First Comes Love, Then Comes Marriage....

Last night I had the privilege of spending some time with my Michigan boys! I have been baby-sitting Gabe and Garrett since they were 3 and 5 and we always have so much fun together. Last night I was watching them and their new baby brother and eventually it came time for bed.

They tried every trick in the book to stay up later. "I am hungry..." "I am thirsty..." "Will you read a story?". Finally as I was just about to turn off the lights Gabe says "Are you married now?" "No" "Why not?" "Because I haven't found anyone nice enough yet." "When you do find someone nice enough, will you marry him?" "Probably...." I move towards the door and just as I put my hand on the light switch... "What do you do at a wedding?" "Well you promise God that you will love and take care of each other forever. Then you have a big party with your friends and family, with cake and food and presents. Goodnight." "But what kind of cake are you going to have!" They shouted urgently, as if I didn't tell them the world would end. "Chocolate I think, that's my favourite. It will have white frosting and flowers on top." "Hey! I know!" shouts Gabe sitting up in bed. "You could have a giant cake and hollow it out in the inside and then Garrett and I can put on tuxedos and wait inside and then at the party we could jump out of the cake and surprise everyone!"

Everything went downhill from there in spiraling arcs of hilarity. I knew it was past their bedtime, but I couldn't help but listen to their funny ideas. They decided that they are going to be my "Wedding Managers". Some of their great ideas were my groom and I getting married in a tree, so that way everyone can sing the "sitting in a tree, K-I-S-S-I-N-G" song. There are going to be fireworks for our kiss, I get shot out of a cannon instead of walking down the aisle, and all the boys at the wedding reception get a whoopee cushion on their seats (the girls don't because that isn't lady-like...)

It went on for awhile like that and then their parents got home. Dad came upstairs to tell them goodnight. "No! We can't go to sleep yet! We have so many more good ideas!" "Don't worry boys, I am not getting married anytime soon." I said, "You can marry ME" shouts Garrett as I tell them goodnight one last time and turn off the light.

DONE!

Whew! What a whirlwind semester.... but it is finally done! I am FRRRRREEEEEEEEEE!


It was a very long and scary semester. Taking online classes this semester presented a new set of challenges. The worst part was missing out on all of the fun stories I get to tell about my crazy classmates like the lady last semester who sat behind me and made duck noises when she wrote in her notebook, or the guy who sat next to me and was training to be a matador (true story! The guy in my psych class last semester showed me pictures on his phone!).

The scariest part of the semester had to be when I almost failed my Chemistry class. I was checking my grades online and discovered that I currently had an F in my Chem class! I sort of freaked out.... I had never failed a class before! I was going to have to take it over again, and it was really expensive, and really boring and I was really mad at myself.

I talked (cried) to my Mom about it and she made me feel a lot better but I was still feeling pretty blue that night when I came up for dinner. Ryan and Louise asked me what was wrong and I said that I was failing my Chem class and almost started crying again. They were so sweet. Louise was like "Your stupid professor! How can this happen! Don't worry Bo, we are going to get a B! We can do this! I can come home early from work and help you study!" I explained that I had NO idea how we could go from a F to B with only a few weeks left of school. I also explained how if I didn't get a good grade then my GPA would go down, and then I wouldn't be able to get into the nursing program because they let the smartest people in first... Ryan interrupted me at that point and said "No they let the people with the best grades in first. There is a difference between getting good grades and being smart. I am one of the smartest people I know and I got horrible grades my whole life.... and just because you are getting a bad grade in this one class doesn't mean you aren't smart because you are, you are brilliant." They are both so sweet....

Anyway's we did it. I have no idea how, but somehow the three of us (Louise helping me with homework and Ryan bringing us snacks and doing everything else) managed to go from an F to a B in the last two weeks of the semester. Maybe this blog post is a little brag-ey but I can't help it I am just so excited. I have an amazing family that loves me in MI and I have a wonderful family that loves me in CO and I NEVER HAVE TO TAKE CHEMISTRY AGAIN! That is something worth celebrating if I say so myself.

