Merry Christmas!

All of us in the Anderson family want to wish you all a very Merry Christmas! For those of you whose addresses we don't have, here's our Christmas card:


Although you can't tell from the picture, Teddy has also started smiling, which turns up the joy of parenting quite a few notches. He has some very cute smiles and we enjoy seeing them every day. Here are some pictures we took one night when we went to lay him down for bedtime:


As you can see, we have been blessed with one stinkin' cute little boy. Lest you think he's all smiles though, here's a video we took tonight while we were showing him his new toy he got for Christmas:



As you can see, he's got some warming up to do with that toy.

Christmas was very good for us as we hope it has been for all of you. To all of you, Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!

Happy Birthday Teddy

Today is Teddy's one month birthday. I thought we could celebrate by admiring how cute and how big he is. Here are some of the pictures that we have taken of him.

This is the first family portrait taken at the hospital right before we left.

He has the cutest face before he cries. It is not cute at 4 in the morning, but it is cute during the day. He preps himself before he screams.

This was taken when he was two-weeks old. Teddy Power!!

This is his first walk. We went out on November 16. We went a total of 2 blocks away.

Again our first walk.

Dad had to buy this outfit when he saw it. He is our little Teddy Bear. Now he looks like a Teddy Bear.

Teddy did not like the Bumbo very much, but he was gassy when we put him in it. He sat in it for a total of a minute.

He is already showing off his muscles.

This was taken today. He is balding. He used to have a lot of hair, but as you can see he is now balding.

That is our little boy. We love him tons. We will be weighing him tonight and seeing how tall he is. He was sleeping well, but lately he gets up at 3-5 for a feeding and then doesn't go back to bed. Any suggestions would be awesome. He is such a sweet boy.

New Niece LIlly

Well, I figured it was time to let go of my pride and let everyone know that Zann's brother Dakoda's girlfriend Ashley had a baby. They named her Lilly. She was born October 26, 2008. She was 8 lbs. 3 oz. Here is a picture of her.

Going Private

Hello one and all. We have decided to go private. We will be doing this by this weekend. If you would like to be invited, please let me know your email address (unless you know I have it like Kellie Buckner or Rachelle Richins).

Mom's Thankful Thursday

Zann let me do the Thankful Thursday and since we don't know how to do anything on time, it is of course late. I am grateful for epidurals and also for my little boy Theodore or Teddy as I like to call him.

Some people have asked for the story of delivery and so without further ado here it is:

I woke up at 5 Monday morning and was having contractions and they were about 7-8 minutes apart. I got up and started moving about 6 and they went away. At 7 they started again and didn’t go away. We called the hospital and they said we should come in. We got there about 9:15 and they admitted me and checked me. I was dilated to a two. It was great since I was only dilated to a one for five weeks. We were excited. We got all checked in and watched some movies. We even played Balloons Tower Defense Three (This is a game on ninjakiwi.com, our new fetish). They started me on Pitocin at about 10:45. Dr. Fowers came and broke my water between 12:30 and one. We were watching Nacho Libre when he came in. The pain continued to increase and they gave me some medicine about 2:30 that knocked me out until 3. After the medicine wore off, I wanted the epidural. They came in and gave it to me at 3. The doctor told me it would take effect in about 15 minutes and that I would feel the next couple of contractions. That wasn’t the case. For me, it was immediate and I was grateful.
The babies heart rate kept dropping anytime they increased the amount of Pitocin. It was strange. I had to be on oxygen from about 4:30 on. It was not fun, but not bad. The Pitocin made me have too many contractions all at once and they baby couldn’t recover from it. The nurse that helped us at the first, Candice, was nice, but when she left at 5, we got an awesome nurse. Her name was Kayla. She was great. She was proactive with everything. I was dilated to a 5 at about 5:30 and then I was dilated to a 10 by 8. Anytime the heart rate dropped lower than we thought was good, she came in before we could call her. They prepped me for a C-Section because they didn’t know if I could deliver the baby vaginally. The let me rest from 8-9 pm to see how far the baby would drop. I started pushing shortly after 9. I threw up a ton of bile during the pushing. That was some of my best pushing. The baby came out and the umbilical cord was wrapped around his head twice. Dr. Fowers had to cut it off before he was born the rest of the way. He was without oxygen for a few seconds. He wasn’t a crier and still isn’t a crier.

