The Blessing-Palooza!

On Fourth of July weekend, Susan and I blessed Albus.

I mean we bless Albus all the time with food, shelter, and love (not that he ever says thank you.) Susan insists that I add in here, that Albus doesn't say anything so I shouldn't take it personally.

But this was the momentous religious baby blessing ceremony. Baby blessings are an important, if not crucial part of the church. And they reflect the value we place on our family.

But the fun hardly started Sunday morning. To tell you the whole story we need to zip back to Friday morning.

48 Hours Until the Baby Blessing

Albus Crisis! A mere 45 minutes before we are to see John, Ivan, and Valerie, Albus must eat. And this is not a debatable proposition.

Susan obliges. But Albus, the pokee, takes his precious time eating. So we must beg John to meet us and not vice versa as we had planned.

When the kids arrive, they bum rush us. I use us liberally. They're mostly excited to see Susan. Though I think my epic dance off with them at Melody's wedding has ingratiated me to them. They are also thrilled to see the baby.

See. Not touch. For all our offers neither Ivan nor Valerie has any interest in laying so much as a finger on Albus. Not that Albus complained. He would soon get plenty of touching.

CORRECTION: Here is indeed documented proof that Ivan did in fact lay many fingers on Albus

46 Hours Until the Baby Blessing

We arrive at the Houston Museum of Natural History. Some of you may recall that Susan and I had once before tried to visit the museum only to end in epic failure, as I wrote about over for LDS.net. This trip went much better.

First up: Butterfly Center

(From the Outside)

This place is wicked cool. It reminded me a little bit of Bio-Dome, because I am often looking for ways to compare my life to Pauly Shore movies.

After a long and winding interactive museum filled with insect factoids, you drop into this artificial rain forest!

Valerie and Ivan were thrilled at the sheer number of butterflies constantly everywhere. One butterfly landed on the sidewalk, apparently injured. And the kids had been strictly cautioned to not touch any butterflies, so everytime they walked by they went to great lengths to circle around.

But you'd think that human babies were at threat of extinction, because no matter where I took Albus, people cooed at him from every direction.

The rest of the museum was far too immense to appreciate while carting about three children. Susan liked nothing else.

Valerie, Ivan, and I, though, thought the Foucault Pendulum was wicked cool.

42 Hours Until the Baby Blessing

Chick Fil-A

41 Hours Until the Baby Blessing

Ivan and I discuss Mario Kart Strategy

40 Hours Until the Baby Blessing

The rest of Susan's family arrives in Texas. They proceed immediately to Chick-Fil-A. We try to explain we already left. This doesn't matter. Albus was very excited to meet his extended family.

38 Hours Until the Baby Blessing

Time to introduce the Vegas in-laws to Rudy's. This is obviously a smashing success, because Rudy's is amazing. And nothing screams "I'm in Texas" quite as thoroughly as mouth watering ribs you have to clean up yourself.

Albus gets hungry. And we must leave. Immediately.

35 Hours Until the Baby Blessing

We celebrate our nation's independence via colorful explosives. Well here's actually the fireworks Susan and I saw.

But in our defense, we're exhausted bums, with a cranky baby, and we never even liked fireworks to begin with. Don't judge us.

24 Hours Until the Baby Blessing

We live about 10 minutes away from NASA. Like the NASA. Like we are in the Houston of "Houston we have a problem"


It's likely that Susan and I don't take advantage of this mind boggling fact often enough. If you want to get all your NASA warm feelies, you can watch this cool movie.



So there's like real NASA, and then there's carnival NASA that people get to visit. Carnival NASA is super fun. Because you get to make Styrofoam rockets and see how high they'll fly. And because they'll hitch up your wife and make her bounce around like she's walking on Mars.

Excuse the photo quality. I was balancing a baby.

20 Hours until the Baby Blessing

To top off our epic day of NASA fun we went on a tour of the grounds. After our first stop, however, the tour was cancelled. Sent Back. Kaputs, because of some thunder storm. The guides kept mumbling something about safety and not wanting us to die. 

But we had a blast! Even Albus got excited reading about the space program. The entire thing feels a little weird, it is both futuristic, and distinctly historical. Like looking back at a past that was looking toward the future.

15 Hours Until the Baby Blessing

My parents arrived, but my dad got beepered into work. Trying to solve the problem of someone who kept telling him she had to go talk to someone else, and then would come back and propose to him the idea he had suggested 30 minutes before. So the first time we got to see them was at Dinner.

