Oklahoma Adventures Week 8

September 23rd--September 29th

Well, now that the kitchen is complete, there's not really a whole lot of big events to talk about, but were are still plugging away at everything. Our home is starting to really feel like a home now that it isn't chuck full of tools or building supplies, I was finally able to get everything into the garage on Saturday....now we just don't have much of a garage :)

I don't have pictures of this, but Nola and I took Brayden and Logan for a walk at this really cool park, it was gorgeous. She hasn't had much luck getting anybody to go for walks there, apparently it is prone to a lot of gay PDA, but luckily we didn't witness any firsthand. We did run into a wild dog, I guess there are quite a few here in Oklahoma. Of course, it was then that Nola decided to tell me about her crazy dreams she keeps having about being on a walk with Brayden when a pack of wild dogs attack her...great I thought, I really hope today is not when that dream comes true. During our walk we took a break on a bench, little did we know we were in a swarm of mosquitoes, that break didn't last too long, but thanks to some helpful advice from my mom's best friend Jan, I had my dryer sheet with me and I didn't get a single bite!! It was amazing. I forget to carry them around in the house though and I just noticed that I have three more, they're itching like crazy!

This was just a perfect photo op, not even a planned one. He just happened to be wearing his dinosaur pajamas and the dinosaur blanket was the blanket of the day that we were playing on.

So, now that the kitchen is done, I don't really have an excuse not to exercise....okay, so I never really had an excuse before either, but somehow it all justified itself in my head, it turns out though, that Logan really likes working out with me, so hopefully I'll be in a little better shape before the next baby comes around, not that I'll be running the marathon next week or anything. ;)

Morgan is still doing really well in school. Now that the kitchen is finished, he actually has a place and time to study while I'm working in our office most of the day. He picks up shifts at the OU Medical Center and has worked quite a bit lately. It's just not quite like Utah though, Oklahoma is light years behind and much less organized. There are three different radiology departments that he rotates around instead of one central place within the hospital and everything has at least 3 or 4 unnecessary extra steps, and they are under-staffed, so even though he is working PRN (on-call) he'll probably end up with quite a few shifts now that he's done training. It all comes around back to the fact that you don't really appreciate things until they're are gone and the grass is not always greener, we've learned a great deal of gratitude for past jobs and employment in Utah. Nevertheless we are still very grateful that I can work from home and that Morgan has a really flexible job, even if he feels like he is helplessly watching the cavemen figure out what to do with the wheel that they have just discovered.

Logan is still our happy healthy baby. We keep forgetting the update, but when we went to his well-baby check up on Sept 7th he was a whopping 14.11 lbs 26 inches and jumped to the 75% percentile in height, (used to be in the 30%) but remained in the 37% for weight, so even though he's a little plump around the edges he's still considered a skinny baby. I'm sure he's at least 16 lbs by now, he's growing so fast that my arms can't keep up with him anymore, I'm really going to have to up my arm workout. :)Sometimes Morgan and I wonder if Logan has some parakeet blood in him...don't ask me where he got it though, that could get awkward...whenever he's really tired and fussy, he'll grab his blanket and pull it over his head to play peek-a-boo and falls asleep before he gets to the "boo" part. And after he takes his little nap, he's a happy little boy again.

He keeps teasing us about teething. Sometimes it seems like he's teething, other times I think it's just a lot of drool. He's pretty much got the perma-bib thing going on, so we have a nice little stock-pile of bibs to sop it all up. I think he's trying to show us where the teeth are coming in.
"It's right back there mom, can't you see it?"
"Or maybe it's a little closer, like here."

"Mmmm.....milk"
Logan really likes his jumper and is starting to get the hang of it. "Hey, Who is that handsome fella looking back at me?"

Until next time......

Oklahoma Week 7

September 16th-22nd

We have a new back door, the baseboards and door frames are finished and now we're only waiting on one cupboard door and a window...I can live with that. So, the kitchen is finished! ...99.99999999% anyway. Here's the panoramic view:

In Oklahoma, there are lots of bugs. I usually have anywhere from 10-20 mosquito bites at one time, somehow Morgan and Logan have been able evade the attacks. The locusts in our front tree wake us up with their buzzing, which is starting to die down a little with the temperature change, but that always reminded me of my parent's Mimosa tree growing up, I like the buzzing noise. And of course, the crickets everywhere make it feel like the remnants of a plague, but the real creepy creepers are the spiders. For the most part the birds have really taken care of all the crickets and locusts, but seem to have forgotten about the spiders. Now, I'm not one of those women who jumps on a chair and makes her husband kill all the spiders, but I'm not ready to invite them to dinner either. We were outside working and saw some rather astonishing spider webs and I thought that it was just a really big bug caught in it, and decided to take a picture, but when Morgan went to clean the web up, the spider came alive and about doubled in size and tried to escape, but Morgan got him. I just have to remind myself, it's sort of like camping. :)

After a hard days work, we like to relax, maybe even take a little nap, but sometimes Logan doesn't have the same idea:

Of course, I couldn't miss such a priceless photo op, so I snuck in with the camera, took a few pictures, and then Logan and I did the rest of the laundry while Morgan finished his nap.

So, yesterday was quite the adventure. First we woke up pretty early because we got to babysit our...hmmm, what is Brayden to us..cousin..something or the other, I'm sure cousin will do while they are growing up. Nola, Morgan's aunt had us babysit her baby Brayden while her and her husband Gary went to the temple. We had a few chores to get done before they arrived, so Morgan was out teaching Logan how to use the riding lawnmower...I'm sure it will only be a few more weeks and Logan will have it down and will be ready to ride solo. Gary and Nola let us borrow the mower, the backyard is quite large and weedy. All the mower needed was a new battery, which is a whole lot cheaper than a brand new mower, however, the mower is about 12 years old and they make them a little different and the battery was quite hard to track down. Morgan has been on the search for the last few weeks for a new battery for the mower and it finally came in special order this past week, so it was a quite momentus occasion to be mowing the lawn.

