A Slight Moment of 'Ahhhhh..."

So, people left and right have been saying what a super trooper I am with my new baby, Parker.

What they see: me having Parker on a Thursday and coming to church that Sunday.
What they don't see: Jason telling me that he promised the sunbeams if they were good for the primary activity I would bring Parker to see them. Not wanting to make a liar out of Jason and not wanting to dissappoint 8 three year olds, I came for the last hour.

What they see: Doing my visiting teaching on NOT the last day of the month
What they don't see: My companion set up the appointments and picked me up. The spirit taught the lesson, I was just the means of making it verbal.

What they see: A refreshed, alert person in the afternoon.
What they don't see: Me almost taping my eyelids open at 3am and 6am to feed Parker and then sleeping in until 10am...somtimes 11am.

What they see: Two kids under control.
What they don't see: I have nothing to do with this control. It is all Jason's. It is by his good grace my hair hasn't gone gray already.

What they see: Jason home, helping with anything and everything.
What they don't see: Me getting the 'deer in the headlights' look thinking about how I will have two kids all to myself during the summer.

I must either be really good at hiding what my life is really like, or people just don't look very deeply into my life. Right now I feel like my life is so chaotic, but looking back at my days, I really don't get anything done. The dishes still pile up, but not as high as the laundry. There is a year and a half of scrapbooking to be done...it's high time I go digital. (This is CODE for "I need help" to anyone who has the knack for digital scrapbooking.) And the more organized I try to be, the more messy my house gets. Is there no end? I think not. For now, I can just take it day at a time. I try to live by the moment, knowing there will be a day when I wish I could come back to where I am now.

What you really see: A woman who loves all the men in her life. I love you Jason, Walker and Parker.

2 jokes

I Stumbledupon a Biology jokes website - most of you will probably think they are dumb. Here are 2 jokes that I thought were pretty funny. (This is actually true, but still funny)

There's a story about an MIT student who spent an entire summer going to
the Harvard football field every day wearing a black and white striped
shirt, walking up and down the field for ten or fifteen minutes throwing
birdseed all over the field, blowing a whistle and then walking off the
field.  At the end of the summer, it came time for the first Harvard home
football team, the referee walked onto the field and blew the whistle, and
the game had to be delayed for a half hour to wait for the birds to get off
of the field.  The guy wrote his thesis on this, and graduated.

here is the Second one:

The Dangers of Bread

A recent Cincinnati Enquirer headline read, "SMELL OF BAKED BREAD MAY BE
HEALTH HAZARD." The article went on to describe the dangers of the smell of
baking bread. The main danger, apparently, is that the organic components
of this aroma may break down ozone (I'm not making this stuff up).

I was horrified. When are we going to do something about bread-induced
global warming? Sure, we attack tobacco companies, but when is the
government going to go after Big Bread?

Well, I've done a little research, and what I've discovered should make
anyone think twice ....

1. More than 98 percent of convicted felons are bread eaters.
2. Fully HALF of all children who grow up in bread-consuming households
score below average on standardized tests.
3. In the 18th century, when virtually all bread was baked in the home, the
average life expectancy was less than 50 years; infant mortality rates were
unacceptably high; many women died in childbirth; and diseases such as
typhoid, yellow fever and influenza ravaged whole nations.
4. More than 90 percent of violent crimes are committed within 24 hours of
eating bread.
5. Bread is made from a substance called "dough." It has been proven that
as little as one pound of dough can be used to suffocate a mouse. The
average American eats more bread than that in one month!
6. Primitive tribal societies that have no bread exhibit a low occurrence
of cancer, Alzheimer's, Parkinson's disease and osteoporosis.
7. Bread has been proven to be addictive. Subjects deprived of bread and
given only water to eat, actually begged for bread after only two days.
8. Bread is often a "gateway" food item, leading the user to harder items
such as butter, jelly, peanut butter and even cold cuts.
9. Bread has been proven to absorb water. Since the human body is more than
90 percent water, it follows that eating bread could lead to your body
being taken over by this absorptive food product, turning you into a soggy,
gooey bread-pudding person.
10. Newborn babies can choke on bread.
11. Bread is baked at temperatures as high as 400 degrees Fahrenheit! That
kind of heat can kill an adult in less than one minute.
12. Most American bread eaters are utterly unable to distinguish between
significant scientific fact and meaningless statistical babbling.

