Another (not so) Lonely Day

Man, I really need to find my Ben Harper CDs, but anyway...

I'm sure that it will start to be a lot harder to take so many pictures and such since I'm going to start going back to work tomorrow, but it's been a REALLY exciting and fun week for both Jenni and I. Luckily, my boss is VERY understanding about the whole situation, so I'll just be working part time for the next week or so, but I'm sure that the whole Charlie experience will only get better has the little guy gets bigger and bigger.

Well, onto the fun part (at least for a picture/video junkie like me). Yesterday, Jenni decided to dress Charlie up in the little baseball outfit that we got from my Mom (it's one of her favorite and despite the fact that I don't really like baseball, I have to admit that it's a pretty cute outfit). Unfortunately, he got a little fussy/tired before we were able to get a really good picture, but it was still a fun experience (that wore out all parties involved).

We then decided to venture out into the world for the first time. It was actually a little better/easier than we expected. I don't know why we thought it would be hard, scary, or bad, but I guess it was just the newness of it all. We stopped by Brian and Mindy's and really enjoyed getting out of our self imposed quarantine for a little while.

About once a day (and usually at like 3 or 4 in the morning), Charlie decides to wake up, relax, and just look at the all the "amazing" things around him. It's the moment that makes how ridiculously tired I feel worth it. Even though I've experienced it, I still don't understand how people function when they're so sleep deprived, but I guess some extra hormone or something must kick in when there's a newborn involved.

If you're interested, here's the link to all of the pictures on the Picasa Web Album or on Facebook, and here's one more little video of me messing with him during his play time.

NOTE: None of the sleeping pictures were framed, planned, or posed for. They were all 100% legitimate "pass outs" (what I have started to call the level where sleep deprivation finally reaches a threshold that the parent passes out and just sleeps), but I guess that those ones just end up making good pictures.

Stupid Spam

Just as an aside for people that are having problems with spam and such on their blog. Here's the instructions on how to make it so that anonymous posts aren't allowed. It won't completely solve the problem, but it should at least cut down on the stupid spam posts.

1) Click "Customize" in the upper right hand corner
2) Click "Settings" tab in the upper left hand corner
3) Click the "Comments" sub-tab in the middle
4) Scroll down to the "Who Can Comment?" area (second section) and select "Registered Users" or "Users with Google Accounts"

It's the little things

About a month ago, I heard a Mom in our ward say, "My baby slept for 6 hours last night and it felt SO good to get 4 or 5 hours of sleep." It totally blew my mind and just didn't make any sense to me at the time, but last night I laid down and said to Jenni, "Hopefully, Charlie will sleep for 2 or 3 hours so we can get some good sleep." How my definition of "good sleep" has changed in the last week. But anyway, onto the interesting stuff.

So the last two nights have been a whole new type of experience. There's been a LOT of fun and smiles, but we are SO VERY thankfully that we've had Grandma Lynn here to run some errands, help out with meals and the house, and most importantly step in with some MUCH needed relief when the little guy is just wearing us out. We're hoping to finally get him to be more active during the day and sleep longer between feedings during the night (instead of his nocturnal creature schedule that he has going right now because the kid seems to only poop and pee in the middle of the night and wants to wake Mommy up every hour or two), but I guess we'll just have to be patient for at least a few days.

I also made my first rookie Dad mistake at home and got pee all over the couch. I was changing the little guy and left him without a diaper for about a minute and he ended up deciding that he wasn't done. He scared the living daylights out of himself and startled Dad as well. I guess that the good thing that came out of it was that all of the couch cushions are looking a lot cleaner since the experience prompted a much needed washing of the covers, but I hope that I've learned that lesson and that we won't have to repeat the experience.

And to finally wrap up the post, you can check out the latest batch of pictures on the Picasa Web Album or on Facebook,or here's some videos that we made of the little guy in action.

Charlie having a little play time with Mommy and saying hi to Grandma and Grandpa Johansen:

Charlie really enjoying a meal (it may be hard to appreciate this without having seen his normal balled up and squirmy eating habits):

Charlie doing his "tricks":

The Miracle of Life (and Modern Medicine)

So this is just a quick announcement sort of post, because I really need to get to sleep and get some energy back, but for those that don't know, Jenni's water broke on Tuesday night and then little Charlie was born on Wednesday April, 23 (the same day as his Uncle Kenny's birthday, which is where he gets his middle name from). Despite being almost a whole month early, he was 7 lbs 12 oz and is doing VERY well (even to the point of wearing Mommy out by feeding so much). We're SO grateful that he came out as healthy as he did, and we couldn't have hoped for anything better.


I'm sure that at some point Jenni or I will get on here and post all the details, but for now you'll just have to settle for the pictures on the Picasa Web Album or the Facebook Album and my cheesy captions.

And in conclusion, I would just like to add that I think it should be a crime for anyone recommend against having an epidural (which was a semi-indirect focus of the birthing class we went to). The epidural made the experience so much more enjoyable for Jenni and in turn for little Charlie, but I'm most of all just thankful that my beautiful wife, Jenni, and the wonderful little bundle of joy that she created are both doing well.

Making Labels

Jenni has been writing up all of the thank you cards for the baby shower (Jenni and I definitely owe a HUGE thank you to everyone for all of the time, energy, and gifts that they put in), and I was given the task of putting the addresses on all of them. I definitely wasn't going to write them by hand and copying and pasting each of the addresses into a label template seemed tedious, so I did a little googling and I found this. It definitely drove me totally nuts at first, but if you follow all of the steps, it actually works and starts to make sense. I wish I could attach documents to a post, so people could see an example of how it's done, but the little walk through thing is pretty detailed and should tell you everything that you need to know.

On a side note, I actually tried just following the steps from the web page and step 2 wasn't working properly, so I had to type "Print mailing labels" into the ask a question box and select the same article and that fixed it for some reason. Don't ask me why, but it did.