He has blessed our lives in so many ways. I am going without much sleep. We went to the doctor today. He has gained 14 oz. since last Friday. That is two oz. a day for those of you who can't do math. He has also continued to grow. He is the 90th percentile for height and 75th percentile for weight. He is a great little boy. I love him tons. I am excited to continue getting to know my son better.

This picture was taken when Zann's parents came up last weekend. It is one of my favorite pictures.

A Very Special Thankful Thursday

No, this week's Thankful Thursday is not about not drinking or abuse or something like that, I just borrowed the tagline "A Very Special" from old school TV shows because I think it's funny. Some of you may have worried that I had given up after only one Thankful Thursday. Luckily, no I am still at it. I've just been super busy. A lot of that business, in fact, is due to the subject of today's Thankful Thursday
Yes, today's Thankful Thursday is all about my new son, Theodore Zann Anderson. Isn't he cute? I'll be skipping the two categories today and just focusing on Teddy for all of my gratitude, because there's a lot of it. What a wonderful blessing it is to have this sweet little boy in our family!! I am so grateful for him. From way back when I was excited to be a daddy and I knew that I would love him and be glad to have him, but I had no idea just how much I would love this little guy.
From the second he was born I loved him so deeply it was amazing to me. I sat there and looked at him and put my hand on his little chest (and tummy, he's a long baby but he's still a baby...) and I was so proud to be a dad and so happy to have him here with us. He has brought such a sweet spirit into our lives and our home (don't worry, we did have the Spirit before).
It's been amazing to me how much we have come to know him and learn about who he is and what his personality is. As I'm writing this, he's just going on 120 hours old, yet you can tell that there's much more to him than that. Babies make the veil so thin and we can just catch a glimpse of where they came from and where we're headed.
I love this little guy so much. I had to go back to work again on Thursday so I can support our family now that I'm the (almost) sole breadwinner. I didn't want to leave and I'm always so excited to see him and hold him when I get home. He already seems to know who his Mommy and Daddy are and he absolutely loves his grandparents as well. He is such a wonderful little boy and I don't think I could possibly be happier to have him here and that he is ours.
I hope that this wasn't too disjointed. I'm pretty much out of words to describe how I feel about our little Teddy, so to sum it all up, I'll just say this: He's wonderful.

More Pictures of Teddy

Here are some more pictures of Teddy. The first is Teddy and Mommy the day after he was born. Mommy is not near so tired now as she looks in this picture...


















The next one is with Grandma Wickham and Teddy. Isn't he so dang cute?














Now we have Theodore and Grandpa Theodore:















And finally, baby and mommy again, taken just a few minutes ago. Hope you've enjoyed his cuteness as much as we are!!

Theodore Zann Anderson

11/3/2008 9:47 PM
8 lbs 1 oz 21.5 inches

Still no baby

For those of you who can not wait for me to have the baby, well, neither can I. I am still pregnant. We went to the doctor today and did a NST (Non-Stess-Test). The baby is healthy and well. I am going in Monday night to be induced. They are going to give me something to help soften my cervix. If that doesn't work then they will give me pitocen. If that doesn't work then we go C-Section. I almost know they are going to have to go C-Section so I just wish they would jump straight to that. Why go through all of the pain if you don't have to. Do not think I want to be cut open, but if they are going to have to do it anyway, I just wish they would do it at the beginning.

