Moving, Family, and Graduation

March in the Wood house was basically a big blur of packing, cleaning, looking for somewhere to live, Ryan's school & house-finding trips, finishing school, graduation, final hanging out with friends and everything else associated with moving across country.  The fun was exemplified by our house being worthy of quarantine status: Grant and Tate with fevers, congestion and coughs, me with a crazy sore throat, cough, and possible ear infection and all of us (except Ryan) with pink eye. (Most of this showed up as we were ready to move out so I really hope no one that came to help us caught anything!)

  My parents came to help us pack up and for Ryan's graduation.  They brought a few eggs filled with candy for the boys to have a little Easter egg hunt.  I had been so busy with all the moving business I hadn't even thought of doing Easter activities.  The boys loved it!

 He's such a handsome lad!

 We've had three years of Easter egg hunts in this backyard, we are definitely going to miss Ohio!

 Ryan's dad made the long trip out from Idaho and his brother, Farel, came up from West Virginia to be there for graduation.  They also helped with the moving process.  Here they are pictured in front of the Tetris masterpiece that is our furniture packed into 10 feet of space in a semi trailer.  Only Ryan has the skills and patience for such fine pack-manship.

 

  Unfortunately, I forgot our camera at Ryan's graduation ceremony, but we should be getting a few pictures from one of his fellow residents soon.  The ceremony was very well done and nicely celebrated and commemorated all their hard work.  Ryan worked very hard during his residency, surpassing many of his requirements.  But I think one of his greatest achievements is that through all the stress and busy-ness of his residency, he always put his family first and continued to be a wonderful husband and father.  We love you Ran and are so proud of you!

I just had to include this picture of Luke because it is so dang cute!

Happy Birthday Ran!

 Another birthday post!  Amongst all the busy-ness that March and April has produced for us this year, Ryan turned 32.  I feel like his birthday got somewhat neglected last year because I was still in the nausea/tiredness stage of Luke's pregnancy, and then this year again with getting ready to move.  I guess it's a good thing that Ran doesn't care too much about birthdays.

For the past several months before our move, I had been using up pantry items instead of buying more food that we'd have to move or give away.  By the time it came to making Ryan's birthday cake, our cupboards were pretty much empty.   Thanks to a friend, I found out about a pineapple cake that uses two ingredients: a yellow cake mix and a can of crushed pineapple.  It was really good (extremely moist, too).  I whipped up a little frosting and we had ourselves a birthday party!

The boys were good and let daddy blow out his candles all by himself.

 

Our favorite part of birthdays (besides the cake and presents, of course) is going on a treasure hunt to find the presents.  The boys were excited to help make the treasure hunt and drew their own pictures for the clues.  I think this was one of the most difficult hunts our family has had because we let Ryan try to decipher the pictures without help from the illustrators.  It took him a minute with a few of the clues but he eventually found the presents.  Happy Birthday Ran, we love you!!