Welcome to the word Eli!

Welcome to the world Elijah Wolfe! Eli, as they are calling him, was born on friday February 6th at 11:41 pm, weighed 9lbs 6 oz, and was 22 inches long. He was born two years and two days after his big sister, Kristianna. It was my first (and maybe last) birth experience, but I am very glad I was there. My sister actually started having contractions on Kristianna's birthday, but, not wanting to upset his sister by confiscating her special day, little Eli waited two more days to finally decide he was ready for the world. My sister is grateful that he finally made up his mind. I must say, childbirth is definitely a miracle, but I think for the first time I find myself being happy with the idea that it may never be an experience I personally have. Cuddling with the babies afterward is definitely the best part. My sister is doing very well, she has her babies at home so it is a different experience all together but she is doing fantastic. Eli sure is a little angel, the complete opposite of his big sister. With Kristianna my sister was in labor for about 12hrs or so, and he took his sweet time. She came into the world screaming, he makes light little squeaky noises and doesn't scream at all. But they are both the cutest little sweet things I could be blessed to have in my life. Sorry the text in this post is short, I'm trying to let Eli sleep on my chest but still have my hands free to type. Here are some pictures!
Here is Eli looking at his Dad, my bother-in-law Ian.
Here is Eli wanting that crazy aunt of his to stop with the bright, flashing lights already.

This is Eli with his beautiful eyes open.

This is auntie and Kristianna opening some presents for her birthday that had to wait for 3 days until baby brother decided to come and Kristianna could come home from Grandma's house. She got a new baby doll. She was pretty confused when she first came home, but she is happy now and loves holding and rocking baby "E".

Enter the Household of Doom!

Not really - I just thought it might be an interesting title for the first installment of random information on us, starting with stuff we display around our house/house tour. Today I will show you some of the stuff we have on our shelves, mainly our Invader Zim collection of toys that you don't play with, weird concept, eh? Anyhew, when you come into our house you see this shelf-
It has lots of pretty things on it :) The story behind it all is that we were first moving into our new home about the same time that we discovered the joys of Invader Zim. I tend to get a little obsessive at times, so I decided that we needed some of these Invader Zim figurines as "decorations" for our new house. It was a great excuse to have Michael let me spend way too much money on toys, but they rock! The bottom shelf in our front room has a part of our collection - which I will tell you more about with these pictures:

We have a set with Ms. Bitters, the lovely school teacher, that includes things like her desk, a lovely neck-ring Hall Pass, and some destiny-determining blotch tests (one of which has Human Slave written next to each one). I put the mutant rats with her because they seemed more fitting. We also have Gaz, and she's holding a pink version of the C-S2, and she has things like a piece of pizza, a can of Poop soda, and her in a beaver suit.

In this picture you can see Dib, with his lovely computer desk full of gadgets, and one of our favorite figures - Dib changing into Bologna. We also have their crazy dad, Dr. Membrane, floating next to him.

One of my other favorites is our set with Gir. We have lots of different Gir figures, but the one here is just regular Gir in his living room set with his squeaky moose on the couch, some Krazy Tacos, a lovely Suck soda, and a cupcake. He's also in his dog suit riding a piggy. We have both of Zim's robot parents, but only the Mom is out on display.

On this end we have some interesting figures of Zim. One is Zim in the Old Man disguise, which is used in one of Mike's favorite episodes. We also have the crazy dog, Mini Moose, a robot bee, and Zim in his Human suit. I love Almighty Tallest Red and Almighty Tallest Purple, but unfortunately Red likes to tip over a lot so I have to glue one of his antennae back on.
Also in our front room we have an Invader Zim clock that I payed too much for also (don't buy them off of eBay- it was just an Ikea clock with a custom paper put in it - not too much fun), but I must admit the guy who made it was very creative, as it has a different Invader for each number on the clock.Other than the shelf in our front room, we also have a few things on our dresser in our bedroom - mostly Zim with the front of his house, another Dib, the giant piggy from the "Attack of the Saucer Morons" episode, and some more Girs. Can you see the box of Poop Candy?

