Cute Dean Moments

Dean's recent adventures can be seen in the above photos.

Recently, he has been climbing in and out of his empty diaper boxes, which we save to organize toys and store clothing that he grows out of. It's pretty funny to watch him stick his hands in and out of the handles and get pushed around by Daddy or Mommy. He's such a little mischevious boy.

He has also learned how to put his feet into Daddy's shoes, and Daddy's hats on his head. We get a good laugh out of the fact that he cannot see once he puts a hat on his head and that he continues to walk around anyway.

Lastly, we went on a family outting to Idaho Falls for the evening and stopped for some Fiesta Ole. Instead of putting him in a high chair, we decided to see how he would do sitting in the booth next to Dad. We thought it was pretty cute that he decided the best way to sit there and eat was to put his legs up against the table to prop himself up. 

Hope you enjoy these captured moments as much as we do!

Love,

The James Anderson Family

Anderson Holiday Photos

Thanks to our sister-in-law, Christina, and her "flashing us" the whole time we were together, we scored some pretty great photos to remember some cute moments with the Anderson's.

The first compilation is of Christmas Eve, which Mom Anderson prepares for, for quite awhile, in anticipation of all the family being able to attend. We had the usual feast followed by the Christmas program. This year she used Little People Nativity Sets to tell the Christmas Story and had all the older kids help pick out which characters should go in each scene. It was pretty cute. Then Santa came and we all sat in his lap to recieve our gifts. Dean sure loved playing with the Santa and Reindeer Little People set! It was great to see all the family together that could be there.

The second set of photos were taken on New Years Day, as it just so happens to be Dad Anderson (Dean's Grandpa's) birthday! So we had a really nice party at our sister Janine's house: scrumptious tacos, rice and beans followed by gifts and socializing. I just love the pictures Christina captured. Dean and his Grandpa and all of the nieces piled on top of James. Left to right: Arianna, Jamie, and Deeana. Tiffany, our oldest niece, also captured a pretty cute photo of James' sister Liz and Brittany 'belly kissing.' Liz is due in the beginning of April with a little boy, so it was pretty fun to talk to them about babies while we were there.

Hope you enjoy the little recap and photos!

Love,

The James Anderson Family

16 Months Too Old

Is it possible to feel like 16 months is too old? Well, that is how we feel about Dean. He is just so smart and seemingly smarter and more able to do big boy things everyday. Here are a few of the recent things he's been doing that are such big adventures for all of us.

One of the new things we've been trying to teach him is how to walk to us when we ask him to, so that we don't have to carry him everywhere. For example, Brittany is 6 months+ pregnant and has to drop James off at work and school every MWF, which includes carrying and then getting Dean in and out of his carseat several times. This is quite the test for a little guy who is mostly trapped inside our small apartment all day long! Notice his attempted-escape turned slip-in-the-snow pictures that were taken this Monday while mommy was attempting the aforementioned walking lesson.

Singing is also a new and exciting thing for Dean. He can sing his ABC's all the way through on a good day, and is actually pretty intelligible for a 16 month old. We love hearing him try to sing along to all his favorite songs and then clap when done.

 Reading his books. He has systematically memorized his favorite sounds and words in all of his books. We read them to him often, but mostly when he says, "story?" Lately, however, he has learned that he can grab them off of the window-sill in his room himself and then will proceed to read them, particularly his favorite pages in each. It's pretty cool to see how much he remembers and what things he associates with on each page. We are so glad he loves to read!

Now that his toddler bed has been set up in his room, we have endeavored to get him to take naps in it during the day. We thought it would be much harder than it is. He has taken to it quite well.

Praying. He now knows to fold his arms when he sees us folding ours in preparation for prayer, and can say "Heavenly Father" and "Namen" at the appropriate times. We have even had some success in getting him to repeat short prayers. He never repeats "in the name of Jesus Christ" though, whenever we say that, he just automatically says "Namen!" because he knows that's how you end a prayer. It brings us so much joy to see him learning to do this.

Lastly, dancing and trying to play Dad's french horn have brought smiles to our faces within these past few days. Whenever he hears music he will bob his head, squat and jump up, and wave his arms around, especially if mommy and daddy are doing it to. And of course when Dad got out the french horn to practice he had to say "do do doo!" into the mouthpiece.

Well, we hope you enjoy these little updates, since it's so hard to relate all the cute and wonderful things he does everyday to make ordinary life into such an adventure.

Love,

The James Anderson Family

Dean and Riley's Room

We finally got around to putting the toddler bed together and reorganizing the baby room to fit everything (two dressers, a crib, a toddler bed, footlocker, cabinet, and toys) into the small space. We think it's a pretty great outcome resulting from such minor changes; and Dean is warming up to it quite well. Can't wait to do a few more personalized things to make little Riley feel more welcome in the coming weeks. We'll definitely keep you posted!

