Peterson Elf's...Elf Yourself

My sister Megan did this of 5 of us Peterson kids...I thought it was pretty hilarious. Thanks Megs for a good laugh!

http://elfyourself.jibjab.com/view/bDxlEYvYwwXscKbTqUu0

I had to do one for our little family too; enjoy the "Rigby Elf's Starring Indiana, Logan, Brent & Kristen"!!

http://elfyourself.jibjab.com/view/ndeqCmvOpKU2sHc1IFwa

Happy 1st Birthday!

I can't believe my sweet little baby is 1 year old! It just seems like yesterday that we were bringing him from the hospital & wondering what on earth we were supposed to do with this teeny little person. Now Logan is a full 21 lbs, crawling all over the place, babbling none stop and just learned how to climb the stairs. We are so grateful to have this sweet little angel in our lives. He has brought us so much joy over the last year it's hard to imagine what our life was like without him. He makes everyone light up around him with his infectious laugh & huge smile!
We had a small birthday party for Logan with all of his "Ohio cousins". Logan loved being the center of attention!

Logan was mesmerized by the candle. We enlisted the help of all the kids to blow it out because Logan just wanted to grab it!

I thought for sure Logan would dig right in and start shoving the cupcake into his mouth, but he took his time exporing it first and squishing the frosting between his fingers before he even tried to put it in his mouth.

Finally, he took a taste...and loved it!

It didn't take long for him to get it everywhere.

Logan loved opening his gifts. This one was from Grandma Rigby. Indiana was just as intruiged!

He was very interested in the wrapping paper. We had to try & keep it out of his mouth!

And he made it to the gift.

And then it went straight to the mouth!

Our little boy is 1!!!

A video of Logan opening his gift from Grandma & Grandpa Rigby! (sorry, I can't figure out how to flip it right side up, so you'll have to watch it sideways).

Happy Turkey Day!

Logan's 1st Thanksgiving was a success! He ate turkey & potatoes like a pro & taunted Indiana relentlessly with all of the potatoes flying overboard.

Laundry Helper

I just thought these pictures were cute. Lately, Logan has

discovered the washer & dryer. He loves to watch through the glass when the washer is on and now that he can pull himself up, he pulls right up and pounds on the glass as the clothes spin around. But he especially loves it when I open the washer or dryer & he practically climbs in the washer or dryer to pull the clothes out (whether or not if I want them out).

Austin, Texas???

Last week we went to Austin, Texas to see if that might be a place we would consider moving and....we loved it (much to the dismay of our wonderful ohio friends). Over the last few years we've been discussing places that we would be willing or wanting to move to and Austin always seemed to come up even though neither of us have been there. The only connection we really had was that one of my friends while I was at the "U" was from there, but that's it. Brent started doing a lot of research online about the area & everything always looked really good, so we finally decided to just go out there & see if we actually like it. Here are some reasons we loved austin:

1. WEATHER (I know that this should probably not be #1 on my list, but it's less than 30 degress right now with wind chill & it's already snowed here in Columbus & I really just don't like to be COLD). While in Ausin, we roamed around in t-shirts & flip flops. I know it's not southern california weather, but that's ok with me, as long as it's not 30 degrees or less for 4 months out of the year & the sun is shining...I miss the sun!

2. The economy doesn't suck (well, as bad as it could).

3. Housing prices are much more reasonable & stable than southern california.

4. Great Schools

5. University of Texas? (I think this is a plus. We will always be buckeyes, but we've loved living in a community where everyone has "team spirit". Austin seems like they are into their Longhorns & I might be able to don burnt orange for a game or two. We figured our first baby was little brutus, our next one could be little bevo).

6. Temples are not too far away

7. Lots of outdoor recreational activies (there were lakes EVERYWHERE. I actually think they were just extensions of the Colorado River). And, because the weather is nice you can actually do these activities year round!!

8. I don't have to take a board exam to transfer my license!!!!!! (this is probably number one for me actually. I found out I would have to take the California board if we moved there since I've been practicing less than 5 years...NOT FUN).

So Brent is now continuing the tireless search of finding a job. Ideally, he'd love to get a job so we have some sort of paycheck & then we could start working on opening a practice at the first of next year after we get a better feel for the area. But until he finds something, we're staying put in Ohio.

Here were some cute pictures of Logan @ the hotel showing off his naked bottom!! Unfortunately, we were too busy getting a feel for the area we didn't take any pictures outside of the hotel!

