This morning Zeb and i went on a little run at the swan creek preserve near our house. I go at about nine everyday cause its the time that the little rugrat normally falls asleep. Today he stayed awake the entire fifty minutes. The entire time he insisted that the stroller shade be down so that he could look around. This little guy is already quite the naturalist. He loves to scan the trees and leaves! he cooed and talked all morning. People in Ohio must not be used to babies cause everybody would stop and look at him!
The wildlife at the parks here is astounding! right here in the middle of toledo they have deer, rabbits, gophers, squirrels, and all sorts of bright yellow, blue, and red birds!! we love it. they also have great insects. I tried to get a better shot but I only had my camera with me. this little deer was just hanging out by the bench!

the little rugrat won't take a nap today. he's just hanging out with this blanket that he loves. I'll be honest, I hate the blanket. I can't handle the feeling of the soft fleecy stuff. The satin side is fine and he likes it best, but I just can't touch the other side. He's been sleeping all through night now! we stick him in his crib, plug him with the binky, and then sing him a song and he's zonked. last night was 8 to 8! we stuck a bottle in his mouth at 11 when we went to bed, but he never even opened his eyes. I'll take a good night over a sleepless day anytime! he's a good little rugrat.

if you want to turn the music off to watch the videos...the link is at the bottom of the disney pics!

we love this show!!!

zeb is so dang funny

too bad zeb's favorite time is morning time, cause its my LEAST favorite time. This morning he was pretty cute though.

It's been a long Monday

I know it's been a long day at school when I stop looking for the morphology, structure and method or mode of secretion of gland cells but turn instead to finding hidden mickeys! Look it's a Mickey Mouse head!!! Leisy and I love to search for hidden Mickeys at Disneyland - I guess the practice carried over to Med School!

i thought this was pretty funny!

80%How Addicted to Blogging Are You?

Mingle² - Dating Site

80% isn't terrible.

Singing Baby

Zeb loves to sing! He did this the entire drive home from church and let us film him once we got home!

Saturday Adventure

Today Leisy and I ventured a little further from our house to check out this really cool metropark called Oak Openings. It is a beautiful, large wooded area with all sorts of hiking trails. It covers over 3400 acres! On our way out we were hit by a downpour and we thought we would have to give up on our adventure. By the time we got out of the car (maybe 20 min) it had totally cleared. We had quite the amazing walk. We saw only a small part of the park and we are excited to return to see more of it. We walked around this small lake and saw people getting married. If we hadn't been married in the temple we totally would have had a wedding like that one. Leisy kept saying she couldn't believe how lucky they were that the rain cleared. It was perfect. We found a cool little 'nature station' that had a small room with large windows all around. They have bird feeders set up outside and speakers to pick up the bird sounds. We sat in there and watched as all sorts of cool birds came to feast. Zeb's new activity is saying Oooo Oooo over and over. We thought that Zeb's owl-like noises fit in perfectly with all the other bird sounds we were listening to! We stopped at the playground next to the 'nature station' to act like kids and pretend like we don't have a baby. It's a good thing he's cute or we would have given him away by now.

Pictured: the park trail (very top pic), Zeb loving the park, wild mushrooms and the playground

The tornado sirens went off!

it was just plain crazy! we were getting ready to head out to the "german-american" festival when the scariest clouds we've ever seen rolled in. The tornado sirens sounded and Kent and I watched the clouds from our balcony. I wish the pictures did justice, but they don't! The clouds were twisting and turning and rolling like crazy! and they were really low to the ground. it was one of the coolest things that I have ever seen. They say the tornado warning for this area is over now...rats huh? It's my dream to be in something cool like that.

=

Star in Your Own JibJab! It's Free!

go zeb go

Star in Your Own JibJab! It's Free!it takes a minute to get started.

sleeping

I have been having a really hard time falling asleep here! I don't know if its because I'm on Utah time or just not used to it or what! kent can zonk by ten-thirty but lately I haven't been able to fall asleep until sometime after midnight. I normally get in bed with kent but when he falls asleep I get out a book or get on the blog and check email and stuff. I drive kent crazy cause I'll try to make him stay up with me. I'll poke and prod him or just ask him questions so he can't sleep. Two nights ago I kept asking him questions but he was falling in and out of sleep so I asked him, "Kent, how much do you love me?" and he replied "more than sugar cube castles". I started giggling and it startled him out of his half sleep and then he started laughing. We aren't sure where the sugar cube castles came from! it's like the night he woke me up and said "Arrggh" and then went back to sleep. The next morning he told me "I dreamed that we were at disneyland on pirates of the caribbean!". Apparently when he was younger he'd sleep walk and pee in weird places. he ruined a bunch of games doing it! thank heavens he doesn't have that problem anymore.

