The Cramer Family

We went and had ice cream at ColdStone last night. We figured that we didn’t get out on Monday as a family, so we were going to be flexible and go out on a different night.

The boys love sprinkles on everything. Of course they were going crazy when given all the different choices of toppings, running back and forth in front of the counter chosing each topping as their favorite. In the end we went with the topping that they mentioned the most number of times. Are we living in a democracy or what?

Very good ice cream and even though they had a lot of sugar in them they still went to bed. Of course we could hear them talking for an hour after putting them down, but they didn’t come out and eventually fell asleep.

Last night the boys decided that they wanted to go to the library. I don’t know where they got that idea, but once it was in there, there was no way to get it out. So in an effort to promote good habits and too give Tammy a little bit of a break I took them to the library.

They loved it. There are computers set up just for kids that have a bunch of fun games installed. This way they can practice their clicking without damaging daddy’s precious computer. We were also able to pick up a new dinosaur movie and some books about dinosaurs. And besides a brief explosion when I told Owen he couldn’t scream in the library, the boys were very well behaved.

When we first introduced the boys to coloring we bought them a box of dollar store crayons. We were living the poor student life and if it could be found at the dollar store we were all over it.

The crayons were poor quality.

That’s an understatement and a half, but in the interest of sounding somewhat educated that’s the phrase that I’m going to stick with. Everytime you even touched one of those cheap sticks of wax it would break. Looking at it wrong would bread it. Coloring on the bench in church would end with Tammy and me hunting through all the cracks on the bench for every last scrap of crayon.

Now that I’m making a little more money we splurged and bought a box of Crayola Crayons. What a difference a buck or two makes! Oh don’t get me wrong, we can still break the crayons, they aren’t bars of iron. But it actually takes some thinking and planning on the boys part. Were before it was unfortunate accident, now it’s malicious intent.

But we do love to color.

I was able to chat with Scott today on Messenger! He was housesitting for the Mission President so he was able to use the Prez’s computer. It was pretty cool to here from him and know that everything is going well. It will be great to have that boy home to play with our boys.

In other website related news I’ve installed the Spam Karma plugin for Word Press and let me tell you I’m loving it. I was getting hundreds of ads for online poker and texax holdem, but this thing is just wiping them out. I get an email for every 10 spam that are caught and so far I’ve gotten 5 emails! So that’s a lot of spam, but not one false positive (there aren’t that many comments anyway) and no necessity to delete the crap that comes in. I’m loving it!

Update: It seems like the comment form is just completely closed! That’s not a good solution at all. I will look into that tonight

The other night I ventured out to get copies of a flyer for the Ward Christmas Party. Because of my own stupidity and procastination I didn’t leave the house until 11 pm. I decided to take Chloe with me in the Honda because she needed to go out and she loves car rides.

I’m used to taking Chloe around in the van which doesn’t have power windows. So naturally I wanted to try out the Civic and get her head hanging out that window without me having to lean all the way across the car and try to roll the window down.

Well we were driving along as happy as can be, when I slowed down to make a left hand turn. As I’m making the turn I happen to look to me left and catch a brief glimpse of Chloe’s butt as she went sailing out the window! She had been moving back and forth on the arm rest and had managed to press down on the window button, rolling the window all the way down!

Not really putting together what happened I slowed to a stop and flipped on my hazard lights. Luckily it was late enough at night that road was completely empty. As I sat in the middle of the oncoming traffic lane I started calling out to Chloe. She caming running in front of the car looking very confused. I opened the door and she came running in, looking no worse for wear. I then continued on to Kinko’s, with the windows now locked.

The Kinkos was packed and only staffed by two employees of questionable intelligence. The laptop printing station was not working and I was told the only media they could accept for printing was a floppy disc. A FLOPPY DISC! Do you remember those? Me Neither.

I ended up going to BYU to get the flyer printed. Turns out the copy machines don’t really run that fast when you are doing 100 copies and that paper cutters are harder to work than you’d think. But in the end I got the flyers done and they were passed out yesterday. Was it worth it?

For several months now the boys have been able to climb into their own cribs. In fact, it is something they demand. If you try to put them in the crib you are going to be in big trouble, I’ll tell you that right now. Now even though they’ve been able to climb in, we’ve tried to convince them that they can’t climb out without our help. And it’s been working so far. We’ve been able to use their cribs for timeouts and not worry about them coming down.