Love,

The James Anderson Family

Our Favorite Things: Christmas '10

A tribute to Christmas 2010 must be done in order to share what few pictures we acutally captured of such a wonderful season and vacation. So here is a short list of some of our favorite things:

1) Seeing Sydney and Tate dressed in cottonball outfits as sheep for the nativity scene at our ward party. It was just adorable.

2) Finding Dean had broken through his candy cane, within the 10 mintues we drove home from the ward party, and managed to get it all over himself. We had to stick him straight in the tub. Babies have magical powers when it comes to candy-finding and eating we've discovered.

3) Making multiple cranberry-orange mini-loaves and going caroling to deliver them to our friends as a family.

4) Finding an abandoned Christmas Tree that was a perfect addition to our humble home decor. It was just the right size to fit on top of our table where Dean couldn't get to it. 

5) Making homemade ornaments out of recycled materials. Some old pipe-cleaner, paper towel rolls, wrapping paper, and glitter glue. We also spent $1.50 on a few small clear plastic picture frames which we decorated with glitter and then put our family photo in each of them as small and economical gifts for our parents.

6) Decorating our livingroom window-sill like a fireplace mantle and making a construction-paper advent chain with scriptures and activities to do as a family each night. 

7) Watching Dean terrorize our parents homes, chase around the dogs and cat, and make all sorts of new discoveries and friends.

8) Brittany and her mother designing and sewing a gorgeous comforter out of beautiful materials in a giraffe pattern; it's big enough to cover a future king bed, if we can ever afford it!

9) Getting so many thoughtful and heartfelt gifts from everyone that we couldn't take them all home!

10) Being able to drive there and back, and everywhere around the High Desert in our cute little rental car that had a rotten banana in the glove box from the last users! :) It was a good little car. Surviving pot holes, ice, rain, snow, and washed out streets and doing it all economically. We'll miss you Zippy!

Love,

The James Anderson Family

Rearranging

As many of you may know, going to college presents a few challenges when it comes to living space. Namely, a tight budget and tight space to work in. In our small two bedroom, one bath apartment, (which we cannot complain about in the least) we have the challenge of finding space to welcome a new addition to our family in April. And I must say we enjoy a challenge! Brittany has practically been on the edge of her seat in anticipation of a chance to reorganize, and spent many hours finding good deals and cute ideas.

Well, it all snowballed from there. There's no stopping a pregnant interior designer on a mission! So we got serious by envisioning the baby room with two kids living in it. Brittany even sketched out several options on her graph paper, being the interior designer she is. After seeing the space we had to work with on graph paper, we realized fitting two small beds, two dressers, and a large cabinet into the space left only a few options. So we ordered the furniture for that room and in our excitement, found ourselves too anxious to wait to re-do that room.

The next evening, we ended up shopping for, and even purchasing, budget furniture to put a little more organization and space into our own bedroom. And what an undertaking it was, even without real furniture. First purchasing, then building, and then rearranging the room to get it all to fit and look the way we had seen it in our minds. We built the furniture throughout the week and then Saturday night finally got to work on taking everything apart so we could put it back together again. We even took the opportunity to sort through our clothes and make a donation box of all the things we don't wear anymore and fixed the bed that was bowing in the middle!

It was quite a week, and I must say we are pleased with the results. Much more adventure to come of course, but still so satisfying even in the little bit of organization we have achieved thus far. It's truly amazing how properly using the space you have makes you feel like you have room to spare. Not a bad way to begin the year, eh?  

Love,

The James Anderson Family

Happy New Year

Hello everyone, and Happy New Year. As the New Year is upon us and so many new and exciting things are happening, we thought we would try out this blogger thing to keep everyone up-to-date as we live so far from so many people we love.

We celebrated Christmas back home, where it all began for our little family in High Desert California, where we got to spend a week and a half with both of our families. It was such a nice vacation from all the long work days of 2010 and such a great way to end out the year. What an adventure it was to get there and back in our little rental car! We had to actually leave some of our gifts in California in order to have room on the way home.

Our favorite part of the trip was watching Dean's reaction to everything. What a little sweetheart he is. How can you not have Christmas spirit with such a cute, excited 15 month old around? He loved his presents and all the attention. He sure was spoiled and we're so glad he has such wonderful grand-parents, great-grand-parents, and aunts and uncles to love him up.  

In other news, this is a profile ultrasound picture of our elusive baby girl. After 4 trys, we finally caught her when she was willing to hold still. She is so active! Brittany will be 6 months along on the 18th and we can't believe how fast the time is flying until we get to meet this sweet little spirit and newest member of our family. We decided to name her Riley Mae Anderson, and had fun announcing her gender and name as a Christmas gift to our families.

We hope you are all doing well and will try to write frequently. Please make comments and let us know you are following and what else you would like to hear.

Love,

The James Anderson Family