Plus with the way that the nursing program is structured I have a whole next semester off of school, something I am very excited about. I have a whole stack of books that I have been waiting to get to but haven't had the time with my gypsy life this year and all of the school work. I can't wait for a little break!

"And what we know.... We don't know...."

When I first arrived I didn't know Louise and Ryan at all.... So I started making a list of things that I could find out about them. Here are some silly things I learned about them in the first week....

She....
Used to work at a Russian Orphanage.
Loves chocolate cupcakes.
Plays the flute
Hates Broccoli
Has an adorable mother with an irrational fear of mustard

He....
Abhors fish.
Doesn't believe in recycling
Is obsessed with Wolverine
Is really into carpentry
Wears suspenders.... tehehe....

They...
Have been married since I was 13
Love tea
Watch Red Dwarf and Mythbusters
Are obsessed with Baseball and the Rockies, even though neither of them play
Are very sweet...

The Donut Saga...

Louise has been ordering her groceries online through a very convenient service offered by a local grocery store. You can hop on their website, place an order, and they come to your house and deliver it the next day! It's wonderful! However sometimes they get things wrong. This just happened to be one of those times....

Louise loves pumpkin flavored donuts and the bakery has some really good ones. So when she was shopping online she added 12 pumpkin donuts to the list as a treat for the three of us and decided to keep it a surprise. The next day while she was at work, the delivery man came and dropped off the groceries. He was very nice and as he was carrying in the groceries he asked if we were having a party. I said no, and asked him why he would think that, "Oh no reason, it just seems like you have a lot of donuts.". Which we did. Three bags full of boxed donuts in fact! I was a little surprised but signed for the groceries. The man left and I had just shut the door and went into the kitchen to start putting things away when the door bell rang. "I found one more bag in the back" the delivery guy said and sheepishly handed me another bag of donuts!

Louise calls a little later from work to just check in and see how the day is going "Everything's going fine... we did get the groceries today though... and.... there were a lot of donuts." I said. "Oh yes," she replied "I thought we could freeze some for later" I didn't think anything of it. I figured Louise knew what she was doing and we would just be set on donuts for the next year.

Louise came home later that afternoon and walked in the door and moaned, "I was afraid of this! I wanted 12 donuts, not 12 dozen!" As it turns out they people at the grocery store got the quantity wrong and instead of 12 donuts they had sent us 144! The worst part of it though was that they ran out of the good pumpkin kind, and ended up sending us a bunch of dry cake donuts instead! So now it is sort of the running joke around here "What's for dinner?" "Donuts.". "I packed you a lunch Ryan, it's donuts" and tonight Ryan sat down in front of the TV with three donuts and simply said "Hey I am just doing my part!"

We called the store several times and they are avoiding our calls, so we have become resigned to the fact that we are now the proud owners of 144 donuts. Some of them have been eaten, but we are currently looking for more creative ways to use them up like, donut bread pudding, donut baby food, perhaps an addition to the house made out of donuts and covered in resin, donut sandwiches, donut pancakes, I even mentioned giving them names and poems and selling them as "Donut Babies". I am sure they will be the number one gift of the Holiday season! Anyways if YOU have any ideas on what to do with a 144 donuts, please leave a comment! We are getting a little desperate....

School of ROCK!!!!!

So Ryan and Louise had both been in college for a few years by the time I turned ten. So there is a little bit of an age gap there. They like to talk about movies and songs and make witty pop culture references that I never get because at the time I was watching more "Barney" than "The Breakfast Club". I don't really mind though. It's actually pretty funny. Whenever I miss something and explain that it was before my time, Louise gets upset and starts moaning about how old she is and Ryan just asks if I want him to make me a PB and J sandwich and says he will turn on the new "Ice age" movie for me "only if you finsh all of your vegtables, young lady!". But yesterday when Ryan made a reference to "Savage Gardens" "The animal song" and I admitted I had no idea who they were, much less heard the song, Louise drew a line. "That's it!" she said "I am going downstairs and making you CD!" She came up a few minutes later with a CD entitled "School of Rock" that contained all of the most important rock songs from the 80s and 90s.