Grandma Cunningham seized the baby. And what had begun as a gentlemanly skirmish for time with the baby spiraled into an all out war.

Sorry for the random picture, but babies in mustaches can cheer up most war-like situations.

10 Hours Until the Baby Blessing

Are you kidding me, Susan and I had been asleep since 9!

90 Minutes Until the Baby Blessing

Will Albus eat at just the right moment so that we can leave for church on time and avoid an unusually cranky baby? He will!

20 Minutes Until the Baby Blessing

Ivan and I discuss Mario Kart Strategy

15 Seconds Until the Baby Blessing

Oh holy anxiety! I forgot they do these at the beginning of sacrament meeting!

The Baby Blessing

Albus was blessed with:

Insight into the feelings and emotions of himself and others.

Vision toward the future and the ability to set and realize goals.

Light of Christ that he would recognize and follow the light in his life.

10 Seconds After the Baby Blessing

You have to remember what you said. You have to write it down. Or posterity will never know.

20 Seconds After the Baby Blessing

Don't forget. Don't forget.

30 Seconds After the Baby Blessing

What did I say again?

40 Seconds After the Baby Blessing

Oh, that's right!

2 Hours After the Baby Blessing

In priesthood, I introduce my father as my old man, and to top it off, Susan's father as my old man in-law, because if you're going to go in. You might as well go all the way in.

3 Hours After the Baby Blessing

We gather for obligatory pictures

4 Hours After the Baby Blessing

After hours and hours of slaving over our Stauffer's Lasagnas, I pulled them out of the oven and took lunch over to the lobby of the hotel where Susan's folks were staying. They had arranged to use their breakfast area for our lunch since there were so many of us. Lunch, which I had randomly stressed over for days, turned out just perfect.

5 Hours After the Baby Blessing

Valerie, Ivan, Grandma Cunningham and I play Red Light-Green Light. Valerie and Ivan never quite agreed on the rules, which led to the inevitable dissolution of the game. Which is a pity, because I was totally winning.

7 Hours After the Baby Blessing

We say goodbye to Uncle Mark and John, and Valerie and Ivan who return because they have regular person stuff to do on Monday.

8 Hours After the Baby Blessing

The remaining celebrators descend on our home for an evening of burritos and relaxation.

24 Hours After the Baby Blessing

Dan, Melody, Susan's Parents, Susan, and I gathered together Monday morning and divided along gender lines. The ladies went to have their toes ornamented, while the gentleman returned to NASA.

You see we missed going to this little gem called Rocket Park  when our tour was cut short. But, and I had no idea about this before, Rocket Park is totally free. If you're one of my Houston friends, just go. Like stop reading the blog, go to rocket park and come back. Because why not? There's a big warehouse with a Saturn V rocket inside. And a great exhibit about every single Apollo mission.

This place is kind of amazing. To give you a sense of how big the Saturn rocket is think of a giraffe. It's bigger than a giraffe. It's also bigger than a 36 story building.

31 Hours After the Baby Blessing
Everyone leaves, and Susan and I begin to recover. It was great to see everyone, and nice to calm back down into regular life. Albus, however, was told he was cute so many times, I had to come up with a new lullaby, just to help keep his ego in check.

Little Albus, I think
That you're a cutie pie
But I am very biased
So that might be a lie.

Albus, Albus, Albue
How can I know if you're cute or not
When everyone who says you are
Loves you an awful lot?

Overdue Pictures of Albus

Recently my oldest son was born.

Susan and I named him Albus, as we had previously agreed.

For a one-sided, self-indulgent account of the entire event you can go over to LDS.net and read my column. What is this you say? You have a column on LDS.net? I do! Since last writing my job is going swimmingly well. I have built a team of several fantastic ----

Christopher! Pictures!

I hope that staves off the masses. As you can see he gets his looks from . . .

Wallace Shawn. The Sicilian from Princess Bride. Also he gets his eyes from his mother, and his chin from his grandfather.

Another picture of Albus to subdue the demanding legions. What was it you needed to keep the people happy? Bread and baby pictures?

Having a baby has proven exhausting. Not in the haha, oh-that's-so-cute-you're-a-tired-new-parent way, but in the oh holy hades hole my brains are going to start leaking out of eye sockets tired. Here's a recent picture of Susan and I for reference:



Albus is already developing a full-fledged personality. He will often look disgruntled:

And he has distinctive forehead wrinkles:

But we aren't sure where he gets it from.

