Grant Thomas Goodman

As stated in the previous post, Grant Thomas Goodman was brought into this world on July 24th. He's been a very sleepy baby and doesn't like to whine much, which is good. He's so sleepy though that he'd rather sleep than eat and that's getting his little liver into a some trouble. But, he's been doing better in the last couple of days. Mom is doing great. We've got people bringing us dinners and it's very appreciated. Heeeeereeee's Grant!!


Mommy and Grant the day after his birth.


Good ol' Grant, sleeping as usual


Mommy, Adam, Logan and Grant hungry for some attention for Mom after spending most of the day with Grandma and Daddy


Grant 2 days after he was born


This picture pretty much sums up how Logan (left) and Adam (right) feel about baby Grant. Logan is like "who in the heck does this kid think he is?" and Adam loves him "this much."

Baby Grant

Well. I brought the boys home from the hospital tonight after my wife gave birth to a beautiful boy. His name is Grant. We already call him Grunt. I have no pictures because she's still at the hospital and I left the camera there. He weighed 8 pounds and 6 ounces and is 20" even. And, he doesn't cry much. I'll post some pictures when we get them. Mom and baby Grant are both healthy and in great shape. Woohoo!!

Me and my brothers enter a dance contest!!

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An Announcement

Erin and I are expecting number 3. And guess what!! It's another boy. We're thrilled. He's due around July 18th!!! Yahhhhoooooo!!! Erin and I both thought it was going to be a girl, but Adam called it the whole time. What a kid!!!

A September to Remember

Well, if anyone can remember back to September, that's where I left off. That was back when it was warm and sunny and you had to get into the water to cool off...or else (in Arizona at least!!) This will show our lake trips during the months of September. Pictured above is Erin (my brother Vance's wife) and their trusty sidekick Bailey!! They are sitting in our boat waiting for some action.

This is my brother Caleb and his lovely young bride of about 6 months at that time, Sarah. Tubing is one of our family's national pasttimes. The goal is to see how quickly you can whip the boat around so that you hit your own wake and send the tube's occupant's flying!! Fun fun!

This is Erin's sister Genie and her husband Rugbert (or Robert). They came down from Provo to experience an AZ Lake trip. Robert likes to wear those silly boat hats that were popular back in the '60s. Genie sticks with the traditional baseball caps.

Here we have Erin (Vance's wife) again telling us where to go stick it...right before her wakeboarding prowess takes over.

Here's Jeff Mitchell of Casa Grande. He's a guy I went to Dental School with and him and his daughter (Hayley, pictured below) came with us to cool off a bit. He's holding Logan (my #2).

And there's the ever-adorable Hayley chilling on the boat waiting for the next trip.

Next, we have my brother Vance attempting a back/front/sideways (??) flip. I don't think he's gonna' make it, you'd better just cover your head and wait for impact!!
Okay, okay. If my brother tries it, I have to try it too. It looks like a little better form, but unfortunately, my flip attempt met with the same awful fate as my brother's.
There we go!! That's a nice jump. Wakeboarding is also another great pasttime that our family loves. It has definitely overtaken slalom skiing, which is what we kind of grew up on as everyone's favorite.

Here's my son Logan again!! He really looks like he enjoys the water, doesn't he? About 3 months ago, he loved the water and Adam couldn't stand it. Now they've switched places.

Here's Adam and I riding the wake surfer, just waiting for the perfect swell...It never came, but we were dragged behind the boat for a while. Adam really liked it!

To cap off the summer, I love this picture of Adam mid-splash, having fun with my little bro Vance. The lake is a terrific place to go in the middle of the summer in AZ and it's a lifesaver with the kids. It's one of the true beauties of the AZ landscape.

July Activities

Ye Olde Renegade

This is my trusty quad. It's a Can-Am Renegade and it's a really fun quad to drive. We took this and my wife's quad up to Richfield, UT to ride the hundreds and hundreds of miles of trails around the mountains there.

I went with my dad and my brother and we met my sister there. My brother Vance is in the middle and my sister Aubrey is on the right. Somehow, I'm the only one that catches all the dirt on my face. Notice how Vance still looks pretty happy?!! This was less than an hour before his big accident on my wife's 2-day old quad that pretty much totalled it along with a couple of his fingers.

The scenery is very green and beautiful with many lakes and meadows spread throughout. There's my bro again taking a picture of his own.

This is a picture of my dad and brother again planning the day's ride. That's my wife's orange and black quad in the background there pre-accident.

I don't remember exactly, but this might have been the ride into the hospital in Richfield (we were camping in the mountains about 30 miles away). My dad doesn't really have a Bell's Palsy. It's just a face he likes to make sometimes. I wish we'd thought to take a picture of his dislocated fingers, but we were a little in shock to do anything but stare.




