Happy Birthday Dad!

My dad and me at the City of Rocks on one of our many fun trips together

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My dad's birthday was on Tuesday- 50 years old! That means that he is exactly twice as old as me. Crazy.

For his birthday my mom put together a book of memories from all of his friends and loved ones. I'll post part of my letter here on the blog- a tribute to the best father anyone could ever hope to have.

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All I Really Need to Know I Learned From My Dad…

How to be happy • How to love life • How to show others that I care • How to light a fire with just one match and a tall cup of white gas • How to make the best of a tough situation • How to laugh • How to win a water fight • How to change a flat tire • How to be nice • How to put my family first • How to always do my best • How to know that my best is good enough • How to do the little things • How to fight off a bear with a handful of pebbles • How to be happy that at least the bear didn’t eat the Spam • How to appreciate beautiful things • How to show my dear wife that I love her • How to ride a bike • How to admit when I need help • How to be confident when I can’t have help • How to scout a rapid • How to swim a rapid • How to have faith • How to make the name Leroy sound scary • How to be patient • How to drop everything when a friend needs help • How to stop a school bus • How to manage my time well • How to dance • How to win • How to lose • How to tie a figure eight • How to try everything at least once • How to skip rocks • How to pray • How to make other people feel special • How to hug • How to enjoy a good book • How to be obnoxious in a racquetball court • How to keep going, even when I don’t think I can • How to set goals • How to listen • How to drive a fifteen passenger van on a road that was only meant for jeeps • How to involve everyone • How to write well • How to make people laugh • How to admit when I’m wrong • How to catch crawdads • How to teach kids not to gamble by taking all of their candy • How to know what’s important • How to make lasting memories • How to be the best dad in the world

"You are not a scrub" -President Hinkley

That quote came up in the church news this week and I thought it was funny to picture president Hinkley using the word "scrub" over the podium. We have the coolest prophet!

Anyway, apparently we forgot to write in our blog last week. That is probably because last week was mostly full of me studying for finals and Rachel working. It was a great week, but not a whole lot of exciting news for the blog.

This week was a little more exciting. It started out fun last Sunday when we had a friend, Kevin, and the missionaries over to our house for dinner and a movie (the movie was "Believing in Christ"). Kevin is investigating the church and will be baptised soon.

During the week Rachel worked a lot, and I studied a lot. I have finals this week, so I have been pretty preoccupied with that. On Thursday, Rachel had a doctor's appointment to check on WB, and everything seems to be going fine. Our baby girl is now the size of a half gallon of milk, and supposedly Rachel's uterus is the size of a soccer ball. Every once in a while I'll be talking to Rachel and all of a sudden her stomach will do this weird lurching thing as the baby shifts around. It is a little bit eerie, but exciting also because it means that we will be parents soon. We've been doing a lot of babysitting for friends and the prospect of parenthood, as frightening as it sounds, is starting to seem doable. I guess that's easy to say when you can just walk out on a screaming baby after mom and dad come home!

On Saturday we finally decided we needed to get out of the house, so we got in the car and started driving out into the country with no particular destination. First we went to the Aurora outlet Mall where we walked around and enjoyed the atmosphere. Then we drove to Cuyahoga Falls, which is a charming little town just South of here. There is a series of beautiful waterfalls which gives the town its name, and we were fortunate enough to make friends with a local Social Studies teacher who gave us a brief historical tour of the downtown area. It will definitely be a place to go back to.

Here are the pictures for the week. We love hearing from everybody, and we hope you are all doing well. Congratulations to Tyson and Cambria on their wedding!

Here's the pie we made for dessert with Kevin and the missionaries. It was soooo good!

Here we are in beautiful Cuyahoga Falls

Here's a picture of the waterfalls. For those who are interested, they are all runnable (class V). The river then continues for a few miles of class III.

"Heaven has a lot to live up to"

This has been an awesome week for us here in the Hazard household. The weather is still very “Autumny” but is quickly cooling off and Winter appears to be just around the corner. We have heard several warnings about Cleveland Winters and we are a little nervous to see what we’re in for. Apparently, the sun takes a 3 month vacation, but we’ll see. In the meantime we are just loving the sweatshirt weather and we go on a lot of walks to look at the changing leaves.

At the beginning of the week, Rachel finished sewing the curtains she is making for the baby’s room. They are very cute. We have decided to do a “Winnie the Pooh” theme; it’s not so original, but that’s okay because we like Pooh Bear. It is fun to imagine what our lives will be like with a baby girl to keep us busy.

On Saturday I played in a racquetball tournament, which was a lot of fun. I ended up winning first place after playing a sponsored player for the championship. I’m having a hard time walking now- after going for almost a year without much real competition, my body has to get used to the game again. I also made some friends at the tournament and hopefully I’ll be playing more regularly now.

