More J pictures

Jacob's First Hike

Some more pictures

This is a picture of Jacob at his placement in his placement outfit and blanket

A Sunday family picture

A beautiful woman and a handsome boy! (so says Thomas)

Welcome Jacob!

We are so thrilled to welcome Jacob Thomas into our family. We were a couple and now we feel like a family. Our lives have been blessed by the miracle of adoption in ways we could have never imagined. When Brianna first picked us it felt so surreal. I never knew that we would grow to love her so much and have a wonderful relationship with her. Brianna called me to be in the hospital room for the delivery which turned out to be an amazing experience. I thought I would be a little grossed out with the process but instead I was amazed at the miracle of it. She even let me cut the cord! Afterward we were both able to hold him and we knew he was meant to be part of our family. We felt the Spirit so strongly during this week as we spent time with Brianna, after Jacob’s birth, and at his placement. We have much to be thankful for - a loving Father in Heaven who has a plan for each of His children, a birthmother with strength, courage, and an incredible depth of love, and the sweetest little boy I have ever seen. We are loving being parents!

We are already being initiated as parents. Jacob pooped through his outfit soon after we brought him home, and just as we were putting a new diaper on him, he pooped again. Many more adventures are in store, and we are looking forward to experiencing them!

Grovers are crazy!

This is my favorite shot from this weekend. On Mother's Day we went in the backyard and played with balloons rockets. Who knew that so much fun could happen for only 88 cents?


That day we also met this cute little guy:

Family and Fun

Erin's parents recently visited and spent a couple of weeks with us. We had a great time with them, which included our annual spring trip up the canyon to have a cookout.

The above picture is of Erin (far left, sitting in the blue chair) with her mom and sister spending time by the fire. We roasted hot dogs, and Thomas made his famous baked beans with bacon. After dinner, we roasted marshmallows and had smores (with regular chocolate only; Thomas LOVES to have smores with a reese's peanut butter cup in place of normal chocolate). Then, Thomas told a scary story that had one of Erin's sisters particularly frightened. The canyon was beautiful, the weather was pleasant, and the family was entertaining.

During the parents' stay, we also visited a couple of other parks and played a fun game called bocce (Italian lawn game: think bowling and curling). It was girls against guys and the girls won! We also borrowed a friend's projector and watched a couple of movies projected onto one of our walls.

After Erin's parents left, things settled down and we got back into our normal routine. On Saturday, Thomas' sister gave us two tickets to the Real Salt Lake game in Salt Lake. Thomas really enjoys soccer, and follows both Real Salt Lake and Manchester United in England (he has a friend from England who is a lifelong United fan). This picture shows us at the stadium during halftime. The game was incredible: RSL scored 6 (!) goals in the second half, all in the goal behind which we were seated. We had a great time. Here is a 10 second clip of the best goal of the game.

SNOW?

That's right, we woke up to ONE FOOT of new powder. Crazy. Blossoming trees all over the city were weighted down and broken because of the snow. And it was pretty localized, as Sandy had almost no snow. Anyway, we took a quick picture from our front door. The forecast for the weekend calls for sunny skies and 70 degrees. Utah spring is like no other ...

Singing the High Notes, Deep in the Heart of Texas

Our wonderful niece Cora was watching the video in the previous post and asked her mom (Thomas' sister) why Thomas was singing so high. Some of you may not know, but Thomas had an early childhood goal of singing for with the Vienna Boys Choir. Unfortunately (fortunately to all of you), Thomas discovered that a high range is not the only requirement for choral singing. Holding a tune also helps ...

We have been in Texas the past week, Erin for longer than Thomas, for work and to visit with family and friends (hello MOM, DAD, Rob, Shauna, Ginny, Audrey, Lily, Sydney, Preston, Sarah, Abigail, and Samuel!). While in Texas, we noticed that spring was finally here because of the bluebonnets (Utah seems to think that winter lasts through April). Anyway, we are both back in Utah, and looking forward to some warmer weather.

Do You Remember When?

Way before we were married (or dating), Erin did not think that Thomas was the coolest kid in school. This video proves it. At the very end, when Thomas mercifully ends his U2 cover, the camera pans to Erin and the look is priceless. Check it out.

It's been fun to go through some old pictures and remember the good times that we have had. Do you have any fun memories you want to share? If so, leave us a comment.

Good eats.

We're trying to eat more healthily but we're running out of ideas. Does anyone have good healthy snack ideas that we could try out?

More quick updates

We got a new computer and we're still transitioning and moving files. So, here's a post that will only have 1 picture.

I am just going to give you a short update on our lives in the past month. I turned 30. After I finished crying about it (not really, there's no shame in growing older), we celebrated with friends and family. 30 is going to be a great year, I can just feel it. Thomas and I did some baptisms for some family file names and one of the temple workers asked me if I was a teenager. She knew I was there with my husband so I guess she thought he was robbing the cradle. But there you go, even after all this time I still look 16.