He also loves life.

We know this because when we try to put him to bed he protests vehemently. Unbeknownst to Susan and I, we had become stellar company from which one cannot bear to leave.

But when he's awake we very much enjoy our time together.

We work:

We play:

We take care of each other:

And we fall in love:

Albus seems pleased with our efforts.

Five Months Later...

These last five months have been so hectic! Here's a summary of what's happened:

January:
I started my second semester of graduate school. Along with taking fifteen credits, I began seeing clients at my university's psychological services clinic.
Christopher started his job with The More Good Foundation! He writes LDS-related articles for them to prepare for the launch of their website, lds.net, in March.

February:
Christopher and I flew out to Las Vegas for Melody's wedding! It was wonderful and her reception was beautiful!

I also had a baby shower with some close family friends. Yum Olive Garden!

I met with my first couple in the clinic! It was exciting yet terrifying. One of my colleagues was my co-therapist and my other colleagues and supervisor were watching behind the one-way mirror. After our second session, our couple decided their problem had been resolved and no longer needed therapy. I say it's because we were just so superb as therapists. Haha.

March:
I had another baby shower with friends from my ward. It was Harry Potter themed which was awesome!

There were "wands" (pretzel sticks) chocolate frogs, and butterbeer!

The cupcakes were decorated with a pretzel stick and a tootsie roll in the shape of a broomstick!

Gayle dressed up in her Hogwarts attire! So cool!

Micah represented the male spouses invited to the shower. :)

Friends who came to the shower.

More friends!

One of the first gifts I opened.

Christopher's company started preparing their launch of lds.net. He spent countless hours writing articles so that there would be good quality content on the site.
Christopher and I went camping with our ward at Lake Livingston State Park. We had such a fun time walking around the lake and singing songs with our ward around the campfire...until we went to bed. It was a miserable night sleeping on the ground in our tent! We will definitely bring air mattresses next time!

April:
The first week of April I had interviews with various internship sites in Houston. While my colleagues will start their internship in June, I will be delaying mine until September so that I can adjust to being a new mom. :) It was an exciting yet exhausting process of having 5 interviews in one week. We had to wait until the end of April to find out our placements, so we were all very anxious!
I also presented a poster at UHCL's student research conference! Ours was on how we would provide family therapy for the Grayson family from the TV show Revenge. I have my mother-in-law to thank for getting me hooked on the show when she watched it for analytical purposes as well! :)

Luciana, me, Yasman, and Andrea!

I had a 36-week ultrasound of Albus this month! Compared to the last ultrasound at 20 weeks, he is definitely bigger! He's still growing normally and the technician estimated his weight at 5 lbs. 3 oz. During the ultrasound, we saw him put his hand in his mouth! It was so cute!

My colleagues threw me a baby shower, which was so nice! I had a lot of fun and there was so much good food!

Christopher got a promotion at The More Good Foundation! He is now the lds.net content director and leads the website's writing team. He is quite busy now writing articles, having google chat meetings with his team, and scheduling the other articles his team writes.

May:
I am at 39 weeks and I'm ready for Albus to make his debut! I have finished with all of my finals and presentations and feel pretty good about how I did on them. Heavenly Father definitely blessed me to get through the semester despite all the stress and worrying Albus would come early. Now I worry I'll end up going overdue...
I also received my internship site placement! I will be starting in the Fall semester at the Clear Creek Independent School District! There are two locations where I will be conducting group therapy sessions with students and meeting with families all over the district once a week. I'm excited to start and I think it'll be a good fit for me.
Christopher and I went to an event last week called Just Between Friends. People bring gently used kids items, like clothes, toys, furniture and sell them at a reduced price. Christopher helped set up for the event, and so we got to go early before the other people and shop! It was amazing the quality of stuff we found for such low prices! We got a baby carrier/backpack for only $20 and usually they're priced around $60-$90! It was almost overwhelming because there was SO MUCH STUFF, and I started asking Christopher several times if we needed this, or that. Luckily, he had brought a list of things we still needed for Albus, so he kept us on track.

Hopefully the next time we update the blog, there will be pictures of Albus!

Christopher's top 10 moments of 2013

Wow! 2013 delivered. Here's one year for the history books. Here are Christopher's top 10 moments of 2013. Maybe I can get Susan to do one too.