I googled "sugar cube castles" to get a good picture of one and this is what I found! it's a sugar cube salt lake temple. eww. creepy. It was on the site "about.com" labeled as an lds craft. maybe we could do it as a relief society enrichment huh? I made a sugar cube airport in elementary school. the control tower even had working lights.

J.K. Rowling

Report: Rowling Writing Detective Novel

click above for the story

J.K. Rowling has been spotted at cafes in Scotland working on a detective novel, a British newspaper reported Saturday.

I already can't wait!!

churches everywhere

You can't see it very well (its a cell phone pic) but this sign made kent and me laugh out loud. This is the "soul city house of god" also known as the "holy ghost headquarters"! There are churches EVERYWHERE here. More here then in Utah for sure. There are 2 or 3 per city block.
I'll have to admit they all have something going for them that our church lacks. They all have marquees out front with really catchy slogans to get people to church. I'm going to try and take pictures of the good ones and post them. Just last week we saw one that said "Get online with God. Download your sins on Jesus". Pretty catchy, huh? and there's a local church that has "traditional" worship at nine, "contemporary" worship at eleven, and saving the best for last- "hip hop" worship at one. It fits perfectly with our schedule! we get out at noon and can head over for hip hop. It sure beats going to choir practice.

Craaaazy rain.

We have been on severe thunderstorm warning and flood watch for 48 hours now! It has not stopped raining AT ALL! The rain here is amazing. It rains in sheets and just keeps coming. Lots of the city streets are flooded over and are closed!

The pictures are all taken from our little balcony! I really love the rain and the gloom. We haven't had to run our air conditioner for almost a week now. At night we open the window and it gets cold. I LOVE it.

I saw on the news this morning that Utah is experiencing "much higher" than usual temps. I am so so so glad that I am not in the desert. I'm glad that first few weeks of dishwasher are over here. This is the weather that I was expecting and wanting.

I came home from being out with the sister missionaries and this is what I found!

Is this really me??

So I know that I am an identical twin and that Laney and I have the same DNA, but this picture of me with Z looks an awful lot like Laney and not as much like me! Kent completely agrees. Laney, what do you think?
And little Zeb is doing the elvis thing. His lips are so big, they do all sorts of crazy tricks!

New favorite!!

Is this a sign of teething? The rugrat has now taken to his blanket instead of his binky. We soak it in water and he just chomps and sucks on the corners until he zonks. He's also turned into the slobber monster and will chew on his bottle instead of suck on it like he's supposed to. Apparently Kent got his first tooth at three months...and little Z is rapidly approaching his three month mark. booooooooo to teeth and teething. its made zeb rather irritable at times, which of course leads to rather irritable mom and dad.

The living room!

here is the living room! I couldn't get any wonderful pictures. you'll all just have to come out if you really want to see what it looks like! we finally found a little stand to put our tv on and I LOVE it! we got it at the same place where we bought the other little couch! the place is fabulous and inexpensive. we need to put some holes in the back of it so that we can put our vcr on the shelf. we are still 1990's, no dvd player yet! we actually watch dvd's on the computer because until this move our computer screen was bigger than the tv screen! but now the couch faces the opposite direction so we have been watching them in bed on our portable dvd player.

we are still looking for some good stuff to put on the walls, so if you have any suggestions let us know!!! I'm trying to figure out what I can put above the tv. I'd love to incorporate some pics but i need to find some innovative/cute way of doing it.

only three tooms left! z's room, our room, and the computer nook.

White Coat

Orientation week has finally ended and here I am with my white coat. The road to becoming a physician has begun! Orientation was enjoyable. It was nice to have a week of introduction to the craziness that my life will be starting on Monday. The week was exciting. It was spent introducing us to the campus, teachers, schedule and basically the routine of daily medical school life. I love the atmosphere at this campus! The teachers are so amazing and the faculty of UT is incredible. My class has a lot of really fun and interesting people - there are 166 of us from all over the U.S. Today at the white coat ceremony we learned that we were accepted from the largest application pool UT has ever seen. We collectively had a GPA of 3.7 and an MCAT score of 31. The white coat ceremony was SUPER boring and 4 hours long. As much as I would have loved to have all of you there, you really didn't miss anything.

Monday begins the craziest, most intense studying I have yet done in my college career! Our first test will be in 2 weeks and will cover 526 pages of notes. I nearly died when they handed out our notes! The nice thing is the college provides and prints out all these wonderful packets. I will be in class 6 hours a day studying Biochemistry, Molecular Biology and case studies for the next 2 months. One of the teachers said medical school isn't so hard as it is immense. Kind of like drinking water from a fire hose. I'm not sure if this was intended to comfort or scare ~ I'm just excited to start studying again!