A few weeks later, we had a big double family reunion with the Goodmans and Busbys. Our grandmas were twins and it was their 90th birthday celebration. We went up to Cyclone Lake in the White Mountains of Arizona. There were a couple hundred people there and I was assigned to take pictures, but I won't bore you with a bunch of my cousins. Erin and I were able to bring the kids and we stayed in a log cabin on a nearby Indian reservation. It was a lot of fun for all.

Here's Adam in front of the lake that nobody was allowed to swim in because "the indians drank the water downstream". Although, you were allowed to put fishing boats and other foreign objects in there. We cheated a bit and let the kids put their feet in. They ended up splashing each other and we had to take their clothes off.

Logan constantly had a handful of rocks and was always throwing them in the water to see the splash.

I thought this was kind of a cool shot at twilight (the best time of the day!)

This was another action shot of one of my distant cousins showing off one of the crawdads he caught from the lake.

Here's Erin and me in front of the lake before the splashing and soakedness began. We had a great time out there and it was so great to see (almost) all of our family up there in "them mountains over there."

To end this up, we snuck into town one day in Show Low/Pinetop area and test drove what Adam calls "a go-kart". He's quite obsessed with any type of off-road vehicle (almost as obsessed as I am!!), but at the same time he's hesitant to get in them himself. It took quite a while to talk him into this picture.

August First, Then July

Alright, well June was easy. Our office has been open for a few months now. I should probably take some pictures of it. It's pretty nice. Not quite as homey as our other office, but it's okay. Anyway, I uploaded a bunch of pictures and realized they were from August, so August first, then July...I had a Dental Conference in Santa Barbara, so we decided to take off one extra day and take the kiddos to Disneyland in Anaheim. Is that a good idea for a 1 and 2 year old? Well, we'll just let the pictures do the talking...Here's Logan at the hotel pool. He wasn't so sure about this whole water thing. He walked around and around the pool, but was content never to get in.


Adam, on the other hand, couldn't get enough of the water...as long as daddy was holding onto him extremely tightly. Smile!!!


I can't be sure, but it looks like they traveled to ancient Egypt during my conference as I know those plants and edifices aren't indigenous to California.

I don't think they went to THE Legoland, but there were some massive Lego structures in DisneyTown. This giraffe looked great until you got down to the feet. There was some type of squatting formation on one of its feet...


Logan has found his perch!!


Okay, on to actual Disneyland. Wow!!! This is pretty much the only picture we have of Disneyland. And that's about how long we stayed before the kids began to get restless. We actually rode the Dumbo ride and ate lunch there too, but then Logan was done!! So, we went back to the hotel.


Erin and the kids after about 2 hard hours of 95+ degree weather and 90% humidity at Disneyland. Not bad.


That night, we stayed in a different hotel with another swimming pool. This is Adam and I playing in the pool.

This is at the Santa Barbara Beach right across from my convention. Logan is a private person and gets really upset when the paparazzi tries to take his picture. I am, of course, up on the latest fashion craze with my BYU choker.

Once again, Adam had a lot better time than Logan in and around the water.

Finally, to end up the month of August, we got to take the youth in our ward on a Youth Lake Trip. CJ here had almost as good a time as I did.

Ode to June

Uhhh, well. It looks like not a whole lot happened in June. We were so busy doing stuff to get our new office open that we didn't have to time to take any trips or even take any pictures. Actually, I found about 10 pictures and they're all pretty much the same thing. Every Sunday, we go to my dad's house and have family dinner there with most of my family. It's a great family tradition that I hope we can also share with our kids when we're older.

This is Adam with his cousin Aiden in our backyard. This was also the Jeep that was hiding the Rattlesnake from the previous post. It's so hard to get them to look at the camera at the same time.

They all did a pretty good job of looking at the camera here though. Out of the 10 or so pictures I took, this was about the only one where we had all of them looking relatively at the camera. This is the sidewalk next door to my dad's house where we have our family dinners. From left to right, Logan, Adam, Kyla (Alberts) and Jayden (Alberts). Kyla and Jayden are their cousins.

Intermssion--Rattlesnake Alert

Oh boy oh boy oh boy. I was going to continue on for the month of June tonight, but look what we discovered when I got home from work today.

An Arizona Rattlesnake was coiled up underneath my sons Power Wheels Jeep. As soon as he moved the Jeep forward a little bit, my wife was greeted by this little guy!!

Luckily, he had eaten pretty recently and was pretty groggy. In fact, he didn't even move until after I'd been home for about 20 minutes. Then, he started looking around.

So, we called the Fire Dept. They came and took the snake away in order to relocate it and while they were at our house, they deputized Adam and Logan with some badges. They were pretty excited.

Logan wasn't too worried about the whole thing!! He had his big brother watching over him!!!