10. Moving to Houston. I'll tack this on to the end of the list because I'm not sure if this qualifies as a top moment, but it certainly was a big one. Moving 2000 miles was very expensive and very stressful, but with lots of help we made it safely and without major incident. It was also a great opportunity to spend lots of quality time with my mom, Bradley, and Susan's brother (who I hadn't spent too much time with since he came back from his mission), and her mother. So if we just forget all the high stakes planning, we can chalk this up as a road trip for the ages.

9. Editing President Eyring's biography. For my advanced editing class, we worked with the author of President Eyring's new biography to help edit each section. It was cool because it was professional quality work for a manuscript that I had a lot of enthusiasm for. The book is very honest, and has some interesting tid-bits most people would be interested in.

8. Free zoo day. When we came to Houston we immediately checked for when free zoo day was. We braved the traffic and headed to the inner loop. The zoo is beautiful, and knowing that we could go for free the first Tuesday of any month, we felt no pressure to see everything. So we just meandered. The highlight was definitely the long and winding Elephant exhibit with at least 6 elephants including a couple of babies. We can't wait to go back.

7. Video game design camp out. While living in Rexburg, I worked with the teacher's quorum. They loved video games and I convinced them that we could spend time on video games if they took it seriously. They bought in completely. And the culmination involved graphic design, story telling, and coding. It was great fun, and at the end we came out with a working video game.

6. Second anniversary. For our second anniversary, and since we're wicked poor, we celebrated in twos. We took a two mile walk. Rented some red boxes (2 for 1), got two ice creams, and spent $2.22.

5. Conference marathon. Before graduating college I presented at four conferences all along the Wasatch front. There is something thrilling about people who sit and listen to your literary analyses. The best of the bunch was the Association of Mormon Letters because I went with two professors. We became close, and chatted all the way from Rexburg to Orem and back. I learned a ton, and made a bunch of great connections.

4. Then I graduated. This wouldn't have been such a big deal, except that I decided to not wear a cap and gown, because wearing clothing that is specifically designed to brag about your accomplishments isn't very humble, or modest. And since as a Mormon I try to wear modest clothing, I couldn't in good conscious wear the cap and gown. Getting to explain this to people over and over all day fed my rebellious spirit and my insatiable ego.

3. 4th of July. Susan and I had the best fourth of July ever. We went to the zoo, because you know--Awesome--where we saw a baby lemur learning how to climb from its mother. Then we had a little BBQ at the park, where we brainstormed the idea for the middle grade fantasy novel I am now in the middle of writing. And then we got a spot where we couldn't see the firework show, but randomly the church we were behind had their own show. It was low key, and perfect for crowd averse me.

2. Reading poetry at Last Poet Standing. So three years ago I had an idea for Last Poet Standing. The little bugger has taken on a life of its own. This year was its third go around. But since I've always been helping I've never gotten on stage before. This season, our vote counting entertainment dropped out, and I had told them I could always fill in. I got on stage and did a short poetry set. It was a huge thrill, the crowd dug my poetry, and since I couldn't get voted off there was no potential blow to my ego.

1. Susan's having a baby! I bet you can guess what will be number one on this list next year. This was a delightful surprise, and the timing couldn't have been better. We learned just a couple weeks ago that we're expecting a boy. It's wicked scary, but once you accept that everyone who has ever had a child has been a terrible parent it takes a little bit of the pressure off.

We're Having a Baby

Susan and I are expecting a baby next May. I have noticed that babies do not do especially well with schedules, so May 11th is only a guess. We don't know the gender yet. We are excited. Susan and I have been married a little more than 2 years now, so the baby is a big blessing.

Susan has a doctor she likes right around the corner. So she is all set up that way. As for our emotions on the subject, very little of consequence has changed. Susan and I have always planned on having children, we still are, just now we have it on the calendar. I'm confident our excitement will grow as it gets closer.

Susan's health has been solid. She had typical symptoms badly for about a week and a half, and they've stuck around but only here and there since then. In our day to day lives this is mostly manifest as Susan not wanting to eat anything I make. I've started going to the store daily in order to keep up with her food moods.

The baby is due at the very end of Susan's semester, if she (my guess) or he (Susan's) can be a little bit late, Susan will have a perfect summer break off. If the baby comes a little early it'll be smack dab in the middle of final's week.

If the books we are checking out from the library is any indication, we are feverishly preparing and certainly nervous, but we have high hopes that this will be an acclivitous adventure.