(My Notes)

Just For Laughs

Has anybody watched this show?! We laugh so hard every time it comes on.

baby z fits into his three month grasshopper outfit! hooray. really he's smiling cause we went in to get our insurance switched over to ohio and it dropped by HALF! we are so excited. hip hip hooray.

buggy stuff

Here is some of my fun kitchen stuff!

The bug canisters are from my sis metta and kent's sis melynda. they got them at different places and different times..weird huh? the bowls (noramlly they are on top of the fridge) are from the Libbey glass factory outlet here in toledo! the place is amazing... all sorts of fun glass stuff and dishes for really cheap (melynda, you'd probably love it). And the last pic is of all of my bug magnets. They are from hong kong, the czech republic, and target.

voila...

The kitchen! sorry to those of you who have no desire to see our new apt!

The kitchen is actually really small, kind of a bummer deal. Fortunately I don't love to cook and don't plan on spending tons of time in here!

Here are the views of our teeny kitchen...one is the left side and the other is the right side. thats about it. The best part of it all is the floor. in our last apt we had nasty grody carpet in the kitchen (sorry kenna). I actually (thanks to my mom) now have a swiffer. it was always a dream of mine. i really really wanted a swiffer.

z

This picture makes z look huge. I really don't think that he is that big yet! I think its the angle of the camera. His little belly is chubbing up though. and he smiles constantly.
We have run into a bit of a problem with the poor little guy. We think he has already started teething but he doesn't know how to hold things in his mouth yet so he'll just squwak until we put our fingers in his mouth to chomp on. He is slobbering all over and keeps chewing on his bink. he must take after his dad...Kent started teething this young as well. boooooooooooo.
oh, and last night he projectile vomited all over me. it shot over my shoulder and went all down my back.

my days all alone!

Kent offically became a medical student on monday of this week and I am officially became a "stay at home" mom. With Kent home all of the time this past while I didn't really feel like I qualified. Now its for real.

Yesterday was a bit long with Kent being gone from 8 am to 10:00 pm, but today was much much better. I can't even imagine what people do without the church. I am so lucky to have moved into a ward like this one. There is so much to do that I will never be bored.

This morning at 9 I went to walking group at the park. We went on a great speed walk through the amazing park and then the kids played at the playground while we chatted. It was so nice to just chat and make friends. We (zeb and i) got home at noonish and left at one-thirty to go out with the sisters! We visited two families and then It was already time to pick up Kent from school (three fifteen).

We made dinner and spent some good time together and then I went to cooking group! I got to meet even more new people and just be able to chat. The social aspect of the church is quite amazing. It's like having family no matter where you go. How do other people do it? I would be so lonely.

As wonderfully perfect as Kent is I really miss all of my friends from Orem that I could just sit and chat with while he was gone at work and school! I am a far more balanced and happier person when I get to talk to people and get exercise and be outside (i've been doing kick boxing to a dvd in the house and I kicked the lamp and broke it yesterday so I figured its time to get outside!).

The weather is unbelievable now. the really bad hot spell has left and apparently we are experiencing normal toledo summer weather. the temps are 84 at the high and the humidity is at 50%. It is heavenly.

I'll try and get kent to post his first few days of school! he zonked early tonight cause apparently z got up a few times last night and he didn't get much solid sleep! I didn't hear a thing. kent is too good of a dad and husband.

here's the dining room! In the one picture you can see the door to outside on the left (it's the dark brown) and also a side closet and laundry room door.

We have a strange little window to the kitchen that we can pass dirty dishes through! its pretty handy. we are still experimenting with things to put on the walls.

We really love our new table and chairs! hooray for KSL classifieds. I can't believe the great stuff we got on it...and super inexpensive too.

stay tuned for the rest of the house!

Amazing!

Good Pizza is one of the best things on earth! Saturday night we decided to search for Toledo's best calzone, and we found it! It's a place called Pizza Pan. The calzones are the most amazing that I've ever tasted. And they are" buy one get two free"! ?? Weird huh? it's just how the place works. PLUS, when we went to pick up the calzones, next doorwe saw a little Russian grocery store! I am so excited to check it out this week! unfortunately kent has school from 8 to 8 tomorrow! we'll have to check it out on tuesday.
We'll have to take anyone that comes out to visit to the Pizza Pan!

pool time

We took Zeb swimming today and he loved it! it was a bit of a shock getting in , but after he adjusted he smiled lots! Kent is much better with him in the pool than I am! Everytime I swam with him he whined at me! I am best at drying him off. That's my job after the bath too. Below is us after the swim! His little gums were chattering. It was cute.

We really enjoy having a pool. I really don't love swimming but on hot humid days it is the only thing that feels good! its so steamy here that you always just FEEL wet. I told kent I always feel like a moist sticky jolly rancher. Getting in the pool actually MAKES you wet and is quite the relief.

the bathroom!