MAY (Part 2)

Okay, I had to change computers because the rest of the May pictures are on this computer. This month, we take a look at a business/family trip to Vegas and delve into the concept of "rodding." I also got a new camera so that our blog would just look that much better. Anyway, we're off!!This is my dad and Logan when we arrived in Las Vegas at the Palazzo hotel where the conference was being held at. It was about midnight when we got there, so my dad...uhhh, the kids were pretty tired.

Here's a little picture of our room. It's definitely the nicest hotel I've ever stayed in and probably the nicest one I'll ever stay in.

While I was at the conference, the kids went to the animal park in The Mirage and they had a good time. Here's Adam on a statuesque liger!!

This is Erin and I in front of some crazy fountain if front of one of the hotels. My dad babysat for us one evening allowing us to go to dinner and to walk around the strip for a while and someone was nice enough to take our picture and not steal the camera.

Here's Logan in some mysterious black velvet portal. I'm honestly not sure what or where this is, but I'm sure it's some place that Erin took the kids while I was at my seminar in Vegas. After this, it was time to hit the road.

But, before we got too far out of town, we had to go by the Las Vegas temple and take some pictures in front of it. This is a gorgeous temple, especially at night.

Here's a parting night shot from across the street.


On our way out, I took a bunch of pictures of the new dam bridge they're building to bypass Hoover Dam. This is a truly incredible structure that looks about 1/5th of the way done so far. The picture doesn't really do it justice as this is a massive structure. If you ever go to Vegas, you'll likely have the pleasure of seeing it as it takes about an hour to get through all the traffic and checkpoints around it. And finally, a picture to hopefully make you laugh.


In my family, my dad is known as a "rodder!" That's Goodman/Brown speak for one who makes a rod out of everything. Of course, a rod is anything that is jerry-rigged together or made to serve as something its inventors never meant it to be used for. My dad is pretty much a professional rodder. This is something he does in his personal as well as professional life (when patients can't afford the best alternative, he rods something up to last them for as long as possible.) This is the IKEA in Tempe. We had to drive over 100 freeway miles to get all this stuff home. Most of it was furniture for our newly-opened office. Amazingly enough, his iron "rod" faith got us through once again as nothing was lost or damaged on the way home.

MAY (Part 1)

WAZZUP?!! This month, we took a couple of little trips. We went to the zoo and later (next post), we got to go to Las Vegas for a, guess what, dental convention!!! More on that later.

"Okay Jayden, you sneak around their base and distract them and I'll lob a grenade inside and we'll take 'em down!!" 'Time for dinner Adam!!' "Not now Mom, I'm busy!!"

This is a little trip to the zoo. Logan has been holding his poo for the last 4 days, but I think today's the day!!

Here's Adam's back side with a view of the Lion and Lioness just beyond the 3-foot thick glass.

Well, hello!! I've gotta' get me one of these in our backyard. Mom would never find me.

MOHAWK MONKEY SEE, MOHAWK MONKEY DO!!

APRIL

Okay then. On to April. This month is highlighted with one out-of-town trip up to Phoenix for a Dental Convention. The kids came up on the last day and we all got to go to the Children's Science Museum. Strangely enough, the little kid's water fountain/get wet exhibit is the first thing you see when you walk in.
This "wet" exhibit had some unexpected and slightly shocking consequences...

So, Adam got to walk around the rest of the museum in his skivvies!! It didn't seem to bother him too much. "Hello Ladies!!

There was a new dinosaur exhibit where they allowed pantless aspiring ballerinas. Adam was all over that one!!

Finally, something daddy can do!! This was a little wheelchair race. Man, that kid was sorry he was ever born!!! Erin didn't think I should make little kids cry at the Children's Science Museum. Oh yeah, well back in '83...

We'll end with a couple of pictures from the month of April that I thought were cute. This is Logan at the PlayPlace at the Tucson Mall.

Here's Adam in our backyard. He's been trying to ride bikes, trikes and whatever else has wheels since before he could walk. He really flies on his little bike!!

And to conclude, here's Logan getting ready to go 4-byin' in the mountains.

MARCH

Well, it was my niece Kyla's birthday and we all celebrated at little kid birthday headquarters PETER PIPER PIZZA!!!

Adam and I rode on the carousel a few times. It was a very tense time for Adam. And you can see my little bro in the background always posing for a picture.

Here is my dad and Logan enjoying the festivities. One of Logan's favorite things to do is punish the floor by hitting it with his face. He more specifically went for a KO with his upper lip on this one.

Here's Adam on the game voted "Most Difficult to Get Adam to share with other Kids in Line" ATV ride. He loves quads, tractors, trucks, go-karts, motorcycles, etc. with a passion until he gets a chance to ride a real one. He then gets scared and runs to Mommy!!

Finally, this is a picture of our backyard in Tucson. Yep, that's real grass!! and about a half-size soccer goal. The kids love their smoothies. Logan has the classic worried look on his face that is almost a permanent fixture. Gotta' love 'em!!