We also just celebrated Dan's birthday and Cami's birthday and Shauna's is in a week. In our family we have 4 birthdays exactly 1 week apart from each other. That's a lot of cake in 1 month!
We also had Camille and Mike over for Groundhog Day. I don't know what it is about holidays but I just love them. We had groundhog tacos and watched Groundhog Day. If any of you know that movie, Bill Murray wakes up to the song "I've Got You Babe" every morning of his eternal Groundhog Day. So we decided to test Camille and Mike and played "I've Got You Babe" on repeat the whole time they were in our house until they finally noticed. It took forever but finally Camille realized that she had been singing along to the same song for a half an hour. And as homage to all the groundhogs out there who predicted another six weeks of winter, here is our groundhog picture (not really loving the picture but it's the only one I've got):

Hibernation

It probably seems as though we have been sleeping through the winter, so we thought it was time to get back in touch with the world. We are still alive and well. In fact, we have a little announcement to make:

WE ARE HOPING TO ADOPT!

We have been working for a while to go through the process of getting approved to be adoptive parents. It has been a lot of work, but our family and friends have been so supportive. Back in November, we participated in an Adoption walk and some of our family came along to support us (pictured in orange).

We are working on a new web site that will help birthparents get to know us a little better. Once it's populated with some additional information, we will post the link here. In the meantime, you can look at our adoptive profile sponsored through LDS Family Services:

https://beta.itsaboutlove.org/ial/profiles/18573172/ourMessage.jsf

We have a favor to ask of you: if you know of any birthparents who may be looking to place their child with adoptive parents, and you like us enough, please consider recommending us to the birthparents. Feel free to give them the above link. From there, if they want, they can contact our caseworker, or we can be contacted via email at thomasanderinfamily@gmail.com.

Thank you so much for your support!

Now, on to some other things we've been up to over the past couple of months:

We traveled with Mike and Camille to Texas for Thanksgiving and ...















for Rachel and Dan's wedding!

The joy was so great, some of the women shed tears.















It was fun to be with the family.
Back in Utah, a White Christmas awaited us.



















We had a lovely time with Thomas' family. The fun was a bit too much for the picture taker (Thomas) who somehow managed to produce only blurry pictures, which is why none are posted here. We wonder if the virgin Big Apples Nathan was mixing for the family had something to do with it.

Erin started work on a new project (Christmas advent calendar) with the help of her sister Brooke (Brooke's calendar is pictured below).















Finally, we spent some time with Erin's aunt, uncle and grandma. Erin's grandma, by the way, is a nonagenarian!















During our visit, Erin's grandma kept sneaking back to her room to watch the Utah BCS football game. I think one of the reasons she gets along so well with Thomas is because he is always willing to walk her to her room so she (and he) can catch up on football or basketball. It was great to visit with Marlene and Curtis as well, who are always so friendly and accomodating.

Protecting Marriage

I found these articles to be insightful and/or well-reasoned, and thought they were worth sharing:

Protecting Marriage to Protect Children

When Gay Rights and Religious Liberties Clash

This video has a lighter side to it, but it still has some interesting information:

What You Ought to Know: Gay Marriage

It's not too late to make a difference in California or other states with similar measures on the ballot. If you want, visit www.protectmarriage.com to see how you can help today.

Spooooky!

We had our annual family Halloween dinner last night. Our spooky foods this year included:

Wormy skeleton brains and zombie eyeballs to keep an eye on our hooligan guests.

Witch Fingers (delicious right down to the crispy fingernails).

Spider Soup eaten out of Pumpkin Soup Bowls (quite the delicacy among ghouls these days).

Iris of Troll. You can only get these specially extracted from the eyeballs of trolls in Northern Iceland. There is no expense too great for our spooky fun. Thanks Camille and Mike. And you are probably wondering what we did with these eyeball guts? We did this:

We drank those irises, of course. That is an iris stuck in the incredibly fat straw Camille and Mike brought for our eyeball drinking pleasure
.Dan got so choked up over those irises or maybe he was just choking.


Speaking of Dan, this picture makes me think of him. No, it's not because I think he's a stinking bowl of pumpkin guts. Really it's because of last night when I was carving out my pumpkin soup bowl and I had to walk away for a minute. When I returned I couldn't believe how many guts that little pumpkin had. I worked away until it was almost clean but I had to leave again. When I got back there where even more guts in my bowl. Every time I left the room Dan kept dumping hte pumpkin guts from his pumpkin into my bowl. It was pretty funny. He better watch out. I won't be on such good behavior when he's part of the family and retaliatory pumpkin guts will be the least of his worries.

A few more spooky shots:

Whose head was this? No one really knows but since we are no respecter of persons, we made our little grinning skeleton friend feel right at home.


I found a spider in my soup! Ahhhhh!


How does he do with his eyeballs?

There were lots of spooky things going on last night. But we were all terrified by this:
This apparition took us all by surprise and we fled in terror.


Whew. It's just Camille.


And Mike.

Brooke requested the ugly ones since she and Tyler had to miss the festivities this year. We put Brooke on speakerphone so she didn't feel left out. There are for you Brooke (well, some of these aren't ugly, just funny):
That's it for our super creepy fun.

Tricks of the Trade

I thought this information may be helpful to some. I found myself not knowing all of these little tricks, so enjoy some tech tips:

Tech Tips for the Basic Computer User
by David Pogue, New York Times