Go Tribe!

One of the perks of going to dental school is that sometimes someone puts together a great activity for everyone and their families to enjoy. This last Friday, a group that connects the significant others of the dental students were able to get cheap tickets for a Cleveland Indians game. Needless to say, we jumped on the opportunity. Cleveland has a team in all the big leagues except one. We've got the Indians in MLB, the Cavaliers in the NBA, and the Browns in the NFL. Unfortunately for us, since we both love soccer so much, there is no MLS team. But we have decided that we'll do the best we can to become fans of the local teams...though it may be difficult to support the ever-dreadful Browns (and besides, their team colors are horrible! Who would want to wear an orange hat besides a hunter?)!

Dave picked up the tickets a couple weeks early at school and then we counted down the days. Mindy has been to a couple San Diego Padres games back in the day, but Dave has never been to a Major League game and was very excited. We headed to downtown once Mindy got home from work. We decided to go to the Tower City mall to find a place to eat. We settled on the Hard Rock Cafe and both ordered huge 10 oz. burgers. We were both surprised that Dave could finish his, must have been the bacon.

We then headed to Jacob's Field for the game. Earlier in the day, when Dave looked up how to get to the stadium, he thought he read that we were suppose to enter at Gate E. Well, after circling around the whole stadium, he realized that he must have been mistaken and that Gate E didn't exist. So we went in Gate A only to discover that we had to go around to the opposite side of the stadium to get to our seats. We finally got to our seats at the bottom of the first inning.
Our seats were in the mezzanine in Right Field. We had a great view of the stadium and were surrounded by 180 other dental students and their families.

It was a great night. We stuck around til the 6th inning when the Indians hit two homers in a row and then get load the bases. We decided to leave when the A's manager finally decided to switch pitchers. We didn't want to be stuck in traffic so decided it was best to leave then. We had a great time and look forward to next season when we'll hopefully be able to get tickets to when the Yankees come to town since they're Dave's favorite team. But until then, Go Tribe!

White Coat Ceremony

One of the fun things about starting dental school is all the Pomp and Circumstance the school tacks on to everything. Isn't all this stuff suppose to be for when you graduate? Dave started orientation on the 31st of July. He'd go at 8am and return around 5pm and was given all sorts of information on the ADA's Code of Ethics, CWRU Student Handbook, Student Health Services, blah, blah, blah. It turned out to be 4 days of excruciatingly boring speeches, ordering really expensive glasses, and "read this form, sign and date it, pass it to the end of your row."

There were things that did break all the monotony. At the end of the first day all the new students got to open several boxes that contained their new tablet pc and its corresponding accessories. Everyone was excited and couldn't wait to actually use them in a couple days. Trying on and ordering scrubs was another exciting (and time-consuming) process. Everyone that knows Dave might be able to recall how excited he was to go to dental school...so that he could were scrubs to school everyday. He only mentioned it about 5 times in every conversation he's had since last December in case anyone of you didn't get to enjoy his excitement.

The final event of the week was the White Coat Ceremony. It was held at the Amasa Stone Chapel on Case's campus. It's a neat building that's been there since the early 20th century and has plagues about old university presidents and students that served in wars. It featured speeches from the Dean of the dental school, a few faculty, and a guest speaker. The new students all sat together on the left side of the chapel, while their families sat on the right side and struggled to stay awake (Mindy included).

After the speeches were over, the first-years went up one-by-one and had white coats placed upon them representing their new station in life: student doctors. Once everyone had their white coat, they all stood and recited a dental professional creed that none of them will ever remember but they sure looked cool doing saying it together in their new white coats. This ended the ceremony and the new students went out to the steps of an adjacent building to have their class picture taken. Here's to the beginning of 4 fun and stress-filled years!

Home Improvement

As many of you may know, we moved into our new home over a month ago. The house is in great shape! All that needed to be done was simply move in and unpack...Well, unpacking certainly takes a lot longer than we ever wanted it to, and we're newly married and really do not have that much to unpack. But after many hours of moving boxes from here to there, putting furniture together, moving back the boxes to here from there, we finished the main floor.

