2nd annual frandsen family christmas party

merry christmas y'all! friday night peter and i hosted our second annual frandsen family christmas party, southern style. will was a good sport running errands with peter to get all of the necessary ingredients for our treats. here he is, our little christmas bear:

we raided the goodwill and got ourselves some sweet christmas sweaters--the way i look at it, you can never have enough french horn-decorated oversized sweatshirts. and a festive holiday house is always an ideal adornment.

we invited a bunch of friends from peter's residency and our ward. we had a great time drinking wassail, having a lively white elephant gift exchange, and listening to 'n sync and mariah carey serenade us some holiday cheer.

the white elephant gift exchange was full of surprises. josh and jo were lucky enough to get an EPT. because you just never know . . .

dave was super excited for his superman lingerie, however, peter and i just couldn't resist snatching it away from him!

and then of course, the bobble head of some athlete that i've never even heard of. apparently it's worth a lot of money, so even though paula brought it, she made sure to steal it back . . .

all in all it was a very fun night. now that we've celebrated with our mississippi-resident-family, we're excited to go home and celebrate with our real families! just one more week until we're on that plane!!!

big shout out for a little city guy.

one thing i love is when good old salt lake city gets a shout out from the grey lady. it doesn't happen that often, but when it does, i giggle inside.

this time when i read this article, i giggled out loud, a.k.a. i LOL'd.

i'm not sure how many of you have heard the honorable mr. hatch's foray into musical creation. i have and it's hilarious. so the idea of him expanding his reach into the Jewish musical lexicon (if there is such a thing) adding to the likes of Matisyahu (link included to:) makes me laugh out loud. i just hope that it's as beautiful as some of the other lyrical wonders he has previously engineered.

i can't wait to hear what he's done and what else he has in store.

make us salt lakians proud, mr. hatch make us proud...!

short, but totally worth it.

we had a whirl-wind thanksgiving weekend, all crunched down into a quick trip up to north carolina to visit the wonderful fehlbergs and my also wonderful cousin stevey. our flights didn't really hook us up much, so we had to pack a full weekend's worth into about a day and a half.

i won't bore you with the details, but it went a little something like this:

Will took his first plane ride.

we had a lot of baby action; stevey with little sydney and max.

we ate delicious food prepared by kaedi and stevey tag teaming the kitchen.

we watched the man of the house carve his first turkey.

we did this. (click here for more)

we posed for too many pictures.

and spent a lot of time sitting around laughing at ridiculous things.

oh yeah. and my wife all of sudden became the quintessential hipster traveling mother.

black friday y'all!

what's more american than black friday?? (don't answer that, b/c we all know there are many.)

so to celebrate our americanness, my cousin stevey, our buddy marc and i decided to hit up walmart at 5:00 am to relish in the crazy.

check this documentarian digital short that we made:

(be sure to turn up the volume to catch all the dialogue, intended and otherwise...)

also be sure to ask emily about her near-run-in-waiting-on-line-brawl with an ornery old lady as she black friday-ed at Jo-Ann's...

happy anniversary!

what a year.

got married.

got pregnant.

graduated dental school.

moved to mississippi.

and had Will.

like i said, what a year . . . but it's been the best year ever.

i love you, babe.

good thing my mouth was closed . . .

i had somewhat of a pungent awakening this morning around 7:30. i had fed will about an hour before, but he was fussy and having trouble going back to sleep. i soon found out why . . . i'd been holding him and trying to soothe him when i realized he had a messy diaper. so, sitting on my bed with peter still asleep next to me, i decided to change his diaper. i didn't use a changing pad because he had a blanket and his pj's underneath him, and i also had the clean diaper ready just in case. i thought i had covered my bases. how wrong i was. with his legs up in the air in my left hand, and a wipe in my right, i was unprepared for what came at me next.

and what came at me was a whole bunch of poop shooting right out of will's bum.

it came at me with such force i was stunned. i hurried to stop it with my right hand, but i was too late. it hit my chin, my foreheard, and splattered down the whole front of me. it covered my hand, the sheets, his blanket, and his pj's. i was stunned. it even woke peter up. i asked peter for help, and so he grabbed a wipe and asked me what i needed. i told him, "my face, my face, get it off of my face!" peter started wiping my cheek--he wasn't even close to where the poo actually was and so i exclaimed, "no, my chin--right by my mouth!" "sorry," he said (as he was trying to wake up), "my eyes are still blurry, i can't really focus." then, as we were trying to clean up the massive mass, we looked up and saw this:

a look of complete innocence and relaxation. oh will, if only you knew what had just happened. if only you knew that now all of your clothes, blanket, my garments, our sheets, and mattress pad are soaking in oxy clean with hopes that your pungent, mustard colored feces won't stain them! luckily you're so dang cute that we just can't be mad. in fact, it was a really hilarious way to start off our day!

and just in case you're wondering what the crime scene looked like, here are a couple of photos; unfortunately, because of my garments, and because we didn't want to expose our baby on the internet, these photos really don't even show the least of the mess:

and here's a shot of our "straight shooter" after everyone was cleaned up. isn't he just adorable???

giddy-up!

we're about to ride our first hurricane.

apparently, there's a hurricane watch warning for hurricane ida, who is creeping up the gulf tonight... you can see we live smack in the middle of hurricane alley. (click to enlarge)

so we did what we were told and took Will down to the gulf coast to watch the hurricane. (check out those gulls. don't they say that animals start to wig out before the impending doom of natural diasters...?)

but don't freak out y'all. our bags are packed, the gas tank is full, and we're ready to bounce if the order is given...

last night.

