To dunk or not to dunk

Ryan is a dunker. Any type of delicacy that could possibly taste good in milk, Ryan is dunking it. His favorites include graham crackers and cookies, but he also dunks muffins, cake, and even toast (in hot chocolate). Did I mention he dunks grilled cheese sandwiches in his soup. I, on the other hand, love to enjoy the texture of my food and then wash it down with a delicious glass of milk, chunk free.

This need to dunk apparently runs in the blood because the boys have taken right after Ryan's food-sogging ways. The other day I gave Grant a muffin to eat and he said he needed a glass of milk and a fork (Ryan uses a fork to dunk the muffin--more manageable that way). Since Tate is still required to have a lid on his cup, he has not had much experience with true milk dunking. But he gets in on the action whenever we eat something with a dipping sauce involved (ketchup, ranch, etc). Actually, he really just uses his food as a makeshift utensil with which to shovel the dipping sauce into his mouth.


Please note the careful technique of using the tip of the pinky finger as a finger-rest to prevent over-dunking the cookie. The finger-rest ensures that the maximum amount of cookie gets dunked without the dunker getting their fingers wet. It's as much an art as a science, really.

Summer of Fun, part One

At the beginning of May I declared this summer would be called the "Summer of Fun"! Last summer was fun too, but since I wouldn't have a nursing baby this year I knew we could go out more easily and hence have a lot of fun.
We definitely stayed busy as I planned several trips and would go out and enjoy the weather each day. Did I mention I love summer!! If we weren't on a trip, we would split our time between going to a pool, a park, the museum, the zoo, playing with friends, the library or wherever else we could find to go.
With all the traveling, we spent a decent amount of time in the car. You would think the boys would be sick of the car, but they still love to get in there whenever Mom isn't paying attention. Right before we leave to go somewhere and I am grabbing the last minute things, I come to the garage to find them having a good ol' time the car, pushing every button and turning every knob. As you can see in the first picture, I used to keep a stash of gum in the car, but I figured Tate is not quite old enough to handle the three pieces of gum he had shoved in his mouth, so gum is in the house now.
One of our fun summer outings was our trip to the State Fair. I'm not sure why I enjoy a State Fair like I do, I can't remember really going to many as a kid. But with the horse shows, petting zoos, people-watching, and kettle corn, they make for an entertaining time.
Grant enjoyed the kiddie ride as Tate screamed in betrayal. He couldn't understand why he had to watch while older brother had fun. I didn't want to let Tate try a ride for fear he would be ready to get out half way through. I guess next year will be his summer of fun.
One of our favorite parts of the fair are seeing the amazingly huge horses. We try to go the day they are showing the draft horse teams. It's a fun part of the fair that not many people experience. We were in the horse arena with the majority of the people being over 65. But come on, you get to sit there, eat your food, and watch amazingly beautiful horse teams strut their stuff. And to top it off, they have a real-live old lady organ player playing elevator music with a carnival pipe organ. Awesome!
Here are the boys in front of the biggest horse we could find. Sorry you can't see the horse too well, but just know it was huge!! The horse's shoulders were at least 6 feet tall, almost level with Ryan's head! That's a big horse.
Well, that is all for this installment in the Summer of Fun, but expect more to come!

Sweet 6-year anniversary!

Several months ago I got a call informing me of a free Bahama cruise I could have for coming to hear about a travel company's offers. Ryan and I decided to go for it and after a relatively painless hour of high-pressure salesmanship, got our "free" cruise including airfare. Since we've always wanted to go on a cruise but were never willing to lay down the money for one, we considered ourselves pretty lucky to have come across this! Fast forward to last week, we were able to go on our 3 night Caribbean cruise a few days before our 6-yr anniversary. Perfect timing for a child-free getaway!

Can I just say it was pretty much awesome! My mom was also awesome and flew out here to watch the boys for the weekend, all by herself (which is a pretty brave thing to do!). She said they did pretty well (besides the 5am child-crying-in-the-hall episode) and she enjoyed being able to spend time with them.

Ryan and I tried to get our money's worth out of the cruise (we did have to pay the taxes, gratuities, etc). I think we probably did a little bit of everything. Looking back, it may have been beneficial for us to have gotten more sleep, but there was so much to do, we stayed busy most of the day.














One night we decided to join the drunk people for a little karaoke. We sang a duet from Grease, that we accidentally started off an entire octave too high. Ryan ended up having to sing a lot of it in falsetto which was great for comic relief but terrible in pretty much every other way. It must have been memorable because for the rest of the night random people kept coming up to us commenting on our performance. A couple of 30-something ladies said we were "an inspiration". A couple of teenage boys recognized us later on the dance floor and said "that was awesome!!" Nice. I hope we inspired all the rest of those on the ship who can't carry a tune to get up and make fools of themselves. It was really fun though!
Other fun included winning the adult speed climbing competition. I took gold in the women's tournament and Ryan got silver in the men's (though he lost by less than a second to a guy that brought his own climbing shoes on the cruise with him!). We also enjoyed the formal night and I was able to make one of my high school prom dresses modest with a little Shade shirt (you gotta love those!) We were able to get some cute pictures of the two of us all gussied up. And of course I had to add a picture of our favorite towel animal the cleaning staff folded and hung up in our room. It's a monkey, although its face looks unmistakably robot-like.