Blue Jackets

A couple weeks ago Lynne hooked us up with some free Blue Jackets (hockey) tickets. Since they were free we didn't feel too bad about brining Logan with us.

We showed up just in time for the 2nd period (score 1-0 blue jackets), won a hat that was dropped down to the fans, made it through the entire 2nd period (Logan is always such an angel) then decided to ditch Lynne & her friend before the 3rd period started so we could get Logan to bed (score still 1-0). As we were walking out to the car, Lynned texted me to let me know that the blue jackets just scored 2 more goals...we must have been bad luck! (but we had fun).

Happy Halloween

So here is the adorable costume that my mom made for Erik when he was about 18months (he's now almost 16!!) and Logan looked so cute in it...BUT, he was completely pissed off that we made him where the hat. He lasted for about 5 minutes in it; just long enough for us to get some cute pictures.



So we ended up getting him this Yoda costume which was hilarious.

Brent & I rolled when we saw the costume because we always joke that he looks like yoda when he gets out of the bath & is wrapped up in his towel. So we couldn't resist & dressed him up like yoda.

We took Logan trick or treating with his "Ohio cousins" & had a blast. The weather was gordeous & it was fun to get out with everyone & their kids. Logan just loves all of his little buddies.

Logan with "Auntie Lynne" and maddie
Logan was not sure what to think about this huge monster mask...it was pretty funny.

Logan with his favorite babysitter!

Logan with "Auntie Kristen"

I had to post this, becuase this is when Logan 1st pulled himself up @ the beginning of October (I know, 1st time parent syndrome).

Sunday Excursion & random pictures of Logan

A few weeks ago we took our sunday drive to Miami University (of Ohio). It was such a beautiful day & the campus was gorgeous so we got out & walked around and let Logan strecth out on the grass. If we move from Ohio this summer, we will truly miss all of these beautiful fall days that we've been able to enjoy.



But, I'm sure we'll be back for some buckeye football & a fall drive! Here's Logan attempting to eat some grass...EVERYTHING goes straight for the mought.

Logan is fixated on Indy's water bowl; any chance he gets he b-lines right for the bowl. I'm still amazed how quickly he can get to the things he really wants but should not have!


Since he was already covered in his breakfast, I figured a little dirty dog water wasn't going to hurt him.


Afterward, he needed a bath. He absolutely loves bathtime...or any kind of water actually.

All Things Buckeye

It's saturday & the OSU vs Michigan game is on (GO BUCKS!!) and Logan is down for his 4 hour saturday nap (another yeahhh!), so I'm attempting to update our blog since it's been awhile.
(Brent & I @ the Penn State Game)




Well, fall in Ohio means 2 things: Buckeye Football & beautifal foliage. So every saturday is spent watching college footbal & then on suday, if the weather is nice we take a long drive to somewhere in Ohio.
(The Buckeyes entering the stadium to ACDC "Thunder Struck")




Brent & I were lucky enough to go to 2 Buckeye games this fall: Minnesota & Penn State. The Penn State game was awsome!! Jim Tressell called for everyone to participate in "Scarlet Fever"...it was incredible to see the entire stadium of 105,000+ fans in scarlet. I am continually amazed how mean peopleactually fit into that stadium.
(Daddy & Logan watching the Buckeyes)

And he's off...

Logan has finally taken his first "crawls"! Last night as Brent & I were running around getting stuff ready for the next day Logan decided that he just had to have Brent's laptop computer cord that was dangling from the chair a couple feet in front of him. As I turned around, our little acrobat was on all fours and finally crawled toward the cord (of all things...he was surrounded by a bizillion very entertaining baby toys AND the dog with his toys; but, he wanted a computer cord). So our life is now about to change I'm afraid...baby gates up and things put away!!

You would have thought that he had made it to the moon and back by our reaction (he is 10 months after all; Brent was getting a little concerned, but I have been very content). Logan kept looking at us very confused when he would crawl because of our reaction & then he would just giggle after he realized that he was the entertainment. I unfortunately didn't get pics b/c my battery was dead, but we did get video. However, I'm not that high-tech yet (we barely know how to use the video camera), so I'll have to post that another day (if ever).

Brutus on Display

Logan is napping for a minute so I thought I'd blog a little instead of vacuum (much more fun; this has been very theraputic for me lately). So we finally picked up our OSU season tickets on Friday and ended up having to stand in line for ONE HOUR to get them...the buckeyes are crazy! But we spent the time wisely (at least Logan & I, Brent was in line) doing a little shopping and then afterwards going to look at the "Brutus on Display". For all of you non-Buckeyes, Brutus is our mascot (a nut) and they've had this display up for a couple months now. It's Brutus dressed up as all sorts of different people. Out favorite was Archy & Coach Tressel.



