::happy thanksgiving 2010::

(our halloween pumpkins that sadly never got carved into jack'o'lanterns)

Today both sides of our family are together and complete minus us. It's a bummer that we aren't in Utah right now, but with our little Sandy and all, things just didn't work out.
But we love everyone, and we're so thankful for them today. We're blessed with two great families.
We're also grateful for our little family we've been blessed with here. We love our little boys so much.
And we're thankful for great people out here in Santa Fe who are our friends. We've had a bounty of love and caring poured out on us since the baby was born and it's gone a long ways to making us feel at home.

Happy Thanksgiving friends!!

::lost::

In order to keep this blog from being 100% cute baby pictures, I thought I'd tell you all about a biking adventure that Kris had on saturday.
First important detail--Kris got a new mountain bike and he was so excited. He'd been yearning after this bike for months. He's been riding on the same old entry level mountain bike that I got him before Max was born, and it just wasn't holding up to his level of riding. When we got to NM we met friends that had a bike for sale--of course the perfect size, and a better price than the store.
So we finally were able to buy it after months of working towards it. I surprised Kris with it and he was very happy.

See? That's definitely his excited face.
So he got the bike late friday night. Then the baby was born on saturday night! Poor Kris was dying to ride his bike. He went for a quick ride on saturday afternoon, but I didn't want him to go far.

So the following saturday morning he planned on heading into the mountains early for an adventure. My mom was leaving to go back home early afternoon, so he had a deadline.

Of course he got lost. Totally lost. He went up the mountain on one trail (272 if you're looking at the map) and then ended up going down on a completely different trail (175). That trail went completely in the wrong direction. By the time he realized he was in the wrong place it was too late. He couldn't get back up the trail easily because it was too steep. So he just had to keep going. He called me right before he lost reception and asked me to try to figure out where he would come out and meet him with the car.

I'm not that great with maps, geography or directions, so I wasn't super excited about that.

But I tried. I found the road I thought he'd end up on and we packed my mom up and headed out with a car full of kids to go find dad.

He called me as I was driving towards the road and said that the trail had disappeared and that he'd had to hike his bike along a creek for a ways, then through and ranch and he had no idea where he was. That was discouraging news. Then he lost reception. We kept on driving. I thought it was a serious long shot that we would find him, but I had to try.
Then of course, the deeper into the mountain foothills we got, the less phone reception, until we were completely without communication.
We drove up this random dirt road, and after a while there he was! It was kind of miraculous that we found him, and such a relief.

Lucky Kris got to drive all the way to Albuquerque in his spandex. We barely got my mom dropped off in time--by way of Chick'fil'a for lunch, then we drove home exhausted.
So that's the story of Kris lost.

And just so we don't accidentally forget that this blog is 99.99% about cute baby and kid stuff, here's a confused baby with puppy ears.


Good night!

::school & such::

Not only did Max's sweet school teacher come and visit us in the hospital, but when Max got to school monday morning this sign was waiting for him in the classroom:


It definitely made him feel special and proud. He has a great teacher.
(The sign barely survived an inadequately closed backpack water bottle.)

Here is an adorable timeline Max made at school last week:

August--he's eating a popsicle. September--school. October--halloween. November--baby!! December--Christmas.
So cute, right?

Max loves his baby and that makes me so happy.

And here's a dose of cuteness from today for you. Max was home from school with a cold and it was everything I could do to keep him from coughing on Sandy.


It's like watching youtube movies about fluffy kitties or something. Cute overdose?
You're welcome.

::a whole entire week::

As of saturday night our baby was a whole week old. So crazy!
So I thought it would be fun to celebrate the occasion with a photo per day of his life.
Here we go.......

Day one:

So brand new! This is a familiar face we see a lot nowadays.

Day two:

Oh how I love this boy in his elephant suit. We were still in the hospital for most of day two.

Day three:

Home, in his own little basket. Great at sleeping all day, not so good at night.

Day four:

Photo shoot in ducky outfit by my mom. He was awake for once. We love to see his eyes.

Day five:

photo courtesy of my mom. Baby and I were both completely worn out after his first doctor;s appointment--our very first outing!

Day six:

Max took this picture on my phone when he got home from school. "Oh he's SO cute!!!" says big brother. I sure like to hear that!

Day seven:

Photo & adorable pumpkin hat courtesy of my mommy. This baby is always hungry and doesn't care who knows it.

Happy one week birthday little Sandy! We sure do love you!

::::

We went to Sandy's first doctor's appointment yesterday. He did great and the doctor said he was perfect!
It totally wore him out though. He slept for the rest of the day.


So darn cute.

::introducing::

Finally.......
Little Sandy Hendricks!!

He came two days after his due date.

He was humongous--9 lbs 3 oz and close to 21 inches long. Huge!!

He came quickly and basically surprised us. We got to the hospital at 6:00PM and he was here by 7:30PM. (and yes, I was definitely in pain that whole time, so we weren't THAT surprised.)

We stayed at the hospital one night and were home by sunday evening, tired and ready to be home.

We're so glad he's here. He's adorable and fun and very good natured so far.
More info and more pictures coming soon, you can count on it!!!