Owen has seen through the deception. His crib doesn’t lower as much as Braeden’s so he has figured out that he can get out of the crib on his own. Last night after we had put them to bed we shut the door and were waiting at the top of the stairs to listen for any crying. There was a lot of creaking from Owen’s crib, and then suddenly THE DOOR TO THEIR ROOM OPENED! Yep, Owen had gotten out on his own. Thinking it might be a fluke we put him back in the crib, but you guessed it, he got out again. I don’t remember what finally kept him in there, but it was an exciting night.

I’m having conflicting feelings right now. On the one hand I’m proud of my boy for growing, developing and bettering himself. On the other, we are losing the humane baby prison that has served us so well. Now we are going to have to tie doors shut or buy handcuffs (This is all just a joke, before I get in trouble). The thing about twins is, as soon as one has learned to do something, the other one isn’t far behind. I think they have nightly debriefing sessions to see how the day went.

O: “How are we doing on the dog?”

B: “I got three kicks and two body slams. How is your progress in the fridge?”

O: “I was able to pull a full pitcher of juice onto the floor but I think there is room for improvement, the floor didn’t get nearly as sticky as I thought it would.”

B: “K, you keep working on that and I’m going to try to get some ink.”

I’ve been getting a lot of comment spam lately so I’ve turned the commenting to administrative approval. I am impressed with Wordpresses ability to catch the majority of spam but after letting a few online gambling things through I am making the change.

Braeden and Owen have the cutest little phrase. They have not quite figured out the distinction between “you” and “me” and so when we are getting ready to go up to bed one of them will turn to me and say “Carry you?” meaning that they want me to carry them up to bed. It’s just really cute having a little tiny kid ask if you want to be carried

I haven’t been keeping up in the blog as I should. I got a job at Theradoc that has kept me pretty busy. I am driving up to Salt lake every day for class in the morning then I stay and work in downtown till the evening. It is a really interesting job and I work a lot with decision support and expert systems.

I was reading my mission journal last night and I was so glad to have that record of the things that I did in Ukraine. The memory is not always there so it’s nice to have the reminders. I will try to make this blog work more like my journal so I can have the record of what is going on.

We are enjoying our digital camera and I hope that you’ve enjoyed the pictures that have been put up. Many more to come.

We sold the iPod that I got from the Gratis site. Go eBay!! With the money that we got from that sale I purchased a Sony DSC-W1 and we are loving it! The worst part is the small memory card that came with it. I mean 32MB, who would ever only need that! But we are loving the small size and the quality of the pictures. It even takes short movies so we are going to get some of those out there too. Now I need a better way to get them out there quickly so that there are actually useful to people. Is flickr the way to go?

Here’s some samples that we’ve taken so far

and of course a movie

Drinking Ice Cream Requires Windows Media Player to view

Well another week has gone by, and we have figured out the ward, and the area a little better. It is actually really cool to be in a new area, and both missionaries, brand new to the area. We are both really excited about the work, so it it really cool to see. We are still working hard on those letters that were sent out, and we had some missionaries come to help us with that. I never thought I would have not enough time to do doors, but it has been amazing. For example, tuesday got let in three times, wednesday two times, and again two times yesterday. It is unreal. So we set out to doors and we get let in, and arent making too much progress through the 500 letters. But it is way good. My companion is a stud. We push each other and work real hard together. We get along really well too. He played baseball for UVSC, and we definitely would have been buddies at home. So it is a little bit of a change, and I know we are going to tear it up out here. Alot went down this week, on tuesday, we went up to mission home to hear a fireside that they put on there, and I got to meet an investigator we found in Bremen, and take him up there. It was sweet. Torston is a stud, and I know he has a testimony, but he has some fear for the church, so this was a good intermediate step for him to take. We also had some good times, trying to find addresses, streets, cities, it was a blast. We are trying to visit, or just figure out all the addresses, and contacts the other missionaries left behind. So everything is going great here, we are working hard, and making the best of the time we got here. Love you all, and take it easy.
Elder Cramer

“The good word of God with which we must nourish is the simple doctrine of the gospel.”