Thankful Thursday

Ok, so I know it's Friday but I've been meaning to do this for a few weeks now. In case you haven't noticed, the last few posts by myself on our blog have been pretty negative. In the hopes of showing all of you friends and family that I'm not really that negative, I am starting a theme day: Thankful Thursday. Every Thursday (that's not a promise, just a goal) I will post on the blog about two things that I'm grateful for. One of those will be spiritual, the other temporal. Hopefully this will help me to count my blessings and help all of you to feel a little more grateful for the blessings in your lives. So without any further ado, Thankful Thursday for 16 October 2008:

Spiritual - My Amazing Wife, Amber


This fits in both categories, really, but I'll put it here. I am so grateful to have such a wife as Amber. She makes every day of my life more meaningful, fun, peaceful, exciting, productive, loving, good, and fulfilling. Besides that, she's beautiful! To quote a favorite movie, "She's pretty much the best thing that's ever happened to me." I'm so thankful for the way she loves me even though I have so many little goofy weaknesses that make it hard for me to even get along with myself sometimes. She is very patient with me and my sometimes childish/silly ways. I have grown so much in the time we've been together, and though the credit goes to the Lord in the end, a big part of his plan in helping me get here has been by blessing me with a wife who is capable of getting the best out of me. What a blessing it is to have her for my own and to know that our marriage will last forever.

Temporal - Double-Stuf Oreos



First off, why would you even CONSIDER buying regular Oreos? To borrow from another quote, "What's fun about less [frosting]?" Ok, now that that's out of the way, what an amazing cookie! Oreos and I have a friendship that goes way way back to the earliest days of my childhood. I have developed, discovered, and been taught many different ways of eating Oreos, and they are all delicious. I really do have a great fondness for these little cookies. Whoever invented these cookies deserves a Nobel prize.

PS - Isn't Amber a cute little soccer player?
PPS - After that spiel about double-stuf, I DO still like regular Oreos, so if you have some I'd be HAPPY to come over and help you eat them...

Feel sorry for me...

So, for those of you who weren't aware, I am working full-time at New Dawn Technologies. It's a great job, I work on a great team and the work is enjoyable. I have been working since I started here (along with a coworker who started shortly after me) on a project to create our own version of "document automation" software. Basically, what this does is you create a document and put in the document certain bits called "fill points", which correspond to data that you want to dynamically fill in your document. For instance, a fill point could pull in data about the charges against a defendant, or about witness names and addresses for a subpoena (we do justice software). So once you create a template for this, you can generate the same document over and over again for different cases, thus saving somebody the monotony of having to do it by hand. Pretty sweet eh? So we requested an icon for our awesome piece of software. On August 18th, these are the designs we received:
Not bad eh? I mean, the gears are a little blah but the magic wand is pretty cool, sortof like we magically create these awesome documents. So we sent our feedback (which is what was requested): "NO GEARS...boring, and lightning and paper don't go well together. The magic wand is cool but maybe stick with the straight edged paper to stay professional looking." We felt pretty good about that.
After a week or so I finally heard the results of our icon quest. Another employee (not the one who asked for our feedback) had decided on an icon for us. Here it is:
Every time I see it I cringe. Gears. Green ones. The apparent reason for this is that authoring these templates is an administrative action and green gears are the administrative icon for our main product, JustWare. Still, gears? Tell me if I'm overboard on this, but I can't stand it and neither can my coworker who's on the project with me. Please everybody pity me.

For the lazy and forgetful

For those of you who are lazy or forgetful, we are having a little boy. You can look at him manhood further down the blog. I am due on October 28. My last doctor's appointment though he told me I would probably go early. We will see if he is correct. I am 35 weeks tomorrow.

Again, I am having a little boy that is due on October 28.