Unfortunately we didn't take any pictures at the ports: Nassau, Bahamas and Coco Cay (Royal Caribbean's private small island). At both stops we brought our snorkel gear and headed out into the crystal clear ocean waters to snorkel around and check out the sea life. I loved that part of our trip! It was so relaxing!!
Oh, and one other favorite part of the cruise for both of us was unlimited access to delicious food. On the two port days, we wouldn't get around to eating breakfast until 10am. So we would fill up on delicious breakfast foods and then head out to do fun stuff on shore. We would get back to the ship around 4pm, starving, so we would order room service- fruit platter, steak sandwich, Mediterranean chicken salad, etc. Then, our dinner seating was at 6pm, and the food was really good each night, so we would stuff ourselves- Filet Minion, lobster bisque, escargot in butter-herb sauce, roasted duck, etc. And of course, before bed we would find something else to eat, whether it was suckling pig (no joke), pizza, a midnight BBQ, or more room service. Yeah, it was awesome!

And just to make our anniversary even more awesome, we had a Wicked experience yesterday. It rocked! We highly recommend it.


I love anniversaries!! And I love Ryan. Happy six years, and many more to come!

When the Mom is away, the boys will play!

So a week after we got back from our trip to VA, I was packed and off to Girl's Camp for 4 days to be the camp nurse. I'm in the YW presidency in our ward and so I wanted to go and hang out with the girls and plus I thought it would be fun. It was a lot of fun! Being the nurse wasn't too hectic either. I had to teach a few first aid classes and be in charge of several girls prescribed meds. Other than that, most of my nursing duties consisted of passing out Ibprofen, dealing with minor cuts and then mosquito bites. The last day got a little hairy though when one of the girls had heat exhaustion and wasn't recovering. She kept passing out and was starting to have minor seizures. In the end we had to take her to the ER where they pumped her full of fluids and were able to release her about 6 hours later (which is pretty quick for ER standards). I guess I missed all the fun though, because the nurse I left in charge at camp didn't stop moving that night. While I was gone, there was an outbreak of poison ivy, 3 girls burned their fingers in the fire and another girl was starting into heat exhaustion. I felt kind of bad for leaving her with all that when I got back from the hospital until right when I was about to get ready for bed I get a call that a girl had somehow got glow-stick fluid in her eye. 15 minutes of flushing and an eye patch later I sent her to bed and called in for the night. Overall, it was fun time and I enjoyed getting to know some of the girls and leaders I otherwise would not have.

So while I was away, the boys went to babysitters on Wed. and Thurs. and then Ryan was home with them on Fri. and Sat. I was somewhat nervous how that would all go, but Ryan said it went pretty well and they had a fun boy weekend. When I got home on Saturday the boys were really glad to see me, but I could tell Tate wanted his dad more than usual (which is not always the case for this momma's-boy). So it ended up being fun for them and good bonding time.

Since I don't have any pictures from camp I looked on my camera to see what I could add to this post. As I flipped through picture after picture of unknown shots it became clear that someone had quite a fun photo shoot. That someone being our 3 year old and that photo shoot consisting of 90 pictures (yes I counted them)! Grant is usually not allowed free range of the camera, but like I said when mom is away...
Here is a sampling of some of his shots. They range from portrait, to candid, to artistic. I think we may have a budding photographer on our hands :)

Summer Catch Up

We have been having a pretty busy summer so I am going to try to play some catch-up and write a way too long post. For the 4th of July, Ryan took a few days off school and we headed to VA to hang out with my parents. We had a ton of fun and as usual it was hard to leave. Both boys had a blast with their Munga and Papa and Grant was asking when we were going back the day after we got home.

Some of the fun activities included:
Attending a couple 4th of July BBQ's
Shopping (without kids!)
Catching an evening showing of Eclipse with my mom (it was definitely the best of the series)
Eating delicious food... all day
Hanging out with the family
Listening to Ryan and my mom talk politics
and last, but not least
Hitting up the Beach!!

I love going to the beach and since we are hardly able to go now, here are a ton of pictures to commemorate the event. We all had a blast. The boys loved the sand, loved the water, and even loved keeping their hats on (which was a surprise).

We kept the boys nice and covered in their T-shirt suits and hats, and they did not get burned. Ryan and I on the other hand, looked akin to lobsters later that day.

My mom, who is probably not a middle-of-the-day-heat beach person, was a trooper and came with us. She helped keep the boys happy, hydrated and entertained so Ryan and I could actually play out in the water for a bit.

We never made that awesome sand castle but the moat turned out pretty cool.

Ryan had a good grip on the boys to keep the current from getting them (which is surprisingly strong!). And yes, that white farmers-tan skin is what became lobster red later that day.