As mentioned earlier, the house is in great shape. However, some of the paint is not to our liking and the master bedroom had some nasty old-lady wallpaper (two different flower patterns to be exact). Well, we started the long removal process the day we moved in all the boxes from the moving truck. Much thanks to Jeff Jackson for his contributions. The de-wallpapering process took all evening of everyday for the week. During this time, we slept in the adjacent pink and salmon colored bedroom.

Once the wallpaper was finally off, and the lovely process of cleaning the walls off all the glue and glue remover was complete, we were finally able to start painting! Mindy taped off everything and we put on the primer and finally the paint. To entertain ourselves during the painting and drying of the paint, we watched several football themed movies seeing as how we were getting ready to watch the first BYU football game of the season. Rudy, Remember the Titans, and the Italian Job (okay, we know, but We Are Marshall wasn't on DVD yet) helped us get the job done until gametime.
We've since cleaned up all the painting stuff and moved into our master bedroom. We love it! We will be sure to post some completed pictures as soon as we take them, but we still have a couple finishing touches before that. We finished our unpacking a week or so ago and it's been great. The office is all set up, closets are full, and now we can finally relax. That is until next summer...

Ultrasound

So I had another ultrasound today. The doctors wanted to try and get a better idea of how big the baby was. I am just a few days shy of being one month away from my due date, and the baby as of today is already measuring 8lbs! I don't go to the doctor until tuesday of next week and we'll talk about what this all means.
The picture is of Douglas with his hands up next to his face. He was sucking on one of his hands during the ultrasound. Not his thumb, but the back of his hand.
Love you

"...Your Call is Very Important to Us..."

Hey, y'all. Sorry it has taken so long for us to add to this. We're still in the process of unpacking and what-not. I don't have a lot of time, I have a Perio final tomorrow and should be studying for that instead of playing around on the internet. Just wanted to stop by and tell you that we will be adding our two-bits every now and then. Til next time. Word.

Rob & Diedre Freebie

Photo and video editing at www.OneTrueMedia.com

Figured I would post a melange of shots from various events for Rob and Diedre's family. Hopefully this will serve as a gentle nudge and inspiration for them to join in and bless us with pics and stories of their own. Hope you guys get on soon! Would love to see Caleb soccer pics, Rob pulling faces pics, and lots more of Diedre and Peter...Love you guys, Jason

BYU LOSES AGAIN!!!

Total bummer of a Saturday night, especially after a darn fun day at the Utah State Fair! Dacia, Jonah, Jon-Jon, Spencer and I greatly enjoyed our time at the Fair with Mom, Dad, Emily, and Stephen! Spencer is doing great, and his skin is starting to clear up. Jonah loves the first grade, and Jon-Jon is driving us crazy with Jonah gone all day....

Utah State Fair

Make an on-line slideshow at www.OneTrueMedia.com

Blog Hog

Photo and video editing at www.OneTrueMedia.com

First off I want to apologize that I've kind of messed up the blog. All the archives have been moved to the bottom of the screen, and the only way I can get them back up is if I delete my last two blogs, or until we all blog enough to get my last two blogs off the original pull up screen. But since I've put so much time into the slideshows, I figured that I'd rather you guys see them and then we can delete them in a week or so, or wait it out until they move on. Either way, atleast all my hard labor of putting together the slideshow isn't completely wasted. hee hee
We went on a Sunday drive today and were determined to make it to Rhode Island before turning around. All of the pictures are from while we were still in Connecticut. We took a road that followed the coast and saw some pretty cool old seaside towns. We even drove through a little town called Mystic. Have any of you ever seen 'Mystic Pizza' with Julia Roberts? We saw the pizza place.
Found a small lighthouse museum where we stopped to eat our picnic lunch and took all of the pictures. It was a beautiful day. So clear and the temperature was perfect. Got back in the car and drove over the state line into Rhode Island and decided we'd better start heading home. Most of the beaches along the route we took are private waterfront home properties. Not much for the public, but it was still fun to drive.
It's getting late. Love you all