Rant

So I'm in class right now. Yes, I know blogging in class is a no-no, but I am in a state of serious frustration and need some kind of an outlet. As a recent college graduate and one of those people who is crazy enough to pay for more punishment by going for a Masters degree, I've been to quite a few classes and had quite a few teachers. I am writing today about two things that I am utterly disgusted with. 1 - POWER POINT. Microsoft must have struck a deal with the Devil himself on this product, because as a part of Office it's completely ubiquitous, but beyond that, in the way it is USUALLY used (some teachers know how to use it well) it COMPLETELY saps any semblance of real learning from school. It causes students to disengage from the lecture (trust me, I know) because most teachers that use them READ from the slides in their teaching and post the slides on the internet. "But that's so nice, you can have those notes for later!" - THAT'S WHAT A NOTEBOOK IS FOR!!! I have learned MUCH MORE from teachers who DON'T use powerpoint than from those who do, because I know I have to be taking notes myself rather than letting the teacher spoon-feed them to me. Beyond this, a lecture without powerpoint slides flows in a natural way, rather than in some predetermined order that may or may not actually work when the teacher gets into class. Another part of the problem with this is that it causes people (I'm one) to prepare lessons and/or presentations to the slides, rather than fitting the slides to the lesson. This is a BAD way to prepare a lesson. Anyways, just to quickly end this little rant, the other annoying thing to me is the whole tenure system and that being tenured leads (some) teachers to spend way too much time on their research and none on being a good teacher, and teachers who are "great researchers" are often sortof arrogant, especially in terms of showing up to class with little or no preparation because they feel they are expert enough in their field to not have to worry about it. Anyways, maybe I'll write a post about things I'm grateful for to balance all of this negativity. That's all, goodbye.

TAGGED!!!

The Rules:

Link the Person who Tagged you. Mention rules on your blog. Tell about 6 quirks of yours. Tag 6 fellow bloggers to do the same. Leave a comment to let them know.

Quirk #1: When I sleep, I can not repeat CAN NOT feel any human breath on me. I know this sounds weird, but if I can feel my own breath I will move my arm. If Zann is breathing on me, I will pull the covers up over my neck, which leads me to

Quirk #2: I have to sleep with some kind of blanket. Whether it be a sheet, small blanket, I just have to have something covering part of my body.

Quirk #3: I hate being told what to do. I didn't realize it as much until I got pregnant and people tell me all the time that I shouldn't lift that, I should sit down, or I need to take it easy. Honestly, I know what I can and can't do. Don't tell me that I can't do it, or I will do it.

Quirk #4: Once I start something, I always think that I will finish it in a timely manner, but if I don't make a goal to work on it everyday for at least a half hour, it will just sit there. I finally finished a quilt today that I started a year ago. I have moved it back and forth between places and kept telling myself that I would get it done. It is now complete. This is what it looks like:

Quirk #5: I have a nose that can smell awesomely well, particularly candy. My sister's roommate was eating a candy apple Now and Later. She offered me one and so I knew she was eating a Now and Later, but I was able to guess the kind. I have been in the passenger seat before and somebody in the back seat was eating a watermelon Jolly Rancher and I was able to guess that someone was eating it and I didn't see them.

Quirk #6: I have a husband who I love.

I tag Kellie Buckner, Rachel Richins, Janelle Cropper, Mindy Anderson, Mindy Holmgren, Jessica Nielson Newman.

Don't you wish your wife was hot like mine?

Old and New Car

We sold our car on August 2, 2008. We were very excited except that we now have to find a new car, which has been an extremely big head ache.

We really liked this one and even put an offer on it, but we were denied. This is a 2003 Toyota Camry with 59,690 miles and they were asking for 10,800. We offered out the door $10,500. it was a low blow, but like we said we were denied anyway.

They were having Car Wars Thursday-Monday. We went and have test-driving the cars since Friday. We test drove a 2000 Honda Accord with 97,000 miles on it. It has a V6 engine and runs so smooth. It is a great ride. The guy wanted to sell it and so we made him an offer. We drove over to my parent's house and they drove in the car with us. My father is a mechanic and he also has a really good friend who looked at it as well. He said we were getting a great deal. We are now the proud owners of this wonderful car. It was quite a bit less than $10,500 and so we can now buy a camera as well. We are pretty excited about that. The cool thing about buying the car was that we were able to pay with cash. We have been saving for a few years. We highly recommend doing this. We don't have to pay anyone. we are going to be getting the title instead of some lien holder. Sweet!!

