Diane's Cat Cake

We're pretty proud of the cat cake we made for Diane's birthday. The inspiration was our Lucy, who was on the tail end of her stay with her evil aunt Tinker. Lucy and Diane didn't get along very well, probably because the goop that often drains out of her ears (Lucy's) seemed to find its way onto all of Diane's walls. We didn't include any frosting goops in the cake's ears. Any cat cake must have candles as whiskers. I think this is also a great time to point out how gigantic the veins on Randy's arms have become. Look at those things. It's like the Venice of appendages.

Lunch Brake with Randy (pun intended)

Our little Zoe very much loves her Grandpa Randy. Here they are enjoying a lunch break together back in September of 2009 (yes, I truly am that far behind in my blog posting). Every time Zoe sees a blue and white semi truck she insists that it's Grandpa's truck, and the only grocery store she ever wants to go to is Grandpa's store. It's a good thing we live in Seattle now, where Albertson's trips are a possibility, or else we'd have to become subsistence farmers. Do any of you know any other two-year-old that loves her lobster shirt as much as our Zoe does? There's something so lovable about multi-legged pinching crustaceans.

St. George Rocks!

Blogging about St. George in the middle of the winter makes me feel all warm and sweaty inside. While we were enjoying our little jaunt to southern Utah, we took some time to get in touch with our inner mountain goat and did a bit of photographic rock climbing. The red rocks of St. George provide an excellent back drop for a family photo, and I'm so glad to be married to a lady who finds a series of single-toned caves and sees a photo opportunity.

Those same red rocks also provide great toys for two-year-olds. By this I mean that Zoe wouldn't quit climbing on anything she could get her hands on. It was like we had entered a vortex where the law of gravity was reversed for all living creatures less than four feet tall. The smaller rocks were also perfect for throwing and licking...it was a veritable stone nursery for our little Zoe. Here she is fixing to leap from one cliffside to the other like a desert flying squirrel.

I tried to climb as high as I could up the little cranny under which my Sara is posing, but I was too wide to get all the way through. I did, however, find much success in banging my head and elbows on the rocks, so it wasn't a complete bust. We now know where Zoe got her climbing abilities from. Sara was smart enough to stay on the ground. I was amazed at how many ways she was able to prop up the camera just right so that the self-timer feature got all of us in the shot.

A Summer Walk Among My Progenitors

Yep, it's another graveyard visit for our little family. This time we were on a quest for relatives in the St. George cemetery, most specifically, that of my grandma on my dad's side, who died back in 2001. After a bit of searching we finally found the plot, and had the pleasure of visiting the final resting places of some of my direct relatives who helped to settle Utah's Dixie. I really like the picture of Zoe in the middle of the cemetery with the trademark St. George red hills in the background. Boy was it a hot day...I often wonder why I always end up in St. George in the summertime.

Here's a 5-generation shot with my dad and daughter, along with dad's mom, Erma, and dad's grandpa, Wilford Woodruff. About two months ago my grandpa Rudger passed away. That's his headstone on the right, with the date of death still as blank as can be. How strange it is that I was writing about the St. George cemetary at the same time period that Grandpa Rudger died. I'm so glad that Sara and I went to visit him a year before he passed away. When I finally get to the pictures of Rudger's funeral I'll have plenty more to say, I'm sure.

This is Zoe spending a bit of quality time with the great granmother she never knew. I'm very sad to say that I never really knew her as much as I would have liked either, since my mom's mom died when I was only 11 years old. I wonder if we should have given Zoe the middle name Lilly in her honour. Zoe Lilly is kind of a mouthful.

Here's the headstone marking the grave of Daniel D. McArthur, one of the original settlers of St. George, Utah and the surrounding area. Daniel D. led the second handcart company that entered the Salt Lake Valley, and is generally thought of as the biggest stud among all my forefathers. Do you see any family resemblance? Yep, same classic family scowl. I guess we should be relieved that the scowl survived the passing generations instead of the scraggly beard.

Olivia Ranae Gallery

Alrighty, it's high time that I post a few pictures of the Olivia. She's a sweet little baby that still doesn't know how to be sad. When she wakes up hungry in the middle of the night she squeaks instead of crying. If it weren't for Sara's ability to hear dust mites during the night, Olivia's wiggles would go unheard, and she'd starve to death. This little video shows how she spends most of her awake time:

Sara took some pictures of my Olivia and I by the window. She's all artistic and she knows that the best time to take a picture is dusk or dawn. Time in the hospital sorta melts into one big red-eyed pool, so I don't remember if this was a.m. or p.m., but Sara was proven correct, because I think this picture is awesome.

Here's our little family magnified to 4. I think we all look pretty good together, and we've decided to keep Olivia around since she fits in pretty well.