So I have been listening to it and some of it is pretty good.... some of its not.... I think some of it might be a "You had to be there" kind of thing. Anyways I have had Tom Petty's "Refugee" song along with "Don't fear the Reaper" by "Blue oyster cult" stuck in my head ALL DAY LONG! I was even humming it during my pottery class! It won't get out of my head! CURSE YOU CATCHY 90S ROCK MUSIC!!!

Show some respect for the elderly, ya youngster!

So everyone here at the Wood household has to be up early for work in the mornings. So we usually hang out at night until around 9:30 - 10 PM and then everybody gets tired and goes to bed. Well, last Friday I decided it was time to shake up the routine and have a little fun. So I was talking with Louise while she was making dinner and I said "You know its Friday night. We should go a little crazy and have some fun! We are a bunch of young people. We should have a good time!" Louise agreed, so we decided we were going to stay up all night watching TV, eating junk food, maybe make a few cocktails and do everything our mothers told us not to do before bed! It was going to be awesome.

But I was wrong.... We are not young people. We are old people. This is how the night ended up going....

Louise and Ryan put the boys to bed and we were all ready to start our fun night. Ryan made us all tea as goes our night time tradition (I never really used to like tea, but now there is nothing better at the end of the day then a nice cup of steaming blueberry tea!), Louise and I picked up the baby blocks that we are crocheting for the boys, and we sat around and watched TV. We watched a few episodes of a funny TV show we have on DVD, but it wasn't long before we started nodding off. It must have been like 2 AM I was sure of it! I was so tired, it had to be really late. So I got up and checked the clock and it said 10:45....

Old people.

So there you have it. Our idea of a "crazy Friday night" is staying up past 10:30, drinking tea, crocheting, and watching TV sitcom re-runs.... So bad! Actually I think Ryan, Louise, and I have always had a propensity to being old people, but it is a quality that we simply amplify in one another.... Sure I could go out and go dancing, see a movie or go hang out at the mall, but there is just something so nice about sitting at home in your jimjams, working on a project and drinking tea....

This is Opera.... Now don't be scared.....

Last night Louise and I went to the Ellie Caulkins Opera house, part of one of the largest performing arts centers in the country.... It was awesome.

We went to go see "The Tales of Hoffman..." which according to opera Colorado is "the fantasy of a poet obsessed with four remarkable women - and the four villains bent on his destruction." So Louise and I got all dressed up, in high heels, dresses and fake eyelashes ready for a night on the town. After about an hour we both emerged from our powder rooms, and were ready for dinner and to hit the road. Ryan made us sit down at the table for dinner and brought us our food and drinks, because he said we looked so nice he felt like he needed to wait on us... We didn't object... =). We finished eating, took some pictures, and hit the road.

When we arrived at the opera we discovered that it was half price ticket night, so we got really good seats and then went inside for the lecture before the show. We weren't sure if we wanted to go to the lecture but we ended up being very glad that we did because if we hadn't the show wouldn't have made any sense....


Hoffman was a contemporary of Jane Austen, but his works were very different from Austen' "Pride and Prejudice". His works were psychological, dark, surrealist tales that would later inspire the likes of Edgar Allen Poe. The show was very good. It had a golden muse that came to life and followed Hoffman around begging him to forget about women and go back to the poetry that was his true love. But instead of heeding the muse's words, Hoffman during the course of the opera fell in love with an absurd Robot that gets her head broken off, a poor girl who sings herself to death, and a crazy woman at the end who Louise and I didn't get. For some reason she was dressed as a seahorse and was supposed to be able to steal men's souls, but she just stood around on stage making out with some creepy puppet. I still don't really know what happened in that act. All Louise and I could think of was "Creepy puppet, creepy puppet, sea horse, creepy puppet, sea horse, sea horse...."

When we got home and started telling Ryan about it he thought we were making it all up "OK so he falls in love with a robot and there is a golden woman walking around on stage with a giant sea horse that's kissing a puppet... what happens next, they all start flying just before the zombies attack?"