More Problems

It has been forever since we have written, but it is kind of hard writing since we do not have the Internet. Well, that is just about to change. Ok, so it has changed. We got the Internet last night. I was on this morning looking at blogs and having a grand old time. It was great.

Some sad news, our camera broke. We are now in the market, saving up to buy a new one since we do have a little one on the way. You can bet your bippy that there are going to be tons of pictures up of our newborn when he decides to come.

Zann went on a hike a couple of weeks ago and I will let him tell you about that as well as post some pictures. About a month ago, he got strep and we took him to the doctor and they gave him the option of getting a shot or taking 4 pills a day for 10 days. Which would you do? He got the shot. Well, he aparently should have taken the pills. Just as the nurse was finishing giving him the shot, Zann said, "I feel dizzy". He then passed out. I ran around the table to hold him up while the nurse went and grabbed the doctor. His eyes were open, but glazed over, he sounded like he was snoring, and he was frothing at the mouth. I thought I was going to be bringing a child into the world without a husband. I was so scared. The doctor came in and they were about to give him a shot of something, but then Zann came to. He was fine. Apparently what happened was a vasovagal reaction. I'll spare you the explanation and just tell you to check out the Wikipedia article on Vasovagal Syncope. Not even a week later, Zann was riding his bike and crashed and burned. He got a little hurt, but bodies heal themselves. Unfortunately, bikes don't. He is still currently transferring different parts of it to his old frame. At least we didn't need to buy him a new bike.

After all is said and done, we are very happy. We are rearranging things in our aparment/house to get ready for the baby. We only have 11 more weeks. That is so weird to me. We are super excited. Life is wonderful here, just busy.

My Brother

This is a video my brother Dillon made to take to skate shops around the (Salt Lake) valley to try to get sponsored. As far as I know to this point he has two or three sponsors, but it could be more now. Anyways, he's awesome as is my other brother Dakoda and I just wanted to share the awesomeness. PS - sorry for the large size of the file, but that's life. I promise it's worth the wait.

Extra points for the person who can tell the gender from the pictures (it's there if you look close), and who can tell what everything else is!

We never did post the pictures of the Rexburg Temple. There is a good explanation. That would be that we checked in our camera, but we never checked it back out. It is now currently in Rexburg, Idaho. We are blessed enough to have some friends from Rexburg who happened to be going up there for Father's Day. Wonderful people. We will post more when we get the pictures.

As promised, Zambersonville proudly presents Jean's Golden Girls

We went to church yesterday. We decided to be good and go to all three meetings. It was good until Sacrament Meeting and they went 10 minutes over. The only day that it has been nice, is on Sunday when we can't do anything. We did go on a couple of walks and were able to enjoy the weather a little bit. If you remember, Zann has been on a kick on taking pictures of license plates. Well while on our walk, I noticed some license plates that we didn't have and wished we had the camera. Apparently Zann is not the only geek in this relationship. Open mouth, insert foot.

Today, I have not been feeling well. We stayed in
this morning watching David Archuleta for about an hour. We then went out and walked around the town. They have about 20 art galleries and that many realtors here. We then came home and played Dr. Mario. You should all start calling me Dr. Mario. If you look on the left side of the picture and see the three crowns, that would be me, Amber. and I just happened to clean sweep him with three wins. It was great, but I of course am not a sour loser and am a gracious winner. Yeah right.

We then went to Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian. As you can see in this picture, there is plenty of rain. It rained almost all day today. Hence, we went to Narnia. It was awesome. Highly recommended.

