As we see our country quickly loosing its footing as a free, sustainable society with the debt we are incurring (well, I guess sustainable is relative when you look at God’s long term plans anyway)   Sarah and I decided to finish up our Florida trip with a visit to join up on a tea party gathering. We were very excited to see so many people standing up for conservative principles!

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After cooking for 4 hours with 3 different batches, Sarah turned in her finished product to the judges. Now we just have to wait! During the course of the event, we were both interviewed by Alexandra Wentworth, who is the wife of George Stephanopoulos. Maybe we will see that interview at a later date!

Now, we can relax for a few hours in the pool of the resort before the awards ceremony tonight. The category winners will be immediately flown to Chicago via Pillsbury’s private jet to prepare for the Grand Prize announcement on the Oprah Winfrey show on Wednesday. Quite an exciting time!

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The night before the competition, we gathered with the 99 other finalists and all the guests and enjoyed a gourmet meal.

We learned quite a bit about the process of how recipes are selected. Well over 10,000 recipes are submitted and now they are down to 100. First, they weed out obviously not original recipes, ones that don’t meet the requirements, etc. From those thousands left, they send them to the main Pillsbury selection panel to weed them down to what think will make easy to make, yet unique and good tasting items.  Then, all those remaining are cooked and taste tested by a panel at a rate of 4 dozen a day for weeks. Then from those hundreds cooked, they put the team to work looking though every known recipe book, online, etc to make sure they are original recipes. When cleared, the final 100 are chosen. Quite a process.

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We arrived in Orlando Florida last night and kicked off the first day of the Pillsbury Bake-Off contest.

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God once again shows His mercy and Grace by bringing Ryan through another surgery on his hand. This time, Dr. Seitz removed the lengtheners and pins and preformed a syndactyly surgery. The syndactyly release’s purpose was to remove scar tissue between the pinky and ring finger that was just stretched over 20mm and and lower the skin connection. Even though one set of pins came out of the bone on the middle finger during the distraction augmentation, we found that God created some solid bone in the finger anyway! It is not as long as the other, but we did gain somewhere between 5-8mm. Below are some pictures for you to see the progress!

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Ryan did great with this second round of surgery. Dr. Seitz placed two lengtheners on his middle two fingers and placed a bandage for healing. That will stay on for one week and then the stretching will start.

Coming out of anesthesia is always the hardest part for Ryan. He struggled for a while, but with some pain meds, he fell asleep and then has been his normal self ever since. Coloring, watching movies, and eating lots! He had to go without breakfast and lunch today, so for dinner he ate 3+ big pieces of pizza, his favorite!

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We are all excited as Ryan gets to continue his hand reconstruction with his fifth surgery scheduled as he starts the second round of treatment. Dr. Seitz of the Cleveland Clinic in Beachwood, Ohio will continue to be his surgeon.

We ask for prayer for Dr. Seitz, his team, skilled hands and work, and for Ryan’s safety during the surgery and that he will not have any complications from the anesthesia or surgery itself. He is always allergic to adhesives, so pray also that God will calm his immune system in response to these types of things and move his body’s defenses over to fight off bacteria from the incisions.

For those of you not familiar with his condition of the procedure, feel free to read the whole story here, but for a quick synopsis read on. Ryan was born without fingers on his left hand from Amniotic Band Syndrome. He had a few stumps, but without much function at all. After much prayer and searching we found Dr. Setiz in Cleveland Ohio, who is one of the few people in the world who performs distraction augmentation on the hand. Basically, he implants bone if necessary (toe bones) breaks them, attaches a device screwed into the bone and extends outside the hand to slowly move the two broken pieces apart. Then God’s miracle of bone regeneration takes over and fills in the space. Sometimes it is necessary to cut the skin that “webs” between the stretched fingers and fill in with skin graphs taken from the groin area. Sometimes this is not necessary.

Ryan is ready for stage #5. Last time he had four fingers stretched, this time only the shorter, middle two fingers. These are the fingers that are entirely toe bones. The longer thumb and pinky finger he had did have a small amount of bone to start with, so they are a combination original finger and toe bones and do not need further lengthening as they are growing well. The other good news is all the transplanted and original bone still have active growth plates with means they will all continue to grow naturally as well.

Some pictures of his pre-op condition are shown below with daddy’s hand in comparison just like those original pictures before the 1st surgery.

Click here to view the entire story…

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