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Thomas and his best buddy having popsicles together Read more »

This first picture is of a cardboard ferry boat that Isaac made for Thomas.
I celebrated my birthday.  It’s a Cochran family tradition to sing the birthday song really badly and off key.  Also the candles were a few years off on my age. Read more »

Now that I’m back home in Utah, I realize that I didn’t take enough pictures of my parent’s property.  I missed a lot of angles.  This is why I love Google Maps so much, it can fill in some of the blanks and give perspective to my pictures.

I’ll start with the location.  My parent’s house is about 3 miles East of Tiffin on State Route 18.  If you look at a map, we’re about equal distance between Tiffin and Republic, but Republic is super small.  For some reason, Google Maps refers to the road my parent’s live on as “North Greenfield Road.”  Depending on the GPS you use, if you type my parent’s street address into a GPS it will direct you to State Route 18 on the West side of Tiffin.This next picture shows my parent’s property.  As some of the farmland around my parent’s house went up for sale, my dad bought it and increased his acreage.  Read more »

The pictures in my previous Tiffin post showed some of the character and history of Tiffin. This next set shows some of the changes and quirkiness of the town.

When we went out for ice cream as a special treat, we always went to Little Hugos because they put eyes on their ice cream. Read more »

For my own personal history, I took lots of pictures around Tiffin while I was home.  I want to share these pictures here both to introduce some of my family and friends to my hometown and for the benefit of some of my friends who also grew up there, but might not have the chance to return.

Tiffin is a small town.  The 2010 census lists just under 18,000 residents.  (For my Utah friends that’s about the same population as Saratoga Springs on the 2010 census and about half the number of students at BYU).  There are two colleges in Tiffin.  They are Heidelberg University with 1,600 students and and Tiffin University with 3,498 students (Thanks to Wikipedia for the stats).  The largest employer in my town growing up was American Standard (the toilet manufacturer) but they left town in 2007.

We do have one LDS church history claim to fame.  Oliver Cowdery spent his apostate years practicing law in Tiffin.  He helped start the local fire department after a fire broke out in the courthouse.

I took a picture of this sign on the West end of town.

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Zach worked his last day of work at my parent’s house before packing up the van.  We left around 4:00 for our journey home.  The plan was to drive almost straight through and just stay in a motel for one night, but things didn’t go exactly as we planned.

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On Day 7 My Dad took Isaac, Charlotte, Paul, Michael, and I to Put-In-Bay on South Bass Island which is located in Lake Erie.  We took a ferry across the lake.  The ferries are much smaller than the ones we were used to in Seattle.  Most people walked on, very few drove cars.  The ship swayed much more and even splashed the kids once as they leaned against the railing. Read more »

On Sunday we went to church at the branch in Tiffin.  Being in such a small branch is a bit of a shock after spending so many years in big wards in Orem and Seattle.  Even our ward in Knoxville, Tennessee seems huge next to the small congregation in Tiffin.

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Our days in Ohio just seemed to fly by with 8 kids and 6-7 adults, something was always happening.

DAY 3:  I love seeing the cousins play together.  Ila and Michael are pretending to sleep in this empty pool.  Ila was pretending to be the mom.

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I took 186 pictures on my first day in Ohio.  Actually I took a little less than that because Zach took some of the pictures with my camera, but I narrowed the pictures down to about 30 from day one to share.

This is Isaac and Charlotte with Uncle Bryan’s Dog (GiGi).

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It must take a certain level of insanity to even consider a cross-country trip with so many young ones, but we figured the trip itself would be a grand adventure.  What we didn’t count on were all the difficulties we’d have with our third oldest child who was recently diagnosed with Autism.  

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I have many, many pictures to share from our trip, but I will start off with some pre-trip pictures and then probably break the trip itself into parts.

Thomas had his friend Ian over for a bit.  Thomas was so excited to see Ian.  Thomas has seen Ian much less frequently since school has been out (I watch Ian a few times a week during the school year).

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On Monday we went to Cascade Springs in Provo Canyon.  When we arrived, Ila and Thomas were asleep and I was feeling exhausted, so Zach took the oldest 3 out to explore while I rested in the van with Ila and Thomas: Read more »

It’s been a few years since I wrote a personality sketch about Isaac.  I think I hesitated to write last year because he had a tough year and I wasn’t sure how much to write about.  This year has been much better and moving to Utah has been really great for Isaac.

Isaac loves reading books and watching documentaries on Military History.  His favorite is World War II because of the more advanced technology.  Isaac can describe the types of jets and tanks used as well as their strengths and weaknesses.  He knows details about all the battles of World War II.  Isaac refuses to read any fiction, although he does enjoy listening to his Dad read fictional bedtime stories. Read more »

A lot of kids are picky eaters, but I have only ever heard of one kid as picky as Ila.  Ila will go years between trying new things and if she doesn’t eat something in her repertoire for a little while, it will drop off into the category of things that she doesn’t eat.  Although I still try to give her more things with at least some nutritional value, I’ll admit that for the most part, I just let her eat whatever she wants and I don’t stress out about it.  There have been days where she has only eaten potato chips and nothing else.  It sounds like a horrible thing for a mother to do, but I have given up on making eating a battle.  I just hope that the potato chip days are balanced out by the grapes and banana days.

In preparation for our trip to Ohio I have made my mom a list of all the foods that Ila will eat.  It may seem long until you realize what’s not on the list.  Here’s my list: Read more »

Isaac turned 10 yesterday.  We started the day off with his favorite breakfast:  Bacon, eggs, and toast:
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Charlotte started Soccer came last week, but I didn’t take any pictures until this week.  Camp is two days a week for the month of June from 9:30-11.

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It was bound to happen sooner or later.  I only took about 60 pictures this week, probably because I came down with a cold and didn’t have the energy to do as much this week.  Now that I’m on the mend, I should be back up to several hundred pictures next week.

I started summer school lessons with Nicole on Monday.  They didn’t go as well as I thought they would.  I’m hoping the lessons will go smoother once she’s used to the pattern.  We did one lesson every day and two lessons a few of the days.  The plan is to do two per day, but between my cold and Nicole arguing with me about how to do parts of the lesson, I just didn’t have it in me to do more than one a few of the days.

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The week started off with Memorial Day.  My in-laws got out some big paper flowers that they had been storing since my sister-in-law, Bethani’s wedding reception.  The kids ran around and played with them.

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Charlotte loves watermelon.  I put out a plate of it and before long, Charlotte had a plate of rinds: Read more »