New Arrival

I wanted to do this last week, but posting on the blog quickly fell to the bottom of the list of things to do once we got home. We welcomed the newest member of our family on Sunday, March 1, at 1:35 pm. Laelia (LAY-lee-uh) was 7 lbs 10 oz and 19 1/2 inches long. She's a good baby and we feel very lucky that she is happy and healthy and that everything went smoothly in the delivery.

I'll post some pictures, since that's what everyone likes to see!

Tasman was not sure about this baby on Sunday, but has since warmed up.

Sean gave Laelia her first bath.

For comparison: The above is Tasman a few hours after she was born and below is Tasman now—the monkey!

Funny story

I have to remember to blog about funny stories right when they happen. Otherwise, I forget.

I was reading "scriptures" with Tasman, by which I mean that I was reading a story out of the illustrated scripture series that the church publishes for little kids. Jesus was talking to Peter in this particular story. Tasman pointed to Peter.

"Who's that?"

I said it was Peter.

"What's Peter in?"

I didn't really understand the question, but I explained that Peter was one of Jesus's apostles.

"Oh, okay. And Peter is in Ghostbusters too."

Should it disturb me that my child knows Peter Venkman better than she knows Peter the apostle?

Transitions

We have to apologize to all of you who check our blog repeatedly and may have been disappointed in the last few months. It has been interesting to relocate and find that even if all the boxes have been unpacked (they have not) there is still a lot of settling in to do. I really have not yet established a routine and I am finding it hard to accomplish everything I want to, even though I have far more unstructured time available than I used to.

In general things are going very well. Sean is finishing up his first term at Westminster and I am finished with clinic up at the U for the winter break. We are looking forward to having some time in the next few weeks to attack some projects (like unpacking boxes and finishing dissertations, etc). Hopefully we can accomplish what we want to. It has been a very busy couple of months in which we have had to become accustomed to new schedules and new responsibilities. Sean’s new favorite responsibility: shoveling snow. :)

We are enjoying living close to family, but find that this makes us very busy. There is always something going on. Tasman has been the lucky recipient of so much love and attention from two sets of grandparents and doting aunts and uncles. She’s a spoiled girl. Tas seems to be adjusting pretty well to the new house and new schedule. She’s excited for Christmas and for the new baby sister who will arrive in March. Hopefully by the time we have a new little one we’ll feel a little bit more settled, but maybe not. It takes a while for me to really feel like I fit in somewhere. We miss San Diego (especially now when it is cold). I still hate wearing a coat and having to bundle up every time I go outside. It will probably be a few years before I get used to that again. On the plus side – we can refrigerate anything by just putting it out in the garage. Sean is never without a cold Dr. Pepper. :)

We hope that each of you have a very Merry Christmas and we wish you all the best in 2009. Here are a few old pictures of Tasman that we haven't posted yet!

Tasman enjoyed playing in the paper that came out of the boxes while we unpacked.

Tasman dressed up her "My Twinn" doll in a cat mask and opted for a witch hat to go with her cat pajamas.


Tasman enjoyed the beautiful fall leaves.

Tas on Halloween.

Tasman is three!

Well, I've already violated my promise to blog weekly since I missed last Sunday. But today I have an especially good reason to blog. It was Tasman's third birthday on Friday! And we have the photos to prove it:

This was the pile of presents. And this didn't even include two boxes from my parents, who weren't able to be there for the Friday celebration. (They came over today, Sunday.) You'd think it was Christmas or something.

Tas got a Backyardigans cake.


Thanks for the balloons, V!


Mommy and Tasman, looking cute.


The infamous birthday hat. We bought this hat at Disneyland long before Tasman was born with the intention of making it a family tradition. So we're likely to see this hat pop up in photos from time to time.


Yummy birthday cake.


This is Tassie's ghetto pressie. Kirsti found this Sesame Street radio-controlled race set for six bucks at a consignment sale. The plastic and tape on the right end were there when she bought it; the lid had obviously been torn off. We were amazed that nearly all the pieces were there. The only thing missing was a little four-wheeler that goes on a little trailer that the car pulls around, but its absence in no way alters the functionality of the rest of the set. (If we had been missing pieces of the track, that would have been problematic, but they were all there.)

Vanessa made this little hat for Tas.

There were lots of other cool presents. We didn't get photos of everything. Tas got some wooden food toys: one was a Bento box with toy sushi, and the other was a cutting board and some food that can be "cut" into pieces. (The pieces are held together with Velcro and when you cut through the slices, the Velcro separates, making a very satisfying cutting sound.) She got a stuffed rabbit, lots of princess dress-up apparel, the movie Sleeping Beauty, a fake CD player that plays Disney songs, a giant Magna Doodle, and several cute outfits. I'm sure I'm forgetting stuff. But that's because there was a lot of stuff. What a spoiled kid!

And thanks to Papa and Meme (David and Roxann, Kirsti's parents) for hosting the party at their home and preparing a lovely dinner.

We're back!

I'm not sure to whom I'm writing. At this point, it's been three months or so since my last blog post, so most of our frequent readers have probably given up and gone away for good. (Unless you kept our RSS feed in your reader, in which case, good for you!) But if you are out there reading this, welcome back.

So what's new? Well, it snowed this morning. Now the sun just came out, so hopefully by this afternoon, most of the snow will have melted away. But we ain't in San Diego anymore, Toto.

We have made the move to Utah and we're settling in. Well, sort of. We still have about fifteen to twenty boxes sitting either in our garage or our basement waiting to be unpacked. We've retrieved all the stuff we need for our day-to-day living, so the rest of our junk has just been sitting there waiting for us. Since a lot of it is in the garage, we haven't been parking our car in there. But now that it's cold and snowy outside, it would be a good idea for us to get to that stuff and at least move it out of the way enough to get our car parked in the garage.

I am loving Westminster College. All my colleagues are genuinely nice people and the whole vibe there is pretty laid back. My classes are going well, for the most part. I'm excited about the spring semester since I'll be teaching an upper-division topology course.

Kirsti is working one day a week at the University of Utah supervising students in their audiology clinic. She is also planning to work from time to time at the VA as a substitute audiologist (presumably when people go on vacation and so forth), especially during the holidays and summers when I have time to be home with Tas.

Speaking of Tasman, we have been potty-training her for the last few weeks. It is going pretty well. We decided to go "cold turkey" on the diapers. So at least while we are home, she wears her "big girl panties", although we have to put her in pull-ups when we go out in public. When she stops having accidents at home, we'll be more likely to let her go out without pull-ups.

So now you're relatively up-to-date. My apologies that this first post back sounds a little "Christmas letter"-ish. My goal is to blog once a week, probably on Sundays since I'll have a bit more free time on Sundays than I do the other days of the week. Hopefully, the posts will get a bit more exciting.