Morgan was still working on the backyard when Brayden arrived, so the boys got to play with each other for a while.

Logan: Hey, Brayden, I have a plan, on the count of three grunt and push. Brayden: Too late.

Logan: Pee-ew, I hope she changes you first. Brayden: I can't smell anything.

Brayden: Ahhh, much better.

Logan: Trick-or-Treat, smell my feet...

Finally, it was naptime for all of us. What a peaceful 10 minutes that was.

Morgan: See hon, we can have another one. Annie: Well, we did do a pretty good job on the first one. (no, this is not an announcement-we're still enjoying quality time with baby no. 1)

Later that evening, we enjoyed dinner out with the Dills, we've sort of become adopted into Gary and Nola's family now. We went to the Texas Roadhouse and the food was great, the place was fun, minus the peanut shells on the floor and Logan getting hungry right in the middle of dinner. We ended the night with root beer floats and tricks by Logan, he's such a ham. It's been another exciting week and there is sure to be more in the future. We love you all and miss you too.

Oklahoma Week 6

September 9th-15th


I can boil water!!! The kitchen is now about 99.9% finished. We were able to grout last Monday, seal it on Tuesday, and on Wednesday we had the stove in there. Morgan cooked us some spaghetti, and it was one of the best meals we've had in weeks! It was even fun to clean the kitchen for the mere fact that I had a kitchen to clean. (I never thought I'd hear myself say that) I baked some cookies with our new stove and they were delicious.

There are still a couple of cupboard doors that need to be put on under the sink, but we're waiting on that until we're done installing the switch for the garbage disposal (one of those little things that was forgotten when we had the walls wide open...oiy). One cupboard door is on back order, but should be here in the next couple of weeks. The only things left are the baseboards, back door, door frames, and the touch up paint, but to me it feels like it's done. I've unpacked all our kitchen boxes now and we've moved all the tools into the office. And at this point, since I can cook, I'm not as anxious about everything else getting done...well the garbage disposal would be pretty nice, I forget that it's not really working yet, and I've have to scrape out the scraps of food with a spoon. Logan likes the kitchen. We set up his highchair so he can have a few weeks to get used to sitting with us at meals before we start him on solids. We tried him with ice cream, but he wasn't that interested, so I guess its not time yet. :)

In other news, Morgan starts his job on Monday. He'll be doing some part time, on-call work in X-ray for the OU Medical Center. It should be a pretty flexible job, and it's on-call, so if he can't go in he doesn't have to. He's hoping to be able to work 2-3 shifts a week though. This semester has been rather slow, he's really enjoyed re-building the kitchen, although, I think we're both ready to take a hiatus from home improvements for a while. He's still doing really good in his classes and was able to get caught back up after the last couple weeks of every spare second working on the kitchen. My job is going well also. I still work from home writing, consulting, and basically anything else the company needs me to. It's great to have a job that is flexible enough that allows me to still take care of my kids...yes..kids, Morgan will always be young at heart. :) In fact, here are the two of them breaking in the new sink with a bath.

It was pretty slippery and Logan was splishing and splashing all over the place. His cute little tush just wouldn't stick to the bottom of the sink, even when we put in a little washcloth for him to sit on. Maybe it will work better when he can sit up all the way by himself. He's getting closer and closer everyday to sitting up and needs less and less help. He's rolled over a couple times now from front to back...sadly, the first time both of us missed it. I put him on his tummy to play and was talking to Morgan while he was doing some touch up work in the kitchen and when I looked back to check on Logan, he was on his back. We tried for the next 5 minutes to get him to do it again, but he just got mad, but happily we were able to catch him the act a couple days later. :)

Now that he's starting to roll around and try to explore, we have to keep a closer eye on him. Not a whole lot has really happened in the ward yet, since we've been so focused on our kitchen, and can't really invite anyone over for dinner without one, we haven't yet made much of an attempt to be social. There are some other great young couples though that we can't wait to teach Settlers of Catan.

For those of you BYU fans that follow the games, they played here in Tulsa last night (sad game really, we were so close). I was checking to see what time the game was and for some reason I thought it started at 5:00pm, so I thought it would be great fun to drive up to Tulsa (about 2 hours) and go to the game, it would be a little adventure and I've heard Tulsa is really pretty. So, we bought tickets, and then come to find out the game didn't actually start until 8:00pm (Oklahoma time), and if you figure it's about 4 hours for the game, and another 3 hours just to get out of the parking lot, and another 2 to get home, it would have been a very late night. Then Wade (Morgan's brother) gave us the idea of just getting a hotel and staying up there for the night, so we looked around, but it just wasn't in our budget. We had to eat the tickets because we couldn't find anyone else who wanted to go on such short notice, but we were able to watch the game over the internet, so I guess it turned out all right in the end, and we didn't have to pay for all the gas, hotel, and everything else for a game we lost anyway. And besides, Nola and Gary came over with Brayden and brought us strawberry shakes and the boys got to watch the game while Nola and I visited. It's so nice having family out here, it makes it feel a little more like home. I don't have a good segue into these pictures, but their too cute not to post.

Well, we love you all and hope that Happiness is finding you...if not, have him talk to me and I'll give him directions. And because of our late night football game, we're all exhausted and ready for our Sunday Afternoon Nap and hope you enjoy yours too. :) Until next time, keep smiling and eventually you'll convince yourself.