Here's the two of us chillin' with the bear chair here in town. On Saturday morning we went and watched the big "Old West Days" parade here in Jackson. It was pretty much like any other parade you would see elsewhere except that there were a TON of horses and even some mules in it. We had a good time. After that we walked around and checked out some shops for a while until about noon, when we went and saw the Bar J Wranglers again, this time performing at the town square. That was awesome, especially since we got some video of them, which we missed out on Friday since we didn't bring the video camera there with us. After the Wranglers was the real reason we went to the town square though: Jean's Golden Girls. For those of you who don't know, Jean's Golden Girls are a group of old ladies 50 and up who come and perform at a half time show once a year at an Aggie basketball game, and they are great. They do these dances that you would never believe any old lady could do. They were there yesterday and we got video of the whole performance. At the end, one of the Golden Girls even made me (Zann) get up and do the twist with them. We would post video except we didn't bring the cable to get it off the video camera, so as soon as we get home we'll put it up. It will give you all something to look forward to. Anyways, after that we had lunch and pretty much stayed home the rest of the day since it was pretty cold and rainy. Not exactly the weather we would have ordered, but we're still enjoying our vacation. More to come later today!

In case you couldn't tell, we went to Grand Teton National Park today. It was BEAUTIFUL. We had a great time. We went to Jenny Lake and took a bunch of really pretty pictures of the lake and the mountain. We wanted to hike around to the other side and up to Hidden Falls, but they said the trail was 80% snow covered so we just walked around on the trail that was by the lake shore. It was a really nice day in spite of it being cloudy. The sun even came out for a while and we were able to enjoy getting a little pink. There was also a ton of wildlife around the lake, including a lot of different birds and some really teeny little chipmunks. On the way back to the car we were able to see one of them up close and personal as we stood very very still while it was running around looking for food. It was right at our feet no more than three feet or so away. The best part was how it would run around and then just stop there and stand on its hind legs and look around. It was really funny.
Here's a picture for your viewing enjoyment and another picture of us at the lake so you can believe that it really was as pretty as we say. As we were leaving Jenny Lake, Zann

decided he wanted to take as many pictures as possible of all the different license plates of all the different states that were there. We took over 10 pictures. Just when I thought Zann couldn't get any geekier, he always surprises me. After we ate lunch, we took more and ended up taking over 20. We even got a picture of one from Canada. In the evening we went to the Bar J Chuckwagon and ate some great food and saw the Bar J Wranglers. It was pretty expensive, but the food was pretty good and the show was really really good. I had a steak and Amber had chicken and beef. The show was a lot of fun, the Wranglers were really funny and sang some really great songs. It was a great time. More to come!!

Welcome to Jackson Hole!! Ok so this street is in Idaho Falls, but hey whatever. Maybe we should change the name of the blog to Anderson Avenue, then we could have this picture at the top. You guys should vote on it for us. Anyways, we're on a long needed vacation here in Jackson Hole. We left this morning and drove up to Idaho Falls, where we went to the Idaho Falls temple. Wow, what an amazing temple, it's so beautiful in there. It was funny because we were chosen as the witness couple because there was NO other couple there in the session until right before it started. It was really great, we had a wonderful time and the inside of the temple there is really really nice. Since we couldn't take pictures inside, here's a picture of us on the outside.We are here. We are just relaxing and tomorrow we will be going either to the Tetons or Yellowstone National Park. Make sure to check out our blog everyday to see what we are doing.

We're going to be parents!! 10/28/08. More details to come.

It's a sad day in Logan today, for the mighty Aggies have fallen. After beating Boise State twice this season, including a 19 point blowout on their senior night in Boise, we lost to them 88-78 in the WAC Semifinals. Amber and I, who are huge Aggie basketball fans, had to turn the radio off towards the end. Let's just say this picture of Tai Wesley pretty much sums up how the game went for us. But there's no reason to give up now, they've had a great season and will still have an NIT bid by virtue of being the WAC regular season champions. The Aggies are still our homeboys and we still "love the spot where the sagebrush grows".

I just saw the preview for the next Chronicles of Narnia movie, and WOW!! Amber and I saw the first one a couple or three times in the theater, which means we liked it a whole lot, since we rarely even go to the theater period. After watching the trailer for this one, I can't wait. I can assure you that Amber and I will be in line May 16th to get our tickets.