Thanksgiving

Yes, I am fully aware of how belated this post is. Christmas took a lot of my time in December so I'm just getting around to blogging about Thanksgiving. Oh well, better late than never right?

For Thanksgiving this year we were with the Andersons down in California. Since we'd just had our first bit of real cold and snow here in Utah we were really excited to head to a warmer climate :)

As those of you who have been following our blog know, Eric had been working an awful schedule of 6pm - 2am. Well, after Daylight Savings Time ended his schedule changed... to 7pm - 3am. As much as I had hated his schedule before, this was worse. We slowly got so mixed up that we were going to bed at 8am and waking up just in time for Eric to go to work. It got us all wacky. But just before Thanksgiving I'd had enough. It just wasn't working for our family and it was making it hard to make it to church on Sundays. More importantly, the reason Eric was on the night schedule was to take Chinese calls and he'd only received one... since August. Since this was pretty ridiculous I proposed to Eric that he offer to switch to a normal schedule and just stay on call during the nights so that we could get our schedule all worked out.

When Eric went to get approval for this change we found out that he was supposed to have switched to working 5pm - 1am rather than 7pm - 3am, which would have been a totally different story for our family. However Eric's manager approved our proposed solution we were able to start making that transition over Thanksgiving. Eric's last day working the super late shift was Thursday the week before Thanksgiving.

This was such a blessing because it meant that we were able to be starting to be on normal hours while we were with my family. Plus, it meant that we had all of Thanksgiving break to transition before Eric went back to work. In retrospect, I'm really glad that Eric got the time change mixed up because otherwise we never would have made the switch to him being on call at nights and that really was a good change to make.

Anyways, our drive down was actually pretty good. We drove down with Taylor and Ryan Lockwood (my sister and brother-in-law) after a trip to Tucanos - a little bit belated for my birthday, but we wanted to use my birthday club free meal before the end of the month! Sam slept pretty much the whole way, which we attribute to a lot of prayers on the part of my family.

Our time in California wasn't super eventful. We spent some of our time letting Sam chase around my dad's chickens. Yes, my dad now has chickens. And no, my family does not live in a particularly rural part of Southern California. But earlier this year he got it into his head that he wanted to raise some chickens in our backyard. So, he built a chicken coup next to our Sport Court and found a website where he could get mail order chickens. As Dave Barry would say, no I'm not making this up. Apparently you can order chickens and they throw them into a box right after they hatch and overnight them to your house. And then you have chickens. It's been really funny to watch my family's adventures with chickens. For example, one day my mom came into the front room to find all of the chickens laying on the floor staring at the blank TV. They're as bad as her kids!

Anyways, we also spent some time going to the beach where we got some really cute pictures of Sam. The whole album is here but I thought I'd include a few highlights -


Sam took this sand stuff very seriously, actually this is a very common look on his face


Sam really wanted to get in the water. No surprise there! He loves the water!


I think we can safely say that Sam enjoyed the beach

We spent Thanksgiving just at home. I think that's the first time we've had a Thanksgiving dinner without having a bunch of other families from the ward or neighborhood or extended family there. While we always enjoy having guests for Thanksgiving, it was nice to be reunited as a family. It's weird to think that our immediate family is now getting big enough to have an "extended family" Thanksgiving with just us!

One cool trick that Sam learned for Thanksgiving was how to gobble. Eric would put his finger up to Sam's mouth and wiggle it back and forth to make Sam sound like a turkey. It was pretty funny and totally appropriate for Thanksgiving. Sam really enjoyed it too and liked showing off his new trick.

For the most part our time in California was pretty low key - which isn't to say it wasn't fun. It was a lot of fun but we spent the time just hanging out and enjoying family rather than doing big things. In my opinion that's the best kind of vacation. We played board games and nerf guns and Wii and visited together. Hooray for family!  I have a bunch of video that I'm working on editing down to a reasonable posting length, but I've decided it's just time to get this post posted and we can work on the video later.

Our drive back to Utah was as successful as our drive to California. Sam slept really well almost the entire way. Re-adjusting to normal life the next day was no picnic, but it was worth it for the fun we had in California. Thanks Anderson Family for a fun time together!

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 :)