I love the opera. I love getting all dressed up and seeing all the girls in pretty dresses and the guys in tuxedos. I love the sounds of the music and the costumes and the orchestra! When I grow up I want to be an opera singer. I told Louise that and she said that I was no where near fat enough. Maybe if we put the three of us together we could be an opera singer she said.

What do opera singers do when they are not singing opera? I mean I know they have regular lives too but what happens if someone doesn't know that they are an opera singer and like invites them to a Christmas caroling party? Do they go up front and belt out "Silent Night" in Italian? Or do the stand in the back and intentionally sing "Jingle Bells" badly so as not to make all the Joe Schmos feel bad? These are the thoughts running around my head for the whole opera.

It was an amazing night and I hope to go back soon...

Happy Halloween....

So this post is a little late in coming but I thought it was worth it...

So I have finally found a new church that I really like. It is a cute little baptist church about two minutes from here. The people are friendly, and unlike most churches in the area are rather unassuming. They are just a group of people gathered together to praise and honor God, they don't need expensive stage lighting, fancy video announcements, or youth rooms with three large screen TVs complete with wii setup.

The church was going to have a Fall festival on Halloween as an outreach to the community, games, snacks, cotton candy, the whole shebang. They needed some help, so I volunteered a couple of weeks back to work the cotton candy machine.... OK so it was a little selfish of me, I planned on eating almost as much as I was going to be making... YUM!

So Halloween finally arrived. I had spent the day out with my Auntie G getting quilting supplies and we had arrived home about 5 minutes before I needed to leave for the festival. Ryan and Louise had taken the boys over to a friends house so they were out. Auntie G took Molly, her adorable dog (she is a very good dog) out for a walk, so I quickly jumped into my Marie Antoinette costume from last year, minus the wig, and headed out.

We had received a lot of snow that weekend, and Ryan being the good guy that he is, surprised me by digging out, cleaning off and parking my car in the drive way. I walked outside and sat down in the car, turned it on and started backing out of the driveway, when I heard squealing tires and smelled burning rubber. I looked down and saw my parking brake was still on! Suzie is a very good car, but she is also an old car, so things, like the parking brake, don't work very well. I pulled and pushed and grunted and groaned but couldn't get the brake off.

I am getting a little frantic now. I am about 20 minutes late for the festival, and there is no one home to help me. So what do you do in frantic and terrible situations like this? Yep, you call home to Mommy!

So I ran inside and got Louise and Ryan's phone, my cell phone was dead, and talked to Mom. She said not to worry just to call Daddy, but I didn't have Dad's phone number, because it was on my cell phone, which was dead. She said to just hold on and she would call him for me.

So I run back outside while I am waiting to try once again to fix the situation. Picture this if you can.... A girl, wearing an absurd gown, with one foot stuck out the door, holding it open, pieces of her dress falling off, smoking rubber on the driveway, and jerking the emergency break up and down while screaming "RYAN BROKE MY CAAAAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRR!". All of the sudden a little boy walks up and says "Give me some candy!" ... I.... sort of... maybe.... lost it.... "BACK OFF!" I yelled..... The little boy stuck his tongue out at me and I hear his Dad, standing on the side walk say, "Ummmm.... I think we should try the next house Sammy..."

Ok so the above paragraph was met with some skepticism from some of my readers.... Oh alright so my Mom and sisters called and said "We don't think you actually said that!" and it's true. I didn't tell the little boy to back off, but I think I must have had it written all over my face because his Dad did call to him to skip to the next house, and anyways it is funnier this way...

Dad calls me back and says he doesn't know how to fix it, that I just need to push harder... Mom calls Auntie G and asks her to come back and drive me to the church, and I walk inside to wait, right when Ryan and Louise get home. Ryan walks in and says... "You look nice... Is everything OK?" "Oh fine... fine... EXCEPT MY CAR IS BROKEN MY DRESS IS COMING APART AND I AM 45 MINUTES LATE!" "ummm... I will fix that..." he says and goes outside. Louise is helping me fix my dress and get calmed down, when Ryan comes back in. He hands me the keys and with a cocky bow says "Your chariot awaits Madame..." I asked him what he did to fix it and he said you just had to pull it harder... you know by being big and strong and manly. I rolled my eyes, then thanked him and sped off.