Here is the lovely bathroom! and I am sorry that lots of our pictures are dark. We've been using the video camera to take all of our pics cause its so easy to load everything onto the blog! unfortunately the video camera doesn't have a flash so our pictures are a little dim! we'll get batteries for our camera soon!

We have two bathrooms! one in the master bedroom (which is actually Zeb's room, our bed wouldn't fit against any wall but the one with the wondow and we didn't want to block the light) and one off the main hallway. This is the main bathroom.

We lucked out quite a bit with this apartment. Apparently there was a grease fire here a few years back and they replaced all of the carpet, doors, cabinets, paint, and whatnot! So everything is nice and new and clean! :)

The only thing that bugs me about the apartment is that the house doesn't have lights (with the exception of the kitchen and bathrooms). There are no lights! we have to buy lamps for the bedrooms and living rooms! I guess that's how they do it here in the East. and apparently its the same way in most of the states out here. ANNOYING!

wahoo.

Check it out! so all we've ever really wanted is a loveseat that fits two people. Kent's mom and dad have a white one that we love (unfortunately it got moved to their basement!). yesterday we were shopping for somewhere to put our tv and we found a two person chair that matches our couch PERFECTLY! it even came with a pillow (as pictured)...the exact same as our couch pillows! and it was on clearance! so we got it.

here is a pic of Z hanging out on the couch. kent just growled at him so he's a little shocked, but he really likes the couch!

P.S.

Z really likes to be growled at even if it shocks him into the wide eyed stare. See, look what he does right after the initial shock!

Z didn't really fuss too much more after that initial melt down last night. He was a little feverish but he went to bed like normal right at 9:30. I love to put him down for bed! He does so well. I just lay him in his crib sing him a song or two and he's out. I'm kind of a baby hog at night because I love to put him to sleep - Leisy hasn't complained yet.

poor baby z!

So, today we went and got Zeb's two month immunizations. Besides the fact that we almost DIED on the way, (there was an insane thunderstorm. we couldn't see anything and there was at least an inch of water on the freeway) it went really well. Zeb cried for all of thirty seconds after the shots. he's quite the trooper. He went right to sleep in the car and continued to sleep on our errands. As soon as we got home and he woke up, it was TERRIBLE. the little rugrat screamed and sobbed and squawked the SADDEST most pitiful cry known to man. We recorded some of it, but I can't get it to upload. I'll keep trying. it was so sad.
He couldn't breathe and kept nearly suffocating himself with the sobs. His whole body was heaving. Then he finally fell asleep on me, where he slept for two full hours. Kent took the above picture of him while he was on me. I didn't dare move so I just sat on the couch with him! the ENTIRE two hours he continued to gasp for breath! He used his lungs far too much and was trying to get them calmed down. Let's hope tonight goes alright! we got baby tylenol and it is appearing to help.

My new best blogging friend!

First off, I am not racist! but this is funny. our news lady is named Shenikwa. that's right, "Shenikwa". It is the epitome of a female black person (apparently it is better to say black then African American here) name! and she's basically my new best friend. I don't know her, but she does have a blog! and she had a baby May 29, just a few days before I did! I read it often. She seems like a real nice person. Really I just very much like her name.if you want to check out her blog, just go to www.nbc24.com and click on "Shenikwa's baby blog".

Who takes their cat to get acupuncture??

It seems that Jeff from Flipping Out does. Leisy and I were rolling on the floor laughing. It reminded me of my days at the animal shelter - except this cat is really nice! We decided cable was way too expensive so we signed up for the basic channels to get a discount on Internet. Somehow we ended up with the channel "bravo" and this crazy program follows psycho-rich-man Jeff around. Jeff pays his friends to do all of his weird chores.
Apparently humidity and hot weather have turned Leisy into a TV junkie because she refuses to go out into the "dishwasher" unless we have a really good reason to leave the house. The humidity and heat have been REALLY bad this week. It has been fluctuating between 80 - 90% humidity and there have been a lot of really intense thunderstorms.
We helped another new student from BYU move in to their apartment tonight and by the time I was done I was dripping wet. It was literally like I had just jumped into the shower with all of my clothes on. I'm so glad we have A/C!

The Library!

I'm really excited about the Toledo Library! The library is not super far from our house. It's in downtown Toledo and takes us about 10-12 minutes to get there. It's a wonderful library with a large selection and lots of fun activites. It reminds me a lot of the Salt Lake City Library. We already have library cards and actually blogged from the library when we first arrived in Toledo. The library has a really cool system throughout the entire city which we used today. They have several 'branches' of the library scattered througout the city. One of the branches is really close to our house - within walking distance. All items checked out can be returned to any of the branches. We returned our books there today and picked up a new book I had reserved. The branches alone are good sized libraries! They all have a good selection of books and DVDs and they have internet access! It's a really cool library system and I deemed it bloggable!