Wow, I guess it's November now...

I swear once upon a time I thought that once I was a full-time stay-at-home mom I'd have lots of time to keep up with blogging. Turns out, I was wrong. I don't even have time to keep up with dishes! Go figure. I guess Sam takes up more time and attention than I had counted on. But I love every minute of it, even if you don't get to see much of those minutes...

Anyways, I figured it was time for a quick update on October... ready Go!

At the beginning of last month my family came up to Utah for General Conference and to celebrate my dad's 50th birthday! We had a lot of fun with them just hanging out and going up to my grandparents house. I wish we lived closer to them because I truly love spending time with my family, but of course, our future plans are more geared towards moving to the other side of the planet. Oh well, it just makes me all the more grateful for Skype! Here's a fun picture of my dad reading a story to Sam and my cousin Nicolas -

He's reading them my favorite story from when I was little The Piggy in the Puddle

You may have heard that Adobe purchased Omniture and a lot of people have wondered what that has meant for Eric. Basically it doesn't change a whole lot as far as the day to day goes. Eric was presented with an offer from Adobe that pretty well matched what he had at Omniture so nothing real different there. Unfortunately we're still waiting for the new girl to finish training so we can get him on normal hours. If my estimations are right that should be before the beginning of the new year, but no guarantees on that. We are still looking at moving to China but things have been put on hold with the acquisition, so we're still here in Utah for the forseeable future :)

Halloween was pretty uneventful for us this year. Eric was stuck at work from 6pm - 8am on Thursday night (yes, I am counting down minutes until he's off this stupid schedule) so, needless to say we didn't make it to the morning portion of the Omniture Halloween extravaganza (they go ALL out every year, it's a blast). We did make it for some of the afternoon, but Sam was pretty tired so we didn't stay long.

On actual Halloween we were still recovering a little bit from Thursday/Friday's late night. However, Eric and I were able to leave Sam with Taylor and Ryan (thanks again guys!!) while we went to the temple. What better way to celebrate the day of the dead than by serving them? It was a really nice way to spend that evening together. Sam's been having separation anxiety lately which has made it more difficult to spend time with just the two of us, but it definitely makes it all the more special when we can.

Of course, we did dress up for Halloween. I was feeling rather uncreative so I bought a witch's hat and paired it with some black clothes and called it good. Eric decided to go as a Mac that had crashed, although we didn't really have time to expand on that costume either so we just made him a shirt with this on it:

However, we did have some fun dressing up Sam. We had wanted to dress him up as a puppy because he does a lot of puppy-ish things. He likes panting, and making little whimpering sounds that really sound like a puppy. And the way he crawls after us just reminds us of a little puppy. However, I had a hard time finding a puppy costume in his size (seriously, I kept finding them in sizes 3-6months... and 12-18months... and he wasn't going to fit in either :( ). So finally the week of Halloween I found a monkey costume at Walmart that was really cheap and decided that it would be good enough. Then that week Woot had a woot off. At the end of the woot off they sold woot off monkeys... and we knew that we had to modify Sam's costume a little...



Thanks to Taylor for her help finishing off the cape so that he could have a woot cape to go with his costume :) If you want to see more pictures of Sam in his Halloween costume we have a whole album of them on his facebook fan page.

My birthday was the day after Halloween and since it was a Sunday it was a pretty quiet event this year. Sam and I went to church in the morning (Eric was sick from so little sleep during the week so he didn't make it), and then we had some friends over for dinner in the evening. It was really fun though! Taylor and I made Chicken Fettuccine Alfredo that was absolutely amazing. Seriously, if you are looking for a good recipe, I can't recommend that one highly enough. It was our first attempt at fettuccine and the only thing I was sad about was that my tummy wasn't big enough to hold more. Taylor also made me a raspberry cake with chocolate filling. I'd been excited for it since she made it for her birthday back in August... if that gives you an idea of how good it was :)

Eric gave me a sewing machine for my birthday - so that I could make the aforementioned woot cape :) I've had a couple of mending projects but I'm now looking for some simple holiday type projects to work on. Simple being the operative word since I really don't have much sewing experience, but I really want to make use of my new machine! If anyone has any suggestions please let me know!

As far as Sam goes (and we all know that he is really the reason most people read our blog :) ) he's growing up fast! He's 8 months now. He crawls like a maniac and is starting to stand on his own! I would guess that he'll be walking by the end of the month at this rate, but I may just be an overly proud first time parent :) He is very talkative - especially in Relief Society when I'm trying to keep him quiet. Does anyone have any good recommendations for how to teach an 8 month old to be quiet in church? He's not crying or mad so I don't feel like taking him out of the meeting is necessarily the right option, but he jabbers loudly (and sometimes makes happy yells) that are a bit disruptive.  If I take him out of the meeting it seems like that just teaches the wrong lesson that if you make noise you get to leave the meeting. The only thing I could come up with is covering his mouth or saying "shh" but that doesn't seem to do much. Am I being over-ambitious to try and teach this to an 8 month old? Anyways, he's super cute and we're so grateful to have him in our family!

For the most part things have been pretty quiet. Sam and I are getting a little stir crazy so if anyone is looking for a friend let me know! We're still working on not mauling other children but Sam seems to get a big kick out of being around other kids, and I'm getting pretty good at keeping him from pushing them over or poking their eyes out :)

Splish splash

Sam LOVES taking baths. He has loved the water from the first time we gave him a full bath after his umbilical cord fell out. This past week he discovered that if you hit the water with your hands... it makes big splashes! It's been a lot of fun for him.