This is how William felt about last night's win and particularly about his fellow asian-american super star, Mr. RBI: Hideki Matsui getting named MVP.

tricks for treats

oh halloween. i usually don't get super amped about halloween. but this year, we knew that we'd prolly have a little man around the house that would want to get in on the halloween action. so we started planning his costume a month or so ago. we decided on Max from where the wild things are. (i know, so trendy and hip of us) so emily starting making the hood and horns awhile ago. but then Will came a couple weeks earlier and we sorta forgot about halloween again. then we figured we wouldn't be going out, so really we'd just be finishing his costume to take some pictures and tell him many years from now that we had fun celebrating his first halloween.

I went back to work on thursday this week after a few days of paternity leave and found out that the residents were having a halloween party. emily and i figured we'd go. but then we needed to finish the costume and find costumes for ourselves...

long story short. we made Will a scepter, added a crown to his hood, and decided to be each other for halloween. this is how it all went down.

started the day with a matinee of where the wild things are. we even dressed Will in his Max costume for the occasion.

here's cute Will as cute Max, King of the Wild Things.

here's emily as me.

here's me as emily (pre-baby, of course. i did my own make-up and shaved my own legs)

here's the three of us, living it up on Will's first halloween... i think he liked it. maybe, i'll finally start loving halloween again too.

the in-laws are out...

after waiting two whole weeks, will finally got to meet his grandpa this last weekend. emily's mom has been here from the beginning, but her dad flew out for the weekend. we all had a pretty good time. it was great having them here. we got some delicious BBQ at this redneck trailer park called The Shed, Jenny made us plenty of delicious meals, and we made two unsuccessful trips to local donuteries.

will got to spend lots of time bonding with his grandparents, including a couple of bath times, which he hates.

we got to put him in his new clothes to go for drives to pick up food, pick out fabric at hobby lobby, trips to target (brand new in d'iberville as of a week ago).

and we made him wear obnoxious halloween clothes so we could pose to take some family photos... you can tell how much he loves it.

emily's parents left on sunday, so it's just the three of us.

but even with them gone, we still dress will up in clothes we think are cool. like yankees gear that doesn't fit yet.

here he is waving bye to his grandparents... or the angels... or the soon to be fallen phillies... we're not really sure yet who he is waving to.

so stinkin' cute.

totally smitten.

total time being pregnant: 38 weeks and 1 day

total number of vomits: innumerable

total number of doctors prior to birth: 9

total times we had met the doctor that delivered our baby: 0

total weight gained: (you'll have to ask the mother)

total number of days of prelabor: 6

total number minutes of actual labor contractions prior to water breaking: 45

total time driving to hospital: 15 mins

total time waiting for the train to pass in front of us 100 yards in front of the hospital: 90 seconds, felt like 90 mins.

total number of helpful USAF airmen that ran to get a wheelchair for us as we approached the hospital: 2

total number of nurses and techs that didn't believe us that her water had broken: 4

total number of hours pre-epidural: 3.5

total time the nurse told us to rest before it would be time to push: 9 hours

actual time we rested before it was time to push: 25 mins

total time pushing: 16 mins

total time in labor: 5 hours, 56 mins.

total bliss.

welcome to the world our baby boy.

William Shigeki Frandsen

Born October 10th at 10:56 pm. Weighing in at a whooping: 6 lbs 4 oz, measuring 20 inches.

It was an incredible weekend. Luckily, it was Columbus Day weekend, so the whole hospital and base was totally vacated. We basically had the whole place to ourselves. In fact, for most of the time we were there we were the only ones in Labor and Delivery. It was nice.

We spent our obligatory 48 hours at the hospital and were released this morning. So we spent the days taking lots and lots of pictures of Little Man. He was a good sport. Here's a sample of some of our favorites:

Will the Worm.

Once of the nice things about having a baby really far away from family and friends is getting lots of one on one bonding time. This is me and Will catching a movie before Emily's mom got to the hospital, posing like father, like son.

Will got to spend lots of time cuddled up on Emily. It's fairly easy to see that they both loved it.

Before we left the hospital, we took our first family photo

and had our first frandsen team huddle. Just one of many, many more to come.

And I just have to say, from a non-biased point of view, I think little William is totally adorable!!