Dinosaurs!

We FINALLY bought a membership to Thanksgiving Point. It felt justified - as there are LOTS of things we can do there with Zach. Plus they give all IM Flash employees a 10% discount on memberships! Now how can we turn that down?! So what is the first thing we did with our new membership? Hit up the Museum of Ancient Life, which around here is known as the Dinosaur museum. If you are in the area and haven't visited this place - you are missing out. We were amazed at how much hands on things they have for kids and how much "knowledge" they had for adults. I think we were there about 3 hours today and that was just looking at everything, not having Zach play with all the hands on stuff (he is a bit too young for all the hands on stuff...).

This place is full of dinosaurs and other creatures we never knew existed!

Zach liked looking at them....

And touching them....

And biting them...

Zach and Dustin together weighed as much as a good sized dinosaur!

This one was a hit too....what kid...and adult doesn't like to play in this stuff?

One of several play areas for kids

Three generations of Gray's

Repair Night!

So remember our earlier post about the dryer issue and the Sears repairman? Here is a little update. The part new costs $150. Jen scored a deal on eBay - a person closed their repair shop and was liquidating all the inventory - at COST. So that $150 part we got for $100 (got to love eBay - thank you user finditthere2008). It arrived today and we spent a total of 10 minutes taking out the old part and putting in the new one - how is that for $160 in labor!

It's gonna get FIXED!

This is all that needed replacing - it is actually the ONLY thing not inside the drum area of the dryer

See the burnt resistors in the lower left?

It even scorched the backside

Zach's seal of approval

And the final test...did the sensor dry work? YES! How long did it take to dry? 50 MINUTES!!!! Wahoooooooooooooooooooooooo!!!! So not only did we save $330 - we feel pretty dang good about ourselves!

Tooth #7

Zach has had a runny nose most of the week - he even threw up on Thursday and on Saturday (anyone now how to get that smell out of my carpet - I've used carpet spray and our steam cleaner so far....and I can still smell it!). He hasn't really been eating much lunch all week as well.

When he woke up from his morning nap today he was EXTRA CRANKY - and that is when Jen noticed tooth #7 finally has made its appearance! Zach now has three teeth on the bottom, and four up top. A little tylenol and Zach is back to his normal self and enjoyed playing with the one kid we had in nursery this afternoon at church.

Do you think we are stupid?

A little background - we have been having problems with our dryer lately. The sensor dry stopped working about a year ago...and it has been taking longer and longer to dry. What used to take 40 minutes to dry a full load of clothes today takes 70 minutes. Jen gave Dustin an ultimatum....get it fixed or she's buying a new one....so what does Dustin do? Sets up an appointment with Sears repair (we bought the washer and dryer at Sears 8 years ago) - today is the day the "repairman" showed up.

We were given an 8am-noon window. At 8am a man calls asking what our problem was - Jen explain it....he hums and haws...and says he is in Salt Lake and will be there in a bit. Hang up the phone and roll my eyes. I had a feeling how this was going to go. The man shows up - we re-explain the issue and he immediately says "oh it is probably your thermistor". Then runs the sensor dry and sure enough it shut off after 5 minutes as previously explained. He then says he needs to "call in" to find out if it is the thermistor or the control board.....he sits on hold for about 10 minutes...then just decides to open up the unit to look at the control board. Sure enough you can physically see a couple fried resistors on the control board.

At this point he has no clue that we are both engineers - Jen sneaks away and googles the price of a new control board ($150). He proceeds to give us a price quote for a new control board of $270 plus an additional $160 for labor. Yes - this Sears repair man wanted to charge us $430 to get our sensor dry to start working and cut down the time it takes to dry a full load of clothes. We can buy the part ourselves online for $150 and unplug the old board and plug in the new one for no cost! :) And that is why this post is entitled "Do you think we are stupid?".

How Zach measures up!

We took Zach to the pediatrician today for his 12 month visit. Everything went well as expected. Here is how he is growing:

Height = 30.5 inches = 75th percentile
Weight = 22 pounds 9 ounces = 50th percentile*
Head = 42.9cm = 75th percentile

* The weight....when we went to the doctor three weeks ago for his ear infection he weighed 23 pounds 1 ounce...so in three weeks he lost a half a pound. Odd - but the doctor didn't seem concerned.

Only one shot at this appointment!

Party Time!

Today our baby turned ONE YEAR OLD! We can hardly believe it......as we woke up around 7:30am this morning we reminisced what we were doing one year ago at that exact moment. Both scared and excited at the same time - waiting in the operating room for Dr. Smith to come in the room to bring Zachary into this world via c-section. Now one year later....we have the most amazing child (all parents say this...now we know why!).

Physically we can tell Zach has Jen's eyes, Jen's scowl, and possibly Jen's giant feet....Zach also has Dustin's nose, Dustin's smile and Dustin's curiosity on how things work and how to make it "better". We wouldn't change Zachary one bit and look forward to the rest of our lives with him.

So today - Zachary Dustin Gray is ONE YEAR OLD! No rules today - it is his way! Zach's Grandma and Grandpa Twogood drove in from California. His Grandpa Gray drove in from Colorado. Great Aunt Pat, Great Aunt Mary and Great Uncle Leo and some friends in Utah helped us celebrate! Now for the pictures.......

Jen had a local bakery make this cake - she actually designed it herself! Too bad they didn't follow directions completely - the frosting was suppose to be chocolate not white...but it still looked and TASTED yummy!

Zach got quite the haul of presents (see them behind him!) - thanks everyone!

Zach didn't quite get the whole "blow out the candle" deal - even though we practiced....

No holding back

Yeah - I am the King - pound it...

We were so PROUD! He demolished the cake!
The bath after the cake - see the cake floaters?
We had two people taking pictures and have way too many to post here - so if you want to see all of them view our photo album.

Zach's 1 year formal photos

We took Zach out today for his one year old formal portraits. We were SUPER EXCITED because we brought a cake and some balloons....and we let him go to town and caught it all on camera. This was his first cake experience.....tomorrow will bring the second cake experience when we have his birthday party. Here are a few of our favorites!

Our newest birth control

Now that I have your attention! :) We both got called to be nursery workers at church - for those of you non-mormons out there...basically we get to babysit the 18-24 month old kids for two hours every other Sunday while the adults are attending other church classes. Lucky us! Normally the kids have to be 18 months to go into the nursery - Zach gets to go in with us. Looking at Zach who is just barely turning 12 months old and these other kids look so much bigger...even though they only have 6 months on him! So today was quite the adventure for us...we had about 8 kids we were watching. Dustin enjoyed playing with all the toys, Zach just yelled really loudly when ever a kid would get near him......Jen...well...Jen ran ground control and kept the kids from crying cause they wanted to go back with their "Mommies".

Weekend project

Adding cabinet hardware has been on our home project "to do" list for a while. We FINALLY picked out some knobs and pulls and bought them last week - the delay has been agreeing on a style. In the end I think Dustin just gave in to Jen and let her pick out what she wanted. We wanted to have the hardware added before Zach started going crazy and opening cabinets so we could "lock" them. Turns out adding hardware to our cabinets actually just made Zachary more curious - and we didn't think about the fact that he can pull the actual drawers open now.....whoops....I guess we are still learning about this parenting thing!

We even got a video of Zach "exploring"

a SPOON!

Zachary learned how to use a spoon!