When you combine this new discovery and love of the bathtub with Sam's increasing mobility... you get the following picture:


Although, he might want to talk to his Uncle Jayson about what happens if you jump into the bathtub when you're not ready for bathtime...

"You have Tortellini?!!"

Most of you don't know the background to the title of this post, so I'll need to back up a little bit and give you a Hansen Family history lesson...

Once upon a time, in a land far far away... or possibly just in Provo about 2 1/2 years ago.... Eric and I were engaged. Since we enjoyed spending time together, we would get together after classes every night and make dinner together. One night Eric was over at my apartment rummaging through my freezer for something we could make. Suddenly he pulls out a bag. With a look on his face that could mean that we'd just told him today was Christmas, he says "you have tortellini?!" This was how I discovered one of Eric's favorite meals. He was so excited about it that at that moment I REALLY wished that the tortellinis in his hand were mine. Unfortunately, they were in fact my roommate's. However, you can bet that with a reaction like that I made sure to buy tortellini on my next grocery trip, and pretty much every grocery trip since.

Fast forward to today. Last night I once again made tortellini for dinner. Which meant there were leftovers for my lunch today. I made the mistake of making that lunch while Sam was hanging out in the front room with me. The following is what ensued...

Sorry the pictures aren't the highest quality... Sam wouldn't go more than a foot away from me and the tortellini.


Yeah, Samuel is definitely his father's son :P

The Ferberish Method Followup

So for those of you who endured my novel length post on our sleep training methods with Sam you may be interested to know what became of that. I'm here to give you our current progress.

After Day 2 I noticed a trend for Sam. If I put him down within a couple minutes of when he fell asleep he would put up little or no fight and then sleep happily in his playpen for the duration of his nap. If I put him down before he fell asleep then he has something to say about it. If I waited too long after he fell asleep he would wake up and think that the 10 minutes he was asleep counted for his nap and be up for the next couple hours, albeit a little cranky. So I went with that and it's worked like a charm.

After going with this method I listened to this episode on No Cry Sleep Solutions from the podcast New Moms, New Babies (it's made by the same people who make my favorite pregnancy podcast - Pregtastic) and learned something interesting. Apparently the first 10-15 minutes of a baby's sleep cycle take off the edge of tiredness that the baby feels. So if the baby wakes up after that first little bit of sleep they feel like they've gotten rest, but their body hasn't really received all the benefits that they need. So, they won't feel like they need to go back to sleep but they'll still be cranky. (sorry, I know I've made that more confusing, I'd recommend listening to that podcast if that didn't make sense)

It was interesting to me because it totally explained what I was seeing with Samuel. After figuring this out I've been able to get Sam to take all of his naps in his playpen and at least start out every night in there as well (I'm still too lazy to make him sleep in there all night, it's way too easy to just let him sleep with me.

I'm much happier now knowing that our safety concerns with Sam are alleviated during naps. Our next step is working on sleeping through the night. Sam still sleeps nothing like unto through the night, but I don't know how much of that is a result of our wacky schedule and how much of it is poor training on our part. We make it work, but it'd be nice if we could clear that milestone too. I'm sure I'll let you know if/when that happens :)

"Is he starting to sit yet?" "Uhm, starting?!"

Sorry for yet another back dated post. I need to do better at either deciding to omit videos and pictures from my posts completely or assigning the multimedia part of the posts immediately to Eric. Editor's note: Eric ended up putting the video together. Scroll down to see it.

This week we went in for Sam's 6 month check up. Unfortunately Sam had gotten pretty sick the day before and had been running a fever and had a very runny nose, so we weren't able to show off our baby as well as we would have liked. However, you wouldn't have known that he was sick by the way he was acting. He was flirting with the nurse and the doctor, and trying to pull himself up to standing when he was supposed to be laying on the scale. It was pretty fun to watch him. The one kinda good side about him being sick is that we didn't have him get his shots while we were there, so he left happy. Of course, it also means that we'll have to go back sometime this next week just for shots, ick.

Anyways, here are the current Sam stats -

Weight: 17lbs 9oz - 65 percentile
Height: 27 inches - 55 percentile
Head circumference: 45 cm - 90 percentile

It looks like his parents genes are finally starting to catch up to him and he's slowly falling down the growth charts. But it's not at all something to be worried about, he's still very healthy, just evening out to a size that would be more like we would expect for him.

The funniest part of the visit was definitely when the doctor asked us if Sam was starting to sit up on his own. Sam can sit right now for as long as he wants all by himself, and has been able to do that for a couple weeks now. He's crawling like a maniac and pulling himself up to standing. We thought we'd throw in a little bit of pictures and videos of him getting into everything.

The HD version of the video is available on youtube if you click here and then click the HD box in youtube's video player.

As far as everything else goes, we're just still doing the same sorts of things. Eric, unfortunately, will switch back to his ridiculous late night schedule (6pm - 2am) again this week until they can find someone to replace him. Anyone speak Chinese and know HTML/Javascript that's looking for a job? We're pretty bummed about the switch, but it doesn't negate his recent promotion or anything. Hopefully it won't last too long and they'll find someone to replace him soon.

In other news, things seem to be moving forward on the China opportunity. We've been helping figure out the logistics to get us over there, so it might not be too much longer. We'll keep you posted when we know more :)