Then next day, Brent and I actually got to go to the game. My dear friend Lynne took Logan for the day (ALL DAY) and Brent & I had a blast back to pre-baby days. This year our tickets are actually pretty good despite being in the south stands...we are only 14 rows up from the field. It was really fun to be that close and see all the action. I think we're going to end up going to a few more games than we normally would...(ie MICHIGAN!!). As always, pictures to recap our weekend.




In the second picture Laurenitis is looking at me (#33)!!





TOUCHDOWN!!



Go Bucks!




Carmen Ohio with Coach Tressel.

Bad wife or just a busy one? By Orson Scott Card

I thought this was so cute I'd actually go ahead and post it. The link is below if you'd like to check out his column.


Bad wife or just a busy one?

By Orson Scott Card
Thursday, Sep. 25, 2008

I wondered if my wife had a kind of Joan Crawford thing going on when she told me, about six years into our marriage, that she could not live with the idea of my taking my shirts to a professional laundry.

"What is it?" I asked. "The plastic bags? We can tie them in knots so the kids can never play with them."

"It's not the plastic bags!" Kristine looked so miserable. I decided to cheer her up with humor.

"The wire hangers?" I asked, pointedly.

Since this was only a few years after "Mommy Dearest," she got the joke. It didn't cheer her up at all. "You think I'm some kind of monster."

"No," I said. "I don't. I think you're a very busy woman, doing things that the whole family needs you to do."

The list of what she was doing really was quite remarkable. Our then-youngest child was born with cerebral palsy, and Kristine was taking care of him along with our other two children -- and handling the family finances, and dealing with scheduling and transportation, and anything that required making a list and remembering 10 minutes later that there was such a list and where it had been put.

The traditional division of labor was not for us. I had vowed to myself before I even proposed to her that there would never be a job so loathsome, tedious or difficult that my wife could do it and I couldn't. I could clean a toilet, wash and dry dishes, cook a meal, and vacuum a floor (not in that order, of course).

When she handled the check writing, the checks went where they were supposed to go and did what they were supposed to do. When I wrote checks, they often found their way to the Great Banking Trampoline. Our lives became so much better when I no longer carried the checkbook. Ever.

And while our firstborn loved the lullabies his mommy sang to him, when it came to seriously trying to go to sleep, that was daddy's job. From infancy on, he needed a deep baritone voice to fall asleep to. (In my years of teaching, I've found that many children and adults share this trait. I'm always happy to oblige.)

In my son's case, getting him to sleep was a long, long labor. I spent years lying on the floor of his room every night, with a little slant of light from the hall letting me see and grade student papers or stories that I was going to review, and all the while, hour after hour, I'm singing the only song that he'd accept, "Away in a Manger," over and over, in every season of the year. All versions, all verses.

It was my job because he would accept no substitutes. He has no memory of this, though it persisted till he was 5. But I still dream it.

We divided the labor according to my mom's and dad's old slogan: "From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs." (None of us knew that it was an old Communist precept.)

When it came to my shirts, though, I ran into a wall of irrationality.

Because, you see, my wife had internalized the idea that a good Mormon wife irons her husband's shirts.

"So let me see if I understand this," I said. "You can't let me take my shirts to the cleaners, even though we can easily afford it, because if I do, it will mean you're a bad wife."

"Yes," she said unhappily.

"So the shirts pile up in the laundry room until there are 30 shirts there and I have to buy a new one. Or iron them myself. My mother taught me how. I have the skill. Only I don't want to iron them, I want to take them to the cleaners. Why won't you let me?"

"But if you take your shirts to the cleaners, it will mean that I've failed as a wife!"

"To whom will it mean this?" I asked. "Not to me. Not to the kids. Who else will know?"

"It'll mean that to me!" she wailed. "I know I'm being irrational, but that's how it feels."

"It also feels like a colossal waste of your time to iron them, and that's why you don't do it," I said, "because at any given moment on any day of any week of any year, you have something better to do than iron any shirts of mine."

"But if the other women in the ward found out that I ... "

And in that moment, she knew and I knew that I had won. I gloated immediately. "I thought we prided ourselves on making our own division of labor based on what worked in our marriage."

Glumly she nodded.

