One Smart Little Cookie...

It's been awhile since either of us have posted an update on the blog, so while we've been pretty good at adding pictures and videos to Sam's facebook page, we're long overdue for a general family update. And don't worry if you are not a user of the facebook ;), pictures are posted here as well.

Sam is getting so smart in so many ways! It is really fascinating to see how his mind soaks up knowledge like a sham-wow. Take sign language for example. A few months ago we made an effort to teach him basic signs like "more", "milk", and "bye-bye". He didn't seem to take to it too well so we let it drop for the time being, but just in this past month, he out-of-the-blue starts using all these signs that we had shown him before.

His dexterity and spacial reasoning have increased dramatically, as well. It's kind of sad to notice how quickly he has been able to reach all the things we thought were high enough away. We've had to revamp our baby-proofing process, especially since he discovered where his mom keeps her chocolate stash!

The only downside as of late has been his sleep-training process. While he takes all of his naps on his own now, he still has a hard time sleeping through the night. Sometimes he gets so little sleep during the night that he has to make up for it in random places during the day.

But he is such a fun little guy, copying everything he sees his parents doing. He usually hangs out with me in the morning before I go into work so we can spend some time together, and one of the last things he sees me do before I leave the house is put on my shoes. The other day I come into the family room because I realized my shoes were missing, and then I see this:

We sure do love this little guy and all the funny things he does! He's learning to say words and do actions like waving and saying "Aye!", which serves as both his greeting and farewell gesture ("Hi" and "Bye"). We also really enjoy his word for food that he wants to eat or is currently enjoying: "MMMMmmm!"

Our regular family life hasn't been extremely exciting, but we're still getting out and having fun. We finally took advantage of my sister Dianne's Christmas Gift to us and went to see Fiddler on the Roof at the Hale Center Theater in Salt Lake City. Given that Brittny was in Young Ambassadors for four years, you'd think she would have seen this show by now, but surprisingly she hadn't! And of course since it's about a fiddler (and it's a really great show), we had to go see that one. It was a lot of fun. Thanks Dianne!

And the first week of April brought LDS General Conference and by extension, a mission reunion! Sadly, this was the first mission reunion we attended where the number of attendees actually shrank instead of growing. Last time, we took up the whole chapel with all the people that were around here, but as people graduate and move on to other areas of life, it makes it that much harder to get together. I used to get all the members of my Taidong district together for dinner either before or after the reunion. We were a very close district in the mission, but this time around, only my buddy Vance and I were able to get together.

But it's okay, life is supposed to keep changing for us. I found the General conference messages to be truly inspiring. We watched it up at Brittny's grandparents house, and while it was fun to be with family, the noise and little kids running around made it particularly difficult to focus on the TV. So instead, I picked up the Internet stream through my laptop (and at times my new phone) and used noise-isolating earphones. I also participated in the online commentary through twitter, which was exciting in a sense because we were able to become the 4th most popular subject on all of Twitter during conference. It feels like a neat way to share more about the Gospel.

So that concludes the highlights of the past month, I hope I wasn't too boring!