Westward Ho! Part 2

For part deux of our trip we hopped back in the van to drive another 8 hours through southern ID, past Pocatello, to Lava Hot Springs. We were very glad to be out of the car when we drove up to this cute bed and breakfast in an absolutely gorgeous valley. I didn't think southern ID could be this pretty, but I guess it has been getting abnormal amounts of rain so everything was green and lush. For the Wood family reunion, we all rented this place out for the weekend and had such a great time.

We all enjoyed the hangout and relaxing time. Ryan even tried to escape once for a nap in the hammock, but the boys were close on his trail. With the Wood family, it is always fun to sit around and talk, which inevitably results in a lot of laughing and fun times. We also played several family games, including the traditional "Candy Bar game", a white elephant exchange, and a new one we learned called Werewolves, a mafia-type game where you're trying to discover and kill the werewolves before they kill you. I thought it was more fun than mafia, except that I kept on being a werewolf and never figured out an effective way of lying.

So the scenery was absolutely beautiful. Also, you can see the weather here never quite warmed up either. We are glad we threw in those sweatshirts last minute! We loved getting out, enjoying nature and breathing the fresh Western air.

Besides catching up with family and enjoying nature, we spent a lot of time riding the 4-wheelers and dirt bike. Gavin was so great and took the boys out for tons of rides. They never wanted to get off. There was a fire pit out back, so we also enjoyed a roaring camp fire with s'mores.

For one day of the trip we headed out to the water park at Lava Hot Springs. Yes that's me on top of the high-jump. It doesn't look too high from this shot, but up on top it's kind of a different view. It was 33 feet high so they made you sign a waiver, maybe just to freak you out. It was fun and I survived the jump with an "I'm going to die now" scream and a nice bruise along my left thigh where I must have landed. The one draw back to Ryan's eye surgery was that he couldn't swim. So he was pretty much left with kid-duty while I went down the slides, jumped off the high jumps, and climbed the rock wall. We are so glad that the water was nice and warm, 92 degrees they said, because the weather didn't warm up that day, and the sun never came out. So we pretty much stayed neck deep in the water as much as we could.

Grant enjoyed an early morning outing with Grandpa Wood, who normally doesn't look this stern :)

Our attempt at a family picture. Oh well :)

On Sunday afternoon we had to say our goodbyes and we hopped back in the van for a 2 1/2 hour drive back to SLC. Ryan caught a red eye flight that night to be back to school at 6 a.m. the next morning (what a trooper!). The boys and I stayed at Nana's for another couple of days and hung out with my brothers. We went down to BYU for an afternoon and even got to stop by and see Jenna for a minute, one of my college roomies. Driving around BYU I tried to point out places of interest to Grant. We drove by the Elms Apartments and I said "Grant, that is where Daddy and I met and fell in love." In usual Grant fashion, he replied "That's where I lived and fell in love." He likes to be the subject in most sentences. On Tuesday afternoon the boys and I caught our flight back to Ohio. I'd say the flight went pretty well, with only about 15 minutes of uninterrupted screaming and 5 angry looks from the lady in front of us. We had so much fun on this trip, but of course, we were glad to be home and back to somewhat of a routine.

Westward Ho! Part 1

At the beginning of June we took our big summer trip out West, visiting 3 different states and lots of family. It was a lot of fun, but we all think this trip required a little too much traveling. At least I think that's what Grant and Tate were trying to say as they were screaming in the back seat.

For the first leg of our trip, we flew into SLC late Friday night and spent the night at Nana's. On Saturday, drove 8 hours up to La Grande, OR in our rented van (it was supposed to be a compact car, but all they had left was a van...oh, darn), to visit my sister, Christine, and her family. It has been about a year since we've seen them so it was great to visit and to hangout in their new hometown. The kids had a blast together with lots of running around, lots of playing swords, robots, and sharks, and lots of rounds of Star Wars computer games. La Grande was very pretty and a cute little town. We tried to scope out cities and towns as we drove around the area, just to see if we may be interested in setting up shop there eventually. Right now, who knows, but that area is definitely in the running!

We stayed busy going to several parks, playing outside, playing inside, making delicious food, eating delicious food...all the important things.

Part of our trip included a drive to the Tri-Cities of Eastern OR for Ryan to get LASIK eye surgery (hence the glasses in this pre-surgery shot). It's been something we've been considering for Ryan since we've been married, but finally decided now is the time to do it. Of course, Ryan loves it and we both still think it's a little weird that his morning and night rituals with contacts are now a thing of the past. Now his vision is better than mine, but don't worry, I still don't need glasses...yet.

One of the cool things about where Christine and Sam live is that they are about 10 minutes to beautiful scenery and boon-dockish nature. We drove up a mountain side for about 15 minutes to get to this lake, which was very beautiful. The kids had fun throwing rocks in the water until they got brave enough to consider throwing themselves off the dock. That and the mosquitoes made the lake trip short but fun.