6 months of updates a-comin' up!!

Alright, well here we go again. I need to put a few thousand pictures into an entry or two. Maybe I'll do one entry for a month unless it was a slow month. Okay, here goes...

Computer Malfunction

Hello All!! Sorry for no updates in last couple of months, but I have a confession to make. I am not a computer expert. I thought I was or could be, but I'm definitely not. Probably the main reason that there have been no forthcoming updates is because I thought I would get my computer ready for Vista by making it a little faster by installing a new motherboard in a new case with more memory. I'm pretty good at following instructions, but it's been well over a month and the computer is still sitting there. Oh, it's all back together with its nice new motherboard, more memory and a nice video card all in a shiny new case with more cooling and ventilation. The problem is that, well, it won't turn on. So, all of our pictures and everything is sitting on those hard drives that, again, won't turn on. So, there's a guy in my ward who's a whizz with computers and I'm his home teacher and he said he'd help me out, so maybe soon. Very soon. A lot has happened and I'm excited to report. See you soon!!

The Desert Museum

Wow, two new posts in one day!! Last weekend, we went to the Arizona Sonora Desert Museum which lies in the mountains west of Tucson. It's called a museum, but it's actually more like a Desert zoo!! Anyway, my mom and I took the kids to it a few days ago and we took a couple of pictures.

Here's Adam in a cave at the Museum. Man, they grow up fast.

I'm holding Logan while Adam's sipping on his smoothie about 5 feet away from a mountain lion (through the glass behind us).

This is on the other side of the glass. My mom and Adam stand in front of the mountain lion habitat with the wiley cat right above them, ready to perch!!

Alright, Adam and Logan are posing in front of the ground squirrels!!

"So you see, this plate of rice is like the evolutionary soup that we came from. We all started as single-celled organisms that resembled the shape of this very rice..."

"I love crackers!!"

And finally, I wanted to put this video in because it's one of the funniest things I've ever seen. I think it's even funnier for me because my 2-year old (up until a couple of weeks ago) was deathly afraid of this thing. I wanted to get some video of Logan (~9 mos.) chasing Adam (~2 years), but alas he's no longer afraid of it. Anyway, enjoy!!

Here Comes the Bride (and Groom)!!

Okay, okay. So I still haven't developed the pictures from the disposable camera from the zoo trip. It might never happen. I've just gotten too used to the convenience of digital. Anyway, my brother got married a few weeks ago and I had a few pictures from that, so here goes.This is my youngest brother Caleb and his new wife, and also my chairside assistant, Sarah. Her dress has a flowing, life-like train of human hair. It's all the rage in Tucson right now.

This is Adam who used to like to ride his bike with the handlebars backwards. He has since learned the correct way. This was actually a week before the wedding.

This is Erin and Adam at the Costco Home store right after the luncheon. Adam loves to golf...or do pretty much anything with any type of ball.

To end this post, here's my grandma Ethel and I. She is one of my favorite people in the world. I lived with her my Freshman year of college (her house was right by the U of A) and we were able to share many good times together. Congratulations Caleb and Sarah on your new union. Now, get busy and start working on some cousins for my kids to play with!!!

Call the zoo!!

Wow. It appears that everyone went to the Phoenix zoo a couple of Fridays ago. We actually went on the Saturday after (it's been a few weeks now) for the first time. We made the drive up and got to go to the zoo. Adam, Logan, my mom and I drove up and experienced the zoo for the first time. Whoa, it's a lot better than the Tucson zoo. Most of the animals were up and at 'em too. Anyway, I'll post some pictures as soon as I can.

He Will Be Remembered Always

For all of my adult life, this great man has been the prophet and leader of the church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. His actions and his life have truly been an example to me and my family. While I feel a certain sadness that he is gone, I am also glad that he can be with his sweetheart whom he spoke so highly of and missed so dearly after she departed this life. I will always remember and honor him as the prophet, father, and husband he was. Through direct guidance from the Lord Jesus Christ, he has been the leader of the church for many years. He has finally fulfilled his mission and endured to the end, something he often talked about. He is an inspiration to me and all who ever heard his voice. We love you, President Hinckley.

Well, here are a few pictures of us that should have been on our Christmas Card, but it never got sent out. So, please enjoy. We had a great Christmas and our kids got everything they could ever want and more. I think we'll take next year off with the whole Christmas presents thing. However, I was a proud father on Christmas day when my dad asked my stepsister's 2 1/2 and 4 year-old whose birthday it was that day and they didn't know (now that's a weird thing to be proud of!!). Okay, well my son Adam, who just barely turned 2 answered quickly "Baby Jesus!" It was a wonderful moment and the first of many proud fatherly moments to come. I love my wife and kids with all my heart.