In light of these frightening statistics, we propose the following bread
restrictions:

1. No sale of bread to minors.
2. No advertising of bread within 1000 feet of a school.
3. A 300 percent federal tax on all bread to pay for all the societal ills
we might associate with bread.
4. No animal or human images, nor any primary colors (which may appeal to
children) may be used to promote bread usage.
5. A $4.2 zillion fine on the three biggest bread manufacturers.

Remember: Think globally, act idiotically.

These were both found at http://www.xs4all.nl/~jcdverha/scijokes/index.html#9

Parker's Baby Blessing

We will be blessing Parker at 8:30 on Sunday morning. Our Building is on Five mile, just north of Lake Hazel. Anybody who wants to come is invited. We will not be having any kind of celebration or big lunch afterwards. If you have any questions, leave a comment, or email me.

What a Day! And it isn't even nap-time yet!

Or maybe I should call this fingerpainting 101!

What happens when a newborn keeps his parents up most of the night, and the 2 year old climbs into the cupboards? Well, here are some pictures!






Okay, so the day started off on the wrong foot - it took quite a while to clean up the food dye paintings that Walker had made in the front room and in our bedroom.
Not exactly how I wanted to be woken up, with Walker handing me a mostly empty green bottle, stains on his hands. ( I learned that the green stains mostly in the line that it drips down, but the orange doesn't. It smears all over. Which is worse? Smearing it or leaving darker stains?) Luckily I think we got it all off. "all purpose cleaner with bleach."

I wasn't really prepared for the next thing Walker started doing. I should have seen it coming. He quit calling me "Daddy" and started calling me "Jay," like Sarah does. Instead of saying "Daddy I want Crackers," it is now "Jay, I want crackers." (It sounds like Che, as in Che guevara, for those of you familiar with him) I can deal with that.
After that, we worked on some Business Tax stuff, (Unemployment Insurance), which as some of you know doing anything with taxes isn't fun.
Next we decided to do some stuff with the mortgage. I know, this doesn't sound fun either. Well, it started by us getting a notice saying that the bank didn't collect enough from us last year to put in escrow, so they would be charging us an extra $12 per month. Oh, and we would be paying another 40 or so per month because of tax increases. We didn't have a homeowners exemption last year, as the house was rented most of the year. I had to call Ada County Assessor's office, make sure the papers were filed correctly, get transferred to the Treasurer's office, and have them fax the Bank as well. Plus talk to the bank to find out more about biweekly payments. (Does any of this sound like fun yet?) After the hoopla, we will be paying about $80 less per month than they had planned for us. Nice. (of course, I still need to talk to the bank again later on to verify that it is all correct.)
What next.... Oh yes, calling the auto insurance. Anybody else have any good times with them? Well, I told them we were looking to change to another company, and they found some more discounts, which dropped our rates about 30%. (In our case about $60 per month.)

Just a few minutes ago, I thought to myself, "Not bad for a morning's work." I felt like I had accomplished quite a bit. I went over to Sarah, Parker and Walker, and played for a few minutes. Of course, If I hold Parker, Walker needs to be held too. I was laying down, and I had Parker on my tummy; and he had a little gas. Not to be out-done, Walker sat on my chest (mere centimeters from my face) and let a monster rip from inside. It wasn't one of those little cute toots either. It is one of those 12-year old sitting on his sister to make her mad farts. Sarah couldn't contain herself, and her inner devil laugh found its way out as well. After 5 minutes of her hysteria, she tried to make Walker apologize and say he's sorry. (Right, with tears of joy coming down her cheeks, you think he took her seriously?)

I can't wait to see what happens after the nap!

Blogging Tools

Okay, so I know that not all of you that read this are gonna be nearly as excited about these things as I am, but I will let you all in on a couple of my favorite little blogging tools.