Here's one last picture of our newly-promoted Big Sister. Aside from the occasional accidental newborn couch tackles, Zoe is very good at being sweet with the new baby. She's a big fan of holding Olivia and tells everyone that she's a big sister to a little girl named Steve. Yep, Steve. We were hoping that Zoe would ditch the Steve calling when she saw the baby's real name was Olivia, but we were wrong. Thus, a nickname was born with the newborn. Part of me sorta hopes it sticks forever.

Olivia Ranae's Birthday!

Olivia Ranae was born this morning at 7:56. She's an absolute angel, and I can't stop holding and squishing her. After an action-packed morning she's fast asleep and we check that she's breathing every 5 minutes. We don't do that with our 3-year-old.

Sara's doing as well as she can be, considering she was just disected, and we're all in good spirits. We've got Diane running around the city picking up this and that, all the while Zoe is in the back seat very confused. Eventually things will get back to a new sort of normal, I'm sure. I hope I can remember how to take care of a little Olivia.

The hospital WiFi is being a big jerk and not letting us upload any pictures to anything, so you'll all have to be on stand-by for your first view. You gotta see the baby! You'll all soon find out that she's definitely worth waiting for, she's practically perfect in every way.

Grandpa Rudger - still going strong

I'm finally on the happy end of a massive work deadline, and there's no nasty actuarial test looming over the horizon, so I think it's time to reclaim my position as ruling overlord of my little blogsite. Hopefully my tens of readers have been able to weather my absence. Somewhere during my month and a half of blog silence, my little wife has metamorphosed from pregnant lady to "bring towels everywhere you go" as she is nine months pregnant. During our weekly trip to Home Depot today, the help asked Sara if she'd like a wheel chair or a glass of water. "No thanks", she replied, "but if you've got an extra epidural lying around, I'd take one of those." Okay so I made that last bit up, but those hardware guys thought for sure they were just a few waddles away from a very wet clean up on aisle 12. Anyhow, moral of the story is, we're about to enter into a new phase of our lives, which as I remember from the first time, includes a lot of late night infomercials, one-armed dinner preparation, and endless swaddling. Not to mention the frequent quandaries of whether or not our lives will ever be normal again. The answer is yes, in about 6 months. The C-section is scheduled for a week from Monday, there's no going back now!


Anyhow, I've been telling the tale of Summer 2009 for like the last 6 months, and we're almost to the exciting final chapter where we move to the Emerald City. But first, I need to finish up our little jaunt down south to Utah's Dixie. We all went to visit my dad's dad quite a few times while we were in St. George, and it was really awesome to get to know Rudger again. He's doing well and had lots of stories about his mission all over the Mid-West. It was interesting to hear how much and how little Chicago has changed since his time there so many decades ago. His stories all confirmed my life-long impression of him as a man of a deep and rich heritage of class and tradition. I'm sure I'd heard many of those stories when I was younger, but I was far too interested in the toy castle in his living room back then. Now I hung onto every word and wasn't in a hurry for him to stop talking. Zoe, however, was ready to go at any time, so our visits were short. My good ol' grandpas are such manly guys. They're excellent role models for me, and have given me great parents who have made all the difference in the world. I wonder if I'll ever measure up. I guess I've got 60 years to work on that.

History Detectives

Dad was worried that Sara and I wouldn't be intrested in coming along with him to St. George, so he conjured up an adventure to entice us. Back when dad was just a young sapling he spent many evenings working as a clerk at Fenton's Pharmacy in downtown St. George. Whenever he tells us stories of his days working, there the scenery that shows up in my head is from that part at the beginning of Its a Wonderful Life where George Bailey is working in that loony old dude's drug store/ice cream parlour. Hot Dog! I don't remember all the ins and outs of the story, but apparently old man Fenton had a bunch of super old pharmaceutical bottles and devices, including an old timey scale, that were quite the tourist attractions when he had them displayed at the store. Somewhere along the way these items were donated to Dixie College. Our mission was to hunt down these relics and make sure they weren't just shoved into a box somewhere.

At first we thought this would be a tough task, and we were completely prepared to use brass poles to pound our way through a giant "X" on the floor and walk through rat-ridden sewers. Instead we just walked into the Science building and looked at the first display shelf we came across, and there they all were. That's some super sleuthing, says I. The old bottles and beakers were pretty cool, but I was a big fan of the super old Cosmopolitan magazines that were found under several layers of carpet in the house of one of my great aunts. They're probably better off behind glass at Dixie College, instead of eventually finding their way to the Antiques Roadshow.

