Tuesday, December 11, 2012

Porter Shayne Sorenson

On Tuesday, December 4th at 6:00 PM we headed to the hospital so that Chalise could be induced.  Once we finally got a room they started the process and we were kind of just sitting around being bored until about 2:00 AM when the contractions really started picking up and Chalise was in pain.  Once they gave her an epidural a few minutes later she was sleeping like a baby as if nothing was even happening.  Little did we know she actually was progressing and at about 7:00 AM or so she was ready to go.  The actual delivery part went pretty smoothly and Chalise did an amazing job - I was proud of her.  At 9:05 AM, Porter Shayne Sorenson was born and weighed in at 8 lb. 6.2 oz. and was 21 inches long.  Since most of you haven't seen him yet I figured I would post as many pictures as I could. 

Waiting for the excitement.

His first bath.  Chalise ate a bunch of cheese right before we went in and some of it got all over him in the womb.

We were lucky to have Chalise's mom and grandparents here with us to see the birth.   They were a huge help and we loved having them.
















 

Disneyland

I have never been to Disneyland.  We never went when I was little and I really didn't think it was necessary nor did I feel like I missed out on anything because of that.  It was pretty fun though to go for my first time as a 26 year old.  Our friend Sean from our ward works for Disney and has a free pass for four people as often as he wants.  So he and his wife Kelsey invited us to go with them and we happily obliged.  Once again Chalise's activities at an amusement park were limited but it was great because almost all of the rides are OK for pregnant people and little kids.  I would have to say that my favorite part was the food.  We got a gigantic turkey leg and the most amazing corn dog man has ever set eyes on.  Now I can say that I've been there and I wouldn't mind going back there again.
Here we are at the pearly black gates


Of course you can enter through a really expensive gift shop (cause for suspicion).  Lucky for us we borrowed a hat just long enough to steal a picture.  Ha!  We win.
I got two buttons - one for being a first-timer and one because we were celebrating Kelsey's birthday.

This is completely unrelated but not worthy of its own post.  Everyday as I ride home from school I go by the track stadium where the marching band practices.  They are SOOO cool!  I idolize them.


Hallifornia Pie

What do you get when you mix Chalise and Shayne and California and Halloween?  The answer is Hallifornia!  We weren't really planning on dressing up for Halloween but then our ward was having a trunk or treat party and we heard that most people did actually dress up so we figured we'd join in the fun.  We were also invited to our friend Zach's birthday party earlier that day, which was themed after The Hunger Games.  We were thinking for a few days about what we would be for the Hunger Games party but nothing ever came and then in a last-ditch, desperation moment it occurred to us that we could be tracker jackers with relatively little effort.  All we had to buy was some colored duct tape and then we made some antennae out of hangers and construction paper.  We were quite proud of our ingenuity.


We were flirting with the idea of just wearing the same thing to the ward party that night but then a few minutes before we left, we decided that we would do something else.  Chalise had seen someone on pinterest a while back who dressed up as the guy from Castaway with a volleyball.  She had the brilliant idea that we could do the same thing but make her pregnant belly be the beach ball.  I thought it was quality humor but as is usual with our Halloween costumes, most people didn't appreciate it as much as we did (recall Princess Leia and Juan Solo).

Granted our presentation was not flawless, but seriously that is a genius concept


Before we had made the decision we pulled out our dress-up totes and were brainstorming when Chalise encouraged me to try on some old warmups that I had.  This is what happened.

She said I can't wear them anymore.

On Halloween I came home from school and Chalise had made plans about having a party.  Nobody wanted to come to our party (no one else was invited anyway) except us but it was pretty darn funny.


We carved a pumpkin.  Clearly if you buy late in the season it's slim pickins at the patch.

The idea here was to make a Mike Wazowski pumpkin but I totally ruined it and we were left with this piece of work.  We seriously sat there and laughed at it for about 10 minutes and then we snuck outside and left it on our stairs and laughed for another 20 minutes about how cool it would be when our neighbors saw it and didn't know what it was.




We bobbed for apples.  This is not a sanitary activity.  Chalise went first and I watched closely - she dropped either a large saliva chunk or a snot bomb into the water and it was just floating around in there.  I had to bob anyways just for the glory.