I made it to the church, but they didn't really need my help anymore, so I ate a whole bunch of cotton candy and watched kids jump in the bounce house. It ended up being a very fun and funny night....

So what have we learned from this? Well Ryan learned not to put my emergency brake on. I learned to make sure your car is ready before you put an 18th century gown on, and the little boy named Sammy learned never to mess with a frantic Marie Antoinette....

June 9th

We were able to go down the zipline tonight and I realy feel like it was a wonderful illustration of how I feel about starting my first week as a counselor, and the rest of my summer here at camp.

I had been trained on how to put on the zipline equipment. I had seen it being built, and I knew it was perfectly safe. It had been built by a Master Engineer and I was surrounded by people who loved me. However, when I stood at the top of that platform, my toes hanging off the edge, nothing could have untied the knots in my stomach! But no turning back, onwards and upwards. So I stepped off....

All of the sudden I was flying! With the wind in my face I couldn't help but laugh. I didn't want it to end. But I was pulled to the landing platform, helped down and met with a thounderous round of applause. Yet it was nothing I had done. Was it not the Master Engineer who had built the tower, the cable that supported me, the rope that connected me, and the harness that cradled me? All I had to do was step off of that platform and trust. All I had to do was hold on tight for the experince of a lifetime!

God help me to remember this illustration of your love for the rest of my life.

The Earth is Flat....

but despite the lack of posts I have not yet fallen off the edge. Perhaps you are wondering where I have been for the past 3 months. Well let me tell you....

I have been in a place where a backpack is the perfect accessory for every outfit. Where instead of a wallet and a cell phone you bring a Bible and a wristband every where you go. A land of Egor buckets and flag belts, and a place where EVERYONE knows you. Modesty always trumps fashion and slushies are most definitely a major food group. You work 15 hour days without a paycheck and golf carts are the fastest mode of transportation. Prayer, reading, and time alone with God replace ipods, TV, and game systems. Cheagles exist, teachable moments abound, taxidermy is the decoration of choice, and a one-on-one is ALWAYS a private conversation in a public place.

I love this place. It goes by the name of Camp Barakel (a name found in the book of Job) and it means "where God has blessed". God most certainly blessed me there this summer and even more amazingly worked through me to bless the lives of the 80 some girls I had the joy of counseling.

The summer is now over and I am currently on a new adventure, but I feel that I first should chronicle my summer as a Camp Counselor. So please check back for fun stories, crazy situations and tales of Gods amazing love and grace.

aAAAaaarrrUUuuuggghhh...

UUUUUAAAAaaaaaaRRRRRRrrrrrggghh.... Attack of the ZOMBIE BLOG! Yes I know that this blog has been dead for some time now, but it is about to come back TO LIFE! Now that school is done I will hopefully have more time for blogging (everyone all together now... "IN YOUR DREAMS BODECIA!". Ok so I will make more time for blogging), also with my leaving for quite possibly the next year, I thought this would be a wonderful way to keep in touch with friends and family! So check back later for more posts, comment when you can, I love reading your thoughts, and children and puppies run in horror for Blithe Remarks is back from the cyberspace dead.... Yes I had to go there =)....

HELP!

Last night I dreamt I was being tortured by 100s of tiny ninja finger puppets.

At first selling over 50 finger puppets in one week sounded like great fun! And then I realized I had to make all of them. And that I had a 4 tests coming up. And that I had to go back to work. And then the stress set in!

It was been pretty insane. Trying to go to school full time, work two jobs, fight off a cold and still have time for a social life, can be pretty difficult. I think I will be able to do it though. I have a lot of help. Emily has been doing almost as much work on the puppets as I have. I think the fact that she gets paid and can sit on the sofa and watch "Little House on the Praire" because "I am helping Bodecia, Mom!" is to much for her to withstand.

Next week I have all of my first tests of the semester. That should be interesting. I think I should do fine though. Also that weekend I will be going up to Camp Barakel for my summer counceling interview. Please be in prayer for that.

Well Biology lab is waiting, I have got to run.