::::

So today is the fateful baby due date, but where is the baby? Still cookin' away.
We'll see how long it takes to get this dang baby here. But in the meantime, here are a couple of things just for fun.

1. Kris did his first hospital case out here in NM. We bought all the equipment, got him credentialed at the hospital and actually got a patient who wanted to go in right away. His case went awesome last week--being in the operating room totally intimidated the assistants, but they can't wait to do it again.

Kris's most favorite part though turned out to be the physician's lounge, free lunch and the 25 cent soda machine. There are some perks to being a doctor I guess.

2. We got a babysitter and went out this last weekend. And though we didn't pick a great movie to go to, our dinner was awesome and finished with an ice cream baked potato. If you haven't ever had one then you're definitely missing out. It was fabulous. Cowgirl BBQ anyone?



In the meantime we're just waiting for the baby to come. Our sister in law Lechelle came out with her little guy to help out--we were assuming we would actually HAVE the baby at some point--and so we've been having a good time hanging out. I just keep trying to plan stuff to do and stay busy so that the baby will be encouraged to show up at some inconvenient time. Hasn't worked yet. We'll see!


***Update;
I think I need to explain a bit about what exactly the ice cream baked potato is. It is just so cool. It's vanilla ice cream all rolled in cocoa (I think) So that's what makes it look like a potato to begin with. Then it's got some nice frozen cream on top for the sour cream, then some pecans or maybe pralines or something on top for the chives, and the butter pat I think is frosting (the butter pat was the only thing that wasn't totally delicious.)
So come visit us and have one!!!

::bugs::

A few weeks ago we had some crazy behavior going on with Max at school. He was just getting used to his new class, and he has a friend in there that's a little nutty. This little boy is silly, physically a little out of control and just doesn't know when to stop.
And all my little guy needs is a little encouragement to be too too silly.
At school they have a behavior feedback system that works out pretty well. It's based on colors. If a kid's color card is blue by the end of the day that means that they had an excellent behavior day. If it gets switched to green, it means good. Orange is not so good, yellow the next, and red is NOT good at all.
It is nice to have some sort of feedback from school so I can know what's going on--or at least have a hint of what might be going on.
He was all blue for a long time, then suddenly we started seeing yellows and oranges and not many blues at all. And we knew he could do better.
So we had lots of talks about times when it's ok to be silly and times to be serious. We also talked about not letting other people encourage him to do things that would get him in trouble.
All important lessons for life, I'm sure this is just the beginning of trying to teach these lessons.
Then to top it off we gave him an incentive program. If he could get be blue every day for 5 or 6 days in a row (I can't remember which) he got an awesome prize.
It took a couple of false starts, but he totally earned it and we were proud.
We asked him how he got blue one day and he told us that he just did his best to ignore anybody that tried to distract him by being silly. Good job Max!!

So he got a habitat for his hexbug as his prize. And, lucky for him he got an extra hexbug along with it. Have youguys seen these Hexbugs? We got ours at Target.

They're these cute teeny robots that look a lot like little bugs and speed around the floor super fast. They're really fun to watch but it's really hard not too lose them under the furniture. Unless you have a habitat.

See how blurry they are in the picture? Told you they were fast.

Anyway, he loved the prize and hopefully felt fulfilled for doing such a good job behaving. And generally since then he's been quite good, even though we haven't given him too many more material incentives.

He's so cute with the bugs that I had to take a video the other day when Kris was out of town and Max was supposed to be eating dinner. It's pretty cute. Enjoy if you'd like.

::a twist on tradition::

For the last four years Max & I have made delicious halloween sugar cookies. And then I always blog about it. Of course.
So after making it a tradition, and cooking them in four different kitchens in four different houses, we certainly couldn't miss a year just because we're tired and busy!
I was planning on making the cookies over halloween weekend--in fact I made the dough and refrigerated it on saturday. It was while doing that I realized that we had been infiltrated by a yucky fat mouse (which of course didn't help with the workload of the weekend.)
I was planning on finishing up the cookies sunday afternoon, but one of the families that we're good friends with in the ward invited us over for pumpkin pie. Who would refuse something awesome like that?
Come monday the dough was still in the fridge, and there were no delicious cookies to be seen.

We didn't give up. We modified the tradition. This weekend we got out the fall cookie cutters and made leaves, acorns and pumpkins instead of ghosts, cats & jack-o-lanterns.

Good thing I bought those leaf cookie cutters last year, that's all I can say! (Even though Kris thought one of the shapes was a christmas tree, silly boy.)

And we set to work.

It was a fun sunday afternoon activity for the family. This is the first time that Kris got to be involved, yay!

I was about 1000 degrees when we got finished, and I was exhausted. It was worth it though. They're delicious.
Max was my decorating helper again, of course. And somehow he managed to spill exponentially less sprinkles everywhere than even last time. It's nice that he's getting more coordinated--he doesn't listen much better, but he's at least got more hand dexterity!
It is funny to compare now with the first time we did it though--in 2006 I guess. He was only two and it was quite the undertaking to make the cookies together. He's much more capable now of course, and most of the time much more fun to hang out with.

It's fun to have traditions that let us see how time has passed and how fast little ones grow. And traditions that are tasty too. Yum.