it's supposed to be in the 60's again next week!

Just a quick update on Scott. He's in the Tucson, AZ region and is currently staying at a hostel there with two guys from France and a guy from CA. Sounds fun and interesting.

We will be heading up to Dordt on Friday for Parent's Weekend. Sounds like we may see some of you at Jana's game on Saturday night?! I hope her and the rest of the team are healthy as we have two tough conference games this weekend. On Tuesday night we had 4 girls missing from the team due to the stomach flu.

Jody and Shane are thinking of making it down to Jana's last two home games on Oct 30 and 31, so we're hoping to see them there and spend some time with them!

I have been busy cleaning every closet in the house. What a lot of junk I've thrown away. Also got all our carpets cleaned in the whole house. I thought after 8 years of pop and pizza stains it might be a good idea to finally clean them. I'm happy with the results and very glad I did it.

Take care,
Arla

Mom wasn't too impressed

Today after soccer me and some guys decided to shave our heads and get mohawks for soccer tournaments coming up. Needless to say i was kind of worried about the reaction i would get when i got home but it went better than i thought :) And yes this is the first blog that has come from our computer hope you enjoy!

Travis

Good intentions...........

That is what sums up the last few days for me. I was going to go to Deidra's game on thursday night but it got called off because the other team had the flu, and then on Saturday I was going to go to Travis's soccer game but that got called off becasue of weather. Oh well, I tried....

Not much else new here --- so thought it was aboutt time for another picture.

Vonda

snow? . . . really?!

so here i am sitting at home saturday morning looking outside at snow!! crazy. travis had a soccer game today but it was obviously cancled so im not sure what im going to do with my day now :S. (thats a confused face for those of you who don't see that, haha). so volleyball is going good. were still undefeated although we were going to play wwg thursday night and they are supposedly a good team but bc of the flu at their school they had to cancle it :(. the game isnt going to be made up either because varsity got to play them still, but now it sounds like another school that played our freshman in a tournament beat them so they want to see if they can take on our jv team. so that will be fun. well not much else has been happening other than sickness and snow. hope everyone is going to have a most wonderful weekend! God bless, talk to you all soon!

Deidra Danae

for got to sign off .Caroline

Rain rain and more rain

Don't have much news other then i keep busy going to lots of the grandkids volleyball and soccer games---love it!!!!!Last week thursday,friday and saturday we had a 3 day rain with 2 inches in the gage. Sunday [yesterday] was dark and cloudy and today we had another all day rain. 6 tenths in the gage and still raining--not hard but just a continual light rain. Lots of cancellations of soccer and other outdoor activities.Pray this finds everyone doing o k.