Don't Go Smelling My Farts

One thing Susan and I have learned about Houston is that it rains here kinda a lot. But usually it's sporadic. For an hour here, and an hour there. But yesterday we had about 8 hours of non-stop downpour. Since Susan had worked Friday night, we were going to date on Saturday. I had found a local pumpkin patch, but alas neither of us had interest in a muddy tromp. So we replanned on the fly and decided to find a duet and rewrite the lyrics Weird Al style. So for your enjoyment "Don't Go Smelling My Farts" to the tune of "Don't Go Breaking My Heart" by Elton John.

C: Don’t go smelling my farts

S: I couldn’t if I tried.

C: If I get indigestion

S: Maybe don’t get deep fried.

                               

C: Don’t go smelling my farts

S: Here I brought you some tums

C: Oh, Honey, when you walk in the room

S: I just turn round and run

C&S: Ooh Ooh

S: Everyone knows it

C: When I eat bad

S: My nose is sad

C&S: Ooh Ooh

S: Everyone knows it

C: If you are smart

C: don’t smell my farts

S: Ooh Oh, I won’t smell your farts

New Jobs

Susan and I have now been in Houston for a little less than two months. And we're starting to settle in pretty well.

I started by doing tutoring. After less than one month I was one of the top 5 busiest tutors with the company. Since getting tutorees was the most difficult part of the job, getting so many so quickly was quite an accomplishment. In addition I got a job with a local school called, Hua Xia . It is a supplementary Saturday school for ridiculously high achieving kids. I teach 5th grade, 7th grade and SAT prep students. Their original teacher dropped out, and so I was hired on Thursday. I had to develop three entire curriculum and syllabi by Saturday. It was a great adventure. Now I get to teach about setting, and characterization, and grammar diagrams every week. And I couldn't be having more fun.





It's only part time, but combined with the tutoring it was plenty to keep our heads above water. But, and this is the crucial but, I've also been doing a randomly large amount of free work for the More Good Foundation. They run and help support unofficial LDS websites. They help it so that when someone Googles information about Mormons they get accurate information. Gabrielle got a job working with them some time ago, and as I was looking for a full time job, I often talked to her about what she was doing. So I wrote a YouTube sitcom for them, that they are currently looking at getting produced. This was a great chance to meet a lot of people in the company. I've also impressed them with some technical help I did for Gabrielle's presentations. Well they were looking at getting an intern staff writer, so Gabrielle gave me the heads up. I had a great interview, and we were working on getting the internship set up, and they lost one of their regular writers. So now it's turned into the full fledged job of my dreams, and has effectively ended my current job search. Thank you so much to everyone who has helped me as we've looked and who have sent great leads my way. I couldn't have done it without you. I'll be leading a team of writers that create buzzfeed style lists that teach about the church.  Do I feel a little silly writing for a group with a name like "More Good" yeah I do, but at least this wording makes it clear that Good is acting as a noun, so it is grammatically correct.

I've also gotten involved in the local writers group, and have started their first anthology. I'm collecting stories from the writers, and then I'll put it all together using all my mad English major skills. When it's done we're going to sell it print on demand for cost off of Amazon. It's a great project I'm excited to be heading up.

Susan's been no slouch herself. The reason we moved down here was for her to start a Family Therapy program at the University of Houston-Clear Lake. She's already a star of the department. She joined the Marriage and Family Therapy student association. We enjoyed attending their opening social a couple weeks ago, where Susan and I totally rocked out on a fun version of speed charades. They also elected/said hey you do this/appointed Susan as their student government rep. So she gets to go to weekly meetings and vote on important issues like whether or not to fund the Vietnamese club party (she voted aye.) The work for her program has also started to swing in. She wrote her first paper this week. I don't know if this is impressive or unimpressive but she wrote her eight page paper in six hours. It helps that she has an in-house proofreader. She also did her first ever practice therapy session. The students in her class roll played. Susan did great and was singled out by the professor afterwards for validating the feelings of a resistant client. I'm happy she's getting to do therapy, she was so geeked out after she did it.

Susan also got a new job. She's working for a place called Learning Rx. She'll work one on one with students like she did before we moved. But rather than working on social skills, she's teaching cognitive skills. She found one of their offices about five minutes away from our house. So for this semester while she hasn't started her therapy practicum ,she thought she had the time and it would be a good way to keep using her skills. She's started training and should start actually working in the next couple of weeks. That guy below is their actual mascot. I know I know, so cool.

So we have been very blessed in our move, lucky to be in Houston and finding good ways to be involved in the community.