On Sunday night, Rachel and I carved our pumpkins for Halloween. I think they turned out pretty good! Also, we finished reading another book together. This one, Pope Joan by Donna Woolfolk Cross, is definitely a book we would recommend to anyone. We have read some good books lately.

Rachel seemed to sum our lives up pretty well the other day when she remarked that “Heaven has a lot to live up too.” Truly, we are very blessed.

Here are the curtins that Rachel made. She came up with the pattern and design all on her own!

This is Rachel's pumpkin. For some reason, I couldn't get a picture that did justice to the lighting.

Here's my pumpkin. Happy Halloween!

This week has been another one of those weeks that is so full of fun that I just don't know where to start. Seriously. On Wednesday we saw an ultrasound of our baby and found out that little Wiggle Bean is a...(see the post below this one for details). This was very exciting news for us and we couldn't be any happier.

Rachel has been busy in different groups she is involved with. We hosted the cooking club at our house with the theme of "breakfast for dinner," and that turned out some very yummy treats. Actually, Rachel hosted it while I went to the library to study, but I still got to eat the leftovers! Apparently there was a good turnout with a lot of fun conversation to go along with the food. Also, Rachel has taken up knitting, which brings out her perfectionistic tendencies.

As for me, I am pretty predictable. I go to school every day and learn about teeth. Of course I learn other things as well, but they seem to be putting quite a lot of emphasis on the mouth, and specifically, teeth. I continue to love every minute of school and am doing well in all of my classes.

During the weekend we went to an apple orchard and picked a bunch of apples. It was a beautiful day and the trees were all sorts of brilliant colors. I love it out here! It is so pretty and it makes you feel all giddy inside. Anyway, we picked a big ol' bag of apples then brought them home and cooked with them. Yum. Nothing says Autumn time like caramel apples, apple dumplings, and hot apple cider.

Here are some pictures of our week, for those who care to look. Don't forget to check the post below this for an update on WB! Also, Rachel put up a new post on her baby-belly page.

This was the drive to the apple orchard. Beautiful Ohio is full of Autumn color and fresh air. We love it here!

Here us us at the orchard picking the apples

And of course, we had to bake all sorts of fun stuff with all of our fresh fruit.

Exciting News!

Hooray! Hooray! Hooray! We had our ultrasound this week and we found out that the baby is growing well and is very healthy! We were given two pictures of our new little baby and we will post them tomorrow. A funny thing happened when I was looking at the pictures. I was looking at the baby's profile and the immediate thought came to my mind. Hey! That looks like a profile if my forehead and nose. It was then that I realized that this was our baby and there was probably a very good explaination for that! I think some curious minds want to know... Logan and I are having a beautiful baby girl! We are both extrememly excited and ready to envite this sweet baby into our home. Tomorrow we will post an update about our week

"Hey, Hey, La, La- We're gonna' build our dreams together"

This week has been full of Sign Language and interpreting. Rachel has been a busy girl running to her various jobs around the city. Also, she spent the weekend at the RID conference in Cincinnati where she took classes on preparing for the NIC test (a crazy hard test for interpreters to be nationally certified).

A surgery she interpreted for confirmed to her that she is a squeamish person. I say "confirmed" because she actually learned of her squeamishness when I asked her to watch an oral surgery I thought was cool. She started watching it, and before long she was crying, shaking, and rocking back and forth in her chair. We turned the video off before it got to the bad part. The next day she had to interpret the surgery, and she knew from the previous night's experience that she best not watch too much of it.

Rachel was not the only person doing Sign Language though. I am actually trying to learn a little bit of it now. I have never really put forth much effort to learn, as I sort of considered it to be "her thing," but I actually became interested for myself this week and she is now tutoring me. I'll never be as good as she is. I'll probably never really be fluent either, but I will have a basic vocabulary and understanding of grammar. So far, I can do pretty well at introducing myself. If anyone tries to talk back to me, I'm in trouble though! I'm excited to learn.

Autumn time is in full swing here in Cleveland. The ground is littered with leaves and the air is cool (bordering on cold). One day, Rachel picked me up from school and announced that she had planned an Autumn date for us. We went out and collected different leaves and stuff, then brought them home to make Autumn wreaths. She also bought apple cider and stuff to make pumpkin pie. It was a fun night.

Speaking of pie, we have made four pies in the last week. We love baking, but we were getting tired of cookies and brownies. At the beginning of the week, we made a strawberry pie that turned out to be delicious. It got eaten so fast that we made two pumpkin pies later in the week. Tonight, we made a "dump pie" where we threw a bunch of random ingredients (chili, fresh veggies, hamburger, etc.) into a pie crust and baked them. It also turned out really good. I don't think that Autumn time is the healthiest season at the Hazard home, but it is certainly one of the yummiest ones!