First of all, the little side bar, where you add links to your friends and family.... I know that the only reason that I put those there were so that I could follow those links, and not have to remember the address every time I wanted to go there. It isn't necessarily so that other people can follow it. The problem with the links that I have there, is that I don't know when somebody has updated there blog, or posted some pictures. So the new tool that Blogspot added, is on the dashboard menu. I always thought that this menu was dumb, until they recently added this little option.
There is a little tab that says "Blogs that I follow." At the bottom of this tab is a button that says "Add." Click on it, then, in another window, go to the blog that you want to 'follow.' you copy and past the address into the original place, and copy it in. Now, when you go to your "Dashboard" it tells you who has updated their blog, and you can click from there onto the new posts. It sure beats clicking on 48 different links! (I know that there are other ways to do something similar, but this is the one I know how to do, and it easy) Hopefully this helps somebody.
The second little tool that I use, doesn't actually help me do anything in particular. It is called Google Analytics. It basically tracks information about your blog site. It will tell you pretty much anything that you want to know about the people that come to your site. For example, I just looked at Traffic Sources (how did people get to my blog). It tells me that in the past month 41 visitors linked here from woodburysfour.blogspot, 38 typed the address directly in the web address bar, 26 came from a google query, and 25 came from monteandbrittany.blogspot. It even goes more in depth too. Of the google searches, 15 of them were from the keywords "Jason and Sarah Woodbury," 5 from "woodbury adventure blogspot," and 2 came from the search "adam and kristen cole." If I change the time from the past month to say, the past year, it shoes that 3 people did a google search on "shoes galore" and came to our website. The 25 links from monteandbrittany shoots up to 158.


Other info that I get from this crazy google analytics thing is that 65.7% of visitors to our blog use internet explorer, the average time per visit has been 1minute and 12 seconds, and that 45.19% of our visitors are using a cable internet connection. There is also a bunch of other cool stuff, but I am sure you are all getting bored of reading this. It may also be that I am the only person that finds any of this cool. Now, the way to do this, is to go to google.com/analytics. You also need to open up your blogspot, customize, and at the bottom, you can "Add a Widget." I am not a complete expert on this, and I added this over a year ago, so I don't remember exactly. I am sure there is some sort of copy and paste involved in this process as well.

So before next time, will the 1.26% of you still on dialup upgrade to something a little faster?

A post on Sarah's Labor

For anybody that wishes they could have been here when the baby came, we kept a little photo journal of the whole process. Honestly, Sarah did very well, and was pretty happy throughout the whole thing. Here are a some pictures, along with a bit of commentary. Sorry if it is pretty long.

First of all, we had a few friends that were supposed to come over on New Year's Eve, but luckily, none of them were able to make it. Sick kids, etc. So, we were fortunately able to spend a little bit of quiet time together that night. Walker got up around 8:30, and decided by a out 8:45 that somebody needed to get up to get him some breakfast. That was when Sarah decided she would try to get up. Try is the operative word here. As she was getting up, she realized that her water broke. (Flash back to the night before, when we made sure to get a towel to sleep on, in case her water broke while she was in bed.) We did a pretty good job about not panicking, Sarah took a shower, I got Walker some food, etc. We had to finish packing all of the stuff we wanted to take with us to the hospital. Now comes the photo part, as I don't remember nearly as much about that part, and it is all a little bit jumbled.


This is the first picture from the hospital.


Again, when we first got there. It took an hour to get checked in, etc. It is about 11:15.



Here is a fake "Pushing" face. It is her best imitation. It is 3:08



This is Sarah laughing about her fake contraction face. It is 3:09. As you can tell, she was in pretty good spirits about the whole thing.



The baby's umbilical cord was wrapped around his neck, so he wasn't getting as much oxygen as he needed. So they put Mom on oxygen. This is 4:10.

This is about 5 or 10 minutes before she starts pushing. It is 8:05 p.m.


Though most of it went well, she did throw up a couple of times toward the end. This is the last contraction before birth. (Thanks to her mom for taking pics while I "helped" with the delivery.)
This is at 8:36 p.m.


Here is the first picture of Parker. The doctor kept getting in the way, so I couldn't tell the gender, and announce it to mom/both grandmas. This is at 8:36 p.m.


This is 8:38 p.m. Any explanation needed?