Our relic hunt was a lot of fun, but I also enjoyed our little jaunt over to Sara's alma mater, the Dixie College Art Department. She was like a rock star over there, man, every teacher knew her and they were all really excited to see where life had left her. We even spent some time talking to Del Parson, one of the most famous of all Mormon artists. He did the famous picture of Jesus to the right, and a bunch of other really popular ones (look 'im up, and see how cool this guy's stuff is). Del was pretty much Sara's mentor while she was at Dixie, and he was very glad to see her. After we spoke to him, another one of her ex-professors, Glen Blakely, pulled her aside and had her take her pick from among loads of super cool pottery he had recently baked. There were so many awesome ceramics there, her teacher had just gone on some sort of kiln spree and I was glad he let us take a few of them home with us. I had no clue what a great little artist I had married. If I were to ever go back to the Math department at BYU they wouldn't even know who I was...I spent most of my time there trying to avoid the professors.

The Truth of the True Thunder

A lot of the prints at the dino print place were sticky-outy instead of sticky-inny like I imagined they would be. I probably read why they formed that way like 5 times, but I don't remember now. Something about mud and a bunch of time. About half of the footprints were labeled "Eubrontes" so I got to picturing some really cool footprint-lovin' little green critters named Eubrontes that were all over St. George back in the good ol' pre-extinction days. Perhaps they were generally older little beasts and they preferred the warm climate to live out their golden years. In what ended up being one of the strangest coincidances of 2010 (so far) the U-Haul truck we were given to move into our new house had a giant green Eubrontes on it. Crazy! And I'd never even heard of the little guys before that St. George visit.

A little bit of wikipedia-ing tonight has crushed all my visions of Eubrontes grandeur. I discovered that "Eubrontes" is the term for any fossilized footprints from the late Triassic or early Jurassic period, and NOT the critter that made them. Curses, and I had already put Eubrontes on my top five favorite dinosaurs list, not too far from the best dinosaur ever, the mighty Tyrannosaurus. The next picture is Zoe and I being scary in front of a Tyrannosaurus eubrontes shipped in from Mexico. I'd like to see a real Tyrannosaurus skeleton someday. The Tyrannoskull below is just a replica. Like a big moron I've walked right next to two full skeletons in the last few years but didn't spend the few dollars and minutes to go in and check them out. There's one in the Museum of Natural History in Manhattan, and another in The Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago. Man, Tyrannosaurs are so flippin' sweet. I'd say one of the best moments of my life was when my parents let me watch Jurassic Park, my first PG-13 movie, and my first DVD...I would have loved to be eatten by one of those guys, could there be a better story to tell in heaven when people ask what did ya' in, as they're bound to do?

A Return to the Desert

The blood flowing through my veins is a little more red than most peoples' because it contains high quantities of sand from under the hot sun of Utah's Dixie. Way back in the Brigham Young days, my ancestors were sent down to St. George to settle the joint, and there we stayed for generations. Sometimes you just gotta leave Scotland and move to the desert, I guess. I often wonder if I've disappointed my dead relatives by leaving the wilderness they risked their lives to tame. No, I think not, they probably would have moved too if they had the internet and could Google "water" and find out that there's gallons of it goin' for free on the other side of the Sierra Nevadas.

Ends up that I'm not the first animal to creep his way through St. George. Millions of years ago some cool dinosaurs (all dinosaurs are cool) were passing through the city and they left some super awesome footprints in the mud. Not too long ago those footprints were found by a family friend of my dad's, and eventually the site evolved into a big exhibition facility. Dad invited us along for a ride to St. George the week before we moved to Seattle, so we stopped in at the St. George Dinosaur Discovery Site while we were in the neighborhood. Good grief is it hot there, no wonder the dinosaurs didn't stick around.

Happy Birthday Sara!

According to the Pastry Decoration Act of 1983 all cakes shaped like whales shall have lit candles representing water spewing from the confectionery whale's water hole thingy. This was the month that Sara's hair immaculately shot out bangs. She told me I wasn't allowed to make fun of her short-lived hairstyle on my blog, so I won't...or did I? Happy Birthday my Sara!

A Birthday Execution

I thought it best to celebrate Sara's 28th birthday by way of a group papier mache penguin execution. The arctic victim was stuffed full of candy and prizes, put into a box, and wrapped up so he couldn't get away. Sara wasn't very excited about beating the poor little guy, but after a minimal amount of coaxing, her mind was changed, and we strung him up on the basketball standard to await his demise. I believe it was Bryson that delivered the fatal blow, and I was very disappointed to see that none of my kin jumped to the floor to pick apart the carcass. The whole point of having a pinata in the first place was to hear the clunking noise of heads colliding while the candy is collected. Fortunately for the penguin, it was a super cold day outside so that he could enjoy his last moments in his native climate. Our little Zoe was very concerned about the penguin's recovery after his injury, she actually asked if he'd be okay. Sadly, he didn't pull through, but we were all grateful for his martyrdom, as it provided us an abundance of Kit Kat bars and parachute guys. Happy Birthday Sara!