Here are some pictures of our week. Enjoy!

These first two pictures are when we went leaf collecting for our Autumn Date

Here are the wreaths we made with the leaves. Mine is on the left, and Rachel's is on the right. We've noticed that all of our friend's blogs center around their children. We don't have any children yet, so we'll fill that role for the time being (but I doubt that we'll stop playing once the kids come).

Crazy Week of Recovery

This week has been very eventful, even though I slept through half of it. In the last blog I mentioned that I had begun to have pretty bad back pains. Well, over the weekend they only got worse. By Sunday night I was having extreme back pain that did not ease with medication. I also noticed that my stomach was extremely tender, and it only took a soft brush of my hand to aggravate it. In the beginning I thought the pain in my back was normal due to pregnancy and my stomach sensitivity was round ligament pain, but on Monday morning I called our insurance advice nurse and she told me she thought I was in pre-term labor.

An appointment was set up immediately with my doctor and upon arrival I was admitted in the adjoining hospital. Pre-term labor was ruled out, but the doctors were not sure if I was having a severe kidney infection, kidney stones, or appendicitis. The normal way to diagnose these is through an x-ray, but my pregnancy complicated things. Instead, we had an ultrasound to see if a problem could be found. Nothing conclusive. I was moved into another part of the hospital and put on an IV drip to administer medication, antibiotics, and a fluid drip (all of this amounted in a six pound weight gain overnight!).

The sonographer for the ultrasounds gave us two more pictures of Wiggle bean. This time the baby looked completely different because the bones have begun to harden. I think these are fabulous pictures of Wiggle bean for the Halloween season. Logan will be posting these pictures as soon as they are downloaded. He is also threatening to post pictures he took of me at the hospital.

Throughout the night I had many blood tests and another ultrasound (both times the baby was uncooperative and we still don't know pink or blue). I began to feel better the next day and the doctors were able to rule out appendicitis. I went home on Tuesday night with treatments for both a kidney infection or a kidney stone. Every day this week I have felt progressively better and on Friday the results came back from the lab to show it was indeed an infection.

The best news of the week was that the baby was not affected at all. As my doctor put it "The baby has no idea what mom is going through, he or she is just patiently waiting for the next feeding." Wiggle bean was happily kicking throughout the whole ordeal. This definitely improved my mood! Wiggle bean has become increasingly active over the last week and a half and I am loving every minute of it! Logan felt the baby kick for the first time on Friday! That was a very sweet experience.

I would like to take a minute and thank everyone in our ward and at the dental school that have called, brought over goodies, and inquired about me to Logan. I don't really recall telling anyone what happened, but it seems the grapevine here in Cleveland is very active! Thank you, thank you, thank you. I feel very loved!

Needless to say, we have had a very non active week. Yesterday in-between conference sessions we decided to try and walk to the lake. We made it about three blocks before turning around and driving instead. I feel much better, but my entire stomach and the left side of my back feel like one gigantic bruise.

A few months ago we visited the zoo and noticed the vendors selling funnel cake. We decided that we could do that on our own, and this week we did! We made fabulous funnel cakes on Thursday and we decided to try a recipe for chocolate waffles on Friday morning. This week new recipes were not the healthiest, but they tasted really good!

Logan and I enjoyed watching conference this weekend from the comfort of our home. We didn't go to the church because I can not sit for that long. Ironically the only video version available was the ASL interpreted version. I enjoyed watching the interpreters and was pleasantly surprised to see some of my interpreting friends from BYU.

Life is wonderful in Cleveland!

Hey guys- This is Logan. As promised, here are the pictures of Wiggle Bean making scary faces. Also, as promised, I've included a picture of Beautiful Rachel as she models the local hospital attire. Please take a second to look at our next post as well to hear more about our adventures this week. Rachel has also updated her baby-belly pictures, for those of you who are tracking her "progress."

In this first picture, WB reminds me of Venom (The bad guy on Spider Man 3) with the giant teeth and big eyes. All you can really see here is the face.

In this one, WB is doing the "sad clown" routine. Look at that frown! You can also see both hands curled under the chin- sort of like a hamster.

Here's Rachel eating hospital macaroni and cheese with pudding. Yum. You can't see it, but she has all sorts of tubes and stuff going into her right arm.

This is the funnel cake we made. It actually turned out really, really good!

Here are the chocolate waffles we made. They sort of fell apart when we took them out of the waffle iron, but they tasted good!

That's all for this weeks edition of "The Hazard's Exploits."