Day at the Fair

Make an on-line slideshow at www.OneTrueMedia.com

Jonathan was on call today, but we decided to take a chance and go to the nearby Orange County Fair in hopes that he wouldn't get called as soon as we paid to get in. We got super lucky, he didn't get called the whole time we were there, and we had a fun day at the fair. The kids loved seeing all the animals, Jackson got to see a chicken hatch out of it's shell in an incubator. It was pretty cool. First time Jonathan's seen it too. We saw lots of tractors (they had a huge row of antique ones that were pretty cool). They got to sit on some old school wagons and sit in a firetruck, walk around in an ambulance and talk to some firemen and police men. They even got police badge stickers. Jackson and Jonathan rode on a rollercoaster, which Jackson had fun on, and by the pictures you can tell Jonathan had fun too. :-) Then Jonathan took both kids on the merry-go-round before we left because mom was having trouble standing. The baby has been pinching a nerve or something for the past two days. It puts my right leg to sleep, and causes shooting pain down my leg and thru my right hip. Makes standing for very long hard. Oh the things we do for our kids. :-)
We got home and guess what happened? Jonathan got paged!!! Another dog bite to the face. I can't believe how many of these Jonathan's already seen.
Ok, well hopefully we'll have pictures tomorrow if we can get out and drive up to Rhode Island.
love you all!!

First Day of School

So Jackson survived his first day of preschool and loved it! Even though we've had a few hard weeks here with him going to Primary without a fuss, he was excited about school and kept telling Cooper not to cry when he leaves. He ran off when we got there and didn't so much as even look back at us. When we picked him up he was excited to show me his papers and let me know that he can have lunch there at school sometimes. So all in all it was a success! He's at school again right now and I'm alone for the first time since the kids got here. (Cooper's taking a nap) It's kind of weird. There's no little kids asking me questions or begging me to do something for them. Guess I better enjoy these next few weeks of this since it'll be awhile before it happens again.

Speaking of the soon to be newest Gray...I'm getting another ultrasound done next week to try and get an idea of how big he really is. The most recent doctor I went to wants to have a better idea of how big this baby will be compared to his older brothers to get an idea of how likely it will be for me to have a vbac birth (vaginal). Everyone pray for a small baby!!! (what are the chances of that!)

Other then the normal everyday mom stuff going on, I've been getting ready for the baby. Doing lots of baby laundry and trying to figure out what we'll need to replace since this is the third boy to use it now, and what we can get by using again. Setting up baby furniture in our room and trying to figure out where we're going to put all the baby's clothes and stuff. Hadn't thought about that until recently so more storage of some sort is being worked out.

Jonathan's still surviving work, but only barely some days. We're hoping that we'll get into a groove here soon that will make life alittle easier on him. He's just so overwhelmed, overworked, tired and self esteem wise just so beaten up. This has been much harder than we thought it would. We just never prepared ourselves for the constant putting down Jonathan gets from the other residents above him. It seems to almost be a military 'break him down so we can build him up how we want him' mentality. He'll start his rotation in Internal Medicine the first week or so of Oct. It'll be a good change for him, and we've heard that they're alittle bit nicer then the surgery clinic. :-)

So that's pretty much the update on us Connecticut Gray's. I better get going. Love you all!!

Spencer piggies

Various photos of Dave and Mindy's wedding

All the kids but Jon Jon at Dave and Mindy's wedding

Ed and 4 of the grandson's at Dave and Mindy's wedding

One of these is a photo of the Big Apple (it's the one with the smog and tall buildings). This was my first and only trip there to date. Yee-Haw!

Howdy All

Hey, here's a great way to keep the family in touch. How's bout we all use it.

Heaps O' love & warm muffins, Jon