"Right now I own 30 shirts, all of which are in the laundry room, most of them clean and waiting to be ironed. Other men don't have to own 30 shirts in order to have a hope of a clean, ironed shirt to wear."

"Go," she said. "Take the shirts. Have them washed and pressed by the pros."

You'd have thought it was 1870 and she was giving me permission to take a plural wife.

Skip a few years. Now we shall talk about bread.

I grew up on homemade bread. There was no better food in all the world -- no, not even a spice cake with penuche icing for my birthday, not even pistachio ice cream in Brazil or France or Italy -- than my mother's bread, white or wheat, when it was still so fresh out of the oven you could barely slice it, eaten in thick slabs full of melting butter.

If they don't serve that in the celestial kingdom, I'm not going. Not that I expect my mother to bake bread every day in heaven. Once a week will do.

My wife knew this. But she is not a bread baker.

Don't misunderstand. Kristine is a great cook. She makes perfect pie crust every time. Her gravy always tastes perfect and never has lumps. And she never serves me Jell-O or anything involving Cool Whip. But for one reason or another, she never learned to make bread.

So when, in the late 1980s, I turned up with a breadmaker, she didn't view it as a cool piece of cutting edge technology. She saw it as an insult to her Mormon wifehood.

Because, just as Mormon wives had to iron their husband's shirts, they apparently also had to bake bread for their families.

"But you don't bake bread," I pointed out helpfully.

"Because I'm a terrible wife!"

"You're a wonderful wife who doesn't bake bread. Every now and then I'd like a loaf of hot fresh bread. Making bread is a lot of work and neither of us has time to do it or even time to learn. But this machine already knows how. Let's let the machine bake bread for us."

I think the machine has made two loaves of bread since 1989. Why? Because we both know that when the breadmaker comes out of the corner of the kitchen counter, my wife feels like a failure.

So we buy all our bread at Great Harvest Bread Co. It's almost as good as my mother's. If you toast it or nuke it, you can get butter to melt on it.

Somehow buying good healthy bread from a bakery is something a good Mormon wife can tolerate. But at least one good Mormon wife can't let a machine bake bread for her.

O my fellow Saints, ye males and ye females! Hearken to my voice!

There are so many ways to be a good Mormon wife. They involve taking all the talents and all the time and all the means that God has given you and using them to serve others, especially your family.

The key phrase is that you use the talents God has given you. And you use the time that you actually have.

Not everybody is good at everything. I can't manage money. Kristine can't write novels. So I write the books and she pays the bills.
Not every possible use of your time is as important as every other use. Kristine didn't have time to take care of our kids' needs (including the handicapped one), do her church callings, run our business, and learn to make bread and iron my stupid shirts.


Here's what a good Mormon wife does: Whatever must be done for the good of her family.

Here's what a good Mormon wife does not do: Beat herself up because she can't do every good thing that she's seen other Mormon wives do. There is no article of faith or temple recommend interview question dealing with shirt-ironing or bread-baking or even money-managing.

We all have our own marriages, our own talents, our own lives. Keep the commandments, be kind to each other and provident and wise with your children.

After that, whatever you do is what Good Mormon Wives and Husbands do; and whatever you don't do is obviously something that you don't have to do to be a Good Mormon Spouse.

Another Trip to California

Logan is becoming our frequent flyer. We made another trip out to California last week because Brent had a few interviews scheduled(yep, for a big boy job). One at USC which went awsome and could potentially be a good opportunity for him to start making some connections in the area. The other one was in San Diego just down the block from the Chargers stadium. That one was a little disappointing becuase the practice was not very nice to say the least. Anyways, it's still VERY early on, so the search continues. But Logan and I managed to tag along so we could visit with the fam. The plain ride was a little more challenging this time because we have a VERY wiggly little man on our hands and he does not like to sleep when there is so much going on:( But we made it there in one piece and I don't think we made any of the passengers want to jump off the plane (thank heavens Logan is such a flirt, he's able to get away with a lot)!! Just some pics to recap our trip.

@ The airport preparing for the loooong flight.


Logan's first time on the trampoline...he loved it.


Logan wasn't so sure about the tramp once his wild & crazy uncle JT climbed on.


Loving the swing!


Logan loves going out to dinner with Papa!


Logan want's to be just like his Uncle Erik...a track star. He's already practicing!


Nonni, Uncle Erik, and Logan


Logan loved to look out the window on the airplane; especially as we passed through clouds.


Almost home!


Are we there yet??????????? I think we're done flying for a while!