He weighed in at 7 pounds and 10 ounces. This is at 8:47 p.m., after a few shots/tests.

Like I said, the whole thing went over pretty well. Sarah did a great job, and seems to be handling everything nicely. It was definitely easier for her the Second time around. I don't know if that is the same for everybody or not. We have had several dinners brought over to us from the ward, and from some friends. Thanks to everybody for the support. If you haven't stopped by to see him, feel free to come on by. Just call us before so we will know what time to expect you!

BTW, Sarah, if you want to add or clarify anything, feel free to make a comment about it!

Tango's

So I have to give Props to a new favorite restaurant of mine. This probably won't pertain to half of you that read it, but if you live in Boise, Listen Up!

This is a little place called Tango's. It is owned by a lady from Buenos Aires named Monica, and her husband Luis, from Mexico. They've been in business for about 2 years or so. I received the recommendation to go there from my brother-in-law, Rhett.

So, about the place. It has a mostly traditional Argentine food called Empanadas. Empanadas are made in many different ways. In Chile, they are made different than in Argentina. In Mendoza, they are different than in Buenos Aires. The ones that I ate here were kind of a mix between Buenos Aires and Chile style empanadas. I can't really explain what they are, but here is the homepage, which has some pictures on it.

I wasn't sure what to expect before I arrived. I had decided to take my wife to an informal place for our anniversary, what with having family in town, Sarah expecting in a week, etc. So I drove by the place, and wasn't too impressed from the look of it. It had a dining area with about 8 pub-size tables. It seemed okay, but I was just hoping that Sarah didn't get too upset about the atmosphere not matching with the celebration. I warned her that she shouldn't expect candles or anything like that. It has an order window, like fast-food. You go up, pay, and get your food from the counter. They do not have waiter service.

Like I said before, the food was mostly traditional. The empanadas they serve are about twice the size of the ones I am used to. Instead of having large chunks of green olive in the "Gaucho," she minced them up. (she said that people would just spit them out and throw them away. So she decided to mince them and nobody knows the difference.) The masa, or dough, was a little crispier and flakier than what I think of as traditional as well. I also tried the "cuzco" which monica said was traditional, but I never had tried any like it before. It was pretty good. Sarah had a new one that is not on the menu, and thought it was very good.

The part that I thought I was going to be critical of was the Dessert empanadas. I was pleasantly surprised. Luis asked me how I liked them. I couldn't wipe the stupid smile off of my face it was so delicious. If you are a fan of Bavarian Creme, this is _______ (fill in the blank. I.E. perfect, sensational, mana from heaven, etc.)
The Carmelo was good, basically an empanada filled with home-made dulce de leche. Better than I was expecting.
So my initial rating was an 8 out of 10, overall. The food was good, the atmosphere was average, but the prices were Exceptional. We paid a total of $15 for dinner.

As a side note, we went back, as we made friends with the owner (monica) to show her our brand new baby boy. The floor tile has been replaced, so they are working on improving the atmosphere. They do play tango and other latin music, which definately helps the mood.
Next time you are near the mall, stop by 701 N orchard, and order some empanadas! Do it early, as they close at 7 mon-Fri, and on 4 (I think) on saturdays.

Baby has a Name

So we didn't really like either of theses names 2 weeks ago, but we decided that this name fit our baby boy. We named him "Parker Ammon Woodbury."

We told everybody we would give them an update as soon as we decided a name.

Baby Woodbury

Baby Boy Woodbury was born on January 1st, 2009 at 8:36 p.m. He weighed in at a stocky 7 pounds 10 ounces. That is good to fight in the welterweight division. He has a wingspan of about 20," as well as his height of 20 inches.
Walker took a lot of good pictures as a baby, but unfortunately, this one got its photogenecity from ME, which means out of every 1000 pictures, we might be lucky and get a good one. He did open his eyes for a little bit when he was first born, but he hasn't been awake much since then. he hasn't been eating very well, and has mostly been pretty groggy the whole time.

I will attach a link HERE, to go to our pics. Let me know if you have problems getting to it. Also, we are taking suggestions for names, as we haven't come up with one yet.Okay, so I take back the comments about the pictures. They look a lot better on the computer than they do on the camera.