Sometime between Halloween and Thanksgiving we decided that we would make pies and invite some of our friends over to eat it with us.  Chalise had to work on Thanksgiving so we couldn't really do anything then but we wanted to celebrate somehow.  It was the first time that either of us had attempted to make pies.  We did pumpkin, coconut cream and chocolate cream.  Definitely the hardest part was the crust - making the dough wasn't bad but we have some weird hollow plastic roller that I don't think works very good and we had pie pans that were bigger than normal and I didn't make enough dough to go around.  Trying to stretch that stuff thinner and thinner with a defective roller was enough to drive a freight train up a dirt road (as my mom would say).  In the end we finally found success and they were all really good, especially the coconut cream.  I could have swam in that thing it was so good.  Our friends either liked them all or lied to us as any normal people would and said they were really good.

A fair amount of dishes were produced


We acknowledge that the crusts won't win any beauty contests but they tasted good


We are practically Marie Callender's

Quinn's Visit

Chalise's brother came to visit us in October because he was the only one from their house who didn't get to come this summer when we moved here.  We tried to do some cool stuff while he was here and show him some of the достопримечательности (don't you think it's cool how the Russians found a way to say tourist attraction in just one word?).  Quinn is really fun and we enjoyed having the company.  Over the course of a few days, Chalise took him to the aquarium in Long Beach and to Griffith Park while I was at school and then we went to Hollywood, and Knott's Berry Farm together.  We also spent a good hour and half deciding where we should eat dinner one of the nights and ended up eating at Johnny Rocket's (a glorified fast food joint).  We failed him in that one regard but otherwise I'd say we had a great time and we hope that he can come visit us again sometime.  Since I wasn't actually at the aquarium I'm going to guess what all of these pictures were.

This is Quinn kicking a tiny shark in the face.  Please excuse the lack of focus.

Here he is using telekinesis to move the jellyfish.

Some words are worth a thousand pictures.

In California the birds are so nice that if you just walk around with a little cup of food they will swoop down and land on your shoulder.


That is Grauman's Chinese Theater behind us.  Apparently it's a pretty famous place in Hollywood right by the walk of fame.

We had a camera malfunction and lost all of our pictures from Knott's Berry Farm except this one.  Chalise wasn't allowed on any of the rides because she was pregnant so she just stayed here the whole time. 

Back to the Future

The title says "back" because it's getting pretty close to a year ago that Chalise and I went on a cruise to the Caribbean.  The title says "future" because we will definitely go again sometime in the distant future when money grows on trees.  I don't remember any of the details - just be grateful that I can remember the names of the cities that we went to.  Besides Chalise's bout with food-born illness and my sinus infection it was super fun.  Our favorite activity was just laying there doing nothing and eating.  Here are some pictures for you all to remember our vacation by.


This may or may not be me by the ocean at Cozumel, Mexico.  We didn't pay for any shore excursions at this stop so we just found some really nice guy who drove us around to some cool places and talked to us about Cozumel.  It was a pretty organic traveling experience - as a side note organic food is totally trendy and not very cool but organic traveling is fun.

Chalise was super excited to see these peacocks on the beach.  It was a really interesting feature for sure.  Who just keeps their pet peacocks on the beach?

The beach was actually our last stop here.  Before this we went to some ruins but we weren't allowed to take pictures of them.  The hammocks were definitely relaxing.

This is when I hovered far above the ocean.

Between Cozumel and Roatan Island we went to Belize.  We went on an excursion to a private island which sounds way cooler than it is.  What they fail to tell you in the advertisement is that 4,000 of your fellow passengers are also going to that same private island and they are going to steal all the floaties and all of the beach chairs.  Despite my harsh language it was still way fun.





In Roatan again we just paid some guy to drive us somewhere cool for way cheaper than the cruise ship would have charged.  He took us to this place where you can play with birds and monkeys.  We walked into the first monkey cage and I thought they were gonna ease into familiarity with us.  Not so.  Next thing I knew something had jumped on my back from behind completely unawares.   Chalise loves animals and as expected thought it was the greatest thing ever even though this monkey is climbing into her ear (it appears that way).
This attempts to give you a view of Roatan Island.  We thought this place was the prettiest overall - it was really green and had some pink flowers everywhere.  Looking at this picture now all I can think is how gigantic those ships are - it looks like it's about to swallow the island whole.

We fell prey to the overpriced coconut stand.  It is pretty cool how they chop it up so quick and it tastes pretty decent.


Our last stop was the Bahamas.  This is us with our snorkel gear on, getting ready to go onto the sandbar that they call stingray city.  Soon after this picture we found out that none of the cool kids were wearing the nerdy vests...  Come to think of it not even the weird kids were wearing them.  We were the only ones!  So we took them off and pet the rays unhindered by safety equipment.
Here you can see some of the rays (they are the ones under the water).  This was probably one of my favorite parts of the whole trip.
At our last port we each got to have our picture taken in front of the store that we thought best described us;)




Merry Christmas!