Daily Read #30B: Fruits of your labors.

You're being doubly blessed today. Two daily reads in one day does life get any better?

Make sure you check out Andy's read below. Andy is my first cousin once removed if you're a strict pedigreenie. We've always just been friends who happened to run into each other at family reunions. We're about 2 months and about a foot apart.

Andy is 6'6; needless to say I look up to him. [I remember when we both ended up at BYU freshman year I wondered what the soreness in my neck was that first week and then I realized it was from hanging out with Andy.]

Andy graciously offered to contribute to GoodReads which I think you'll soon realize is awesome. He doesn't dangle his modifiers and is precise in his use of their and they're. Those of you bothered by this* if you are still reading will appreciate this especially. [You know who you are]

Well we've obviously got internet back at home. [You would think we were going without heat or running water with how bad we suffered]. We just were so worried that we were falling behind on our indexing....

I've got three posts started but for now I'll leave you with this also guest authored but by Rachel. If you have been with us since last edition you'll know that our blogs readership was one of the contributors to the Palmer Family's victory in the Hoopes Vision Video contest. If you missed out go back and read some of the older posts.

Ryan had the lasik procedure done last Thursday and naturally it was pretty awesome. If only we were still practicing the whole eye for an eye thing anyone who voted could have gotten free lasik too---too bad.

I have to admit I'm a tad bit jealous. But maybe Ryan will give me his old glasses.
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My camera has been having some struggles lately (since it took a dive on a hard wood floor) So it literally took days to get it to import our pictures from Ryan's surgery. But luckily I got 'em!

It's now been 3 days since he was 'lasered' and it's going really well. His vision out of his right eye is "crystal clear". His left eye is still adjusting and is slightly blurry, but the doctors said that it will stabilize within the next couple weeks.

I tried to take pictures of everything at Hoopes (and probably succeeded in looking like the crazy 'scrapbooking mormon' in the process).


One last 'glasses' picture together before going into Hoopes. (It's really hard to take self portrait pictures with this big heavy camera.)

A dorky picture of Ryan in the elevator on his way to Hoopes.

Prepping for surgery. Right after this picture they took his glasses off him. We won't be needing those anymore!



This is Dr. Hoopes and his assistants working on Ryan. The waiting room was really cool. I could see everything through the glass wall and they put the surgery up on the tv screens.


Ryan's eyeball! They put the blue marks on his eyeball with a special marker that shows them where 'horizontal' is so they can tell if everything is lined up right. It's a bit freaky to watch it happen, but at the same time you can't look away. We have it on DVD, we'll bring it down for Christmas. We can play a game to see who can watch the video and eat grapes at the same time without gagging.



This is Ryan walking out of the operating room with his new eyes. At this point his vision was "cloudy and milky".


This picture was taken the next morning. Ryan can read the bottom sentence with the smallest print (even while holding it at arms length). When he went in for his preliminary evaluation, he couldn't read anything. Even with the blurriness, he's a pretty solid 20/20.


Doctor Barney took this picture of us at the end of Ryan's follow-up appointment. Weston Barney is from Richfield and knows Ryan. In fact, Ryan 'saran wrapped' Weston's brother to the goal post in High School.



Ryan has to tape these 'eye guards' to his face at night time so he doesn't accidentally rub his eyes while he's sleeping. He only has to do this for a couple more nights. It's a good thing because his eyebrows are getting quite thin. Just Kidding.

It was fun to pick up the girls from school and show them Dad's new eyes!
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This was such a wonderful experience for Ryan and for our family and we were truly blessed to have it done for free!