Anyhew, if you can't tell by now, we really like Invader Zim. I love the figurines as they are such great quality and the company that made them was really brilliant with all of the little extras that come with each set. It was really sad that the company went out of business, it makes finding these really hard! The one set I really really really want still but is hard to find and expensive is a figure with Pustulio Zim, complete with a clear-ish Pustulio on the side of his head! Maybe someday.... Well, I hope you enjoyed seeing some of the things we have around our home, until next time!

What a day

Wow, it has been an eventful week. The day before I held a baby shower for my sister's soon-to-be baby boy, our step-sister from my mother's second marriage called. We hadn't talked to/seen her since the divorce almost 10 years ago, and it was such an amazing experience. We were raised together as siblings, and we'll always be siblings regardless of legalities. It was wonderful to hear that my three sisters are all married and happy, one is going to have a baby boy in a couple of months, and the younger brother is serving an LDS mission in the Dominican Republic. I got to be friends with them on Facebook today, and it was such an awesome experience to re-connect with them and realize that family is so much more than biology or legal papers. It's been a strange life growing up with siblings and then losing them, but now we can put our parents' issues behind us and still care about eachother. What an awsome thing to have happen. I am so grateful for this wonderful experience, it has taught me so much about love and the nature of families, I hope that we can all keep in touch and care about eachother without reservations. Family and love are the two most important things in this life, and I'm so happy to be able to have both right now, it's been a long road, but this new beginning is sweet!
:) Risa

Lots of good food And Lots of Pictures!

Whew! I just finished about 4+ hours looking through yummy recipes at Vegweb.com and my awesome friend, Tammie's website (simplehealthytasty.blogspot.com in my list of links/blogs). Our printer decided to run out of ink finally, and after finding that there are new printers with extra ink for less $ than a new ink cartridge, we will be waiting a while to print again. And so, the writing of the recipes began. But now I've got about 11 new albums in my online Picasa account, and a week's worth of breakfast and dinner recipes. Surprisingly, my fingers aren't that tired! It must have been all of the note-taking in school coming back to me. In the end, you should all go and look at all my new pictures (that took quite a while to download) and you can see all the pics from our Amazing 2008 Adventure with Mike's parents (we went to Virginia, Washington DC, New York City, New Jersey, Rhode Island, Pennsylvania, and we drove through other places probably but I can't remember), our trip to Moab, and our family photo out-takes. We will get more stuff on in the future, I promise. I saw some of my family's blogs and other blogs and they're so awesome that we are (or I am) going to work harder to make this one awesome. Some possible future features will be highlights of different things we enjoy, and of course any big events, and don't forget more pictures! I may go on about different things, like our new vegan/whole foods lifestyle, because that is huge for me, but bear with us and we will work more to make things interesting. Now go and look at those pictures :)

We are approved!

The best Christmas present came early this year, the Monday before Christmas we were finally approved for adoption through LDS Family Services. We are really excited, it has taken about 8 or 9 months to get this far. Now we have the opportunity to see what happens, and we pray that all who work with us will be guided to the right places, etc. It is a big step since we first set off to start a family, so now that dream is closer than ever.
PS - with our new internet, we hopefully will be posting more frequently and adding more pictures, etc. :)

The Ice Age is over - we have the Internet!

I am typing this post from our house - a feat I haven't been able to manage in probably 10 years (except for college and Mike's parents' house). We are really excited to finally have some technology in our home, now we won't be completely in the dark when it comes to the outside world. Anyhew, that is exciting, just thought I would share the good news :)

Mighty Mike's Majestic Monologue of... Majesty!

Soooooo... I thought it was finally time for me to post something completely independent of Risa. And in this blog, I will proceed to blow your minds with an account of the last little while. Or not.

So, Risa and I just attended adoption training over the weekend. Wow - that was awesome. I cannot lie - I TOTALLY did not want to be there (not that I don't want to adopt - because I do with every cell of by body - but I thought it would be really boring and not helpful). However, it ended up being really good, and my wife is super spectacular for putting up with my initial whining. We learned all sorts of neat stuff. I won't get into the details - that would probably be really uninteresting for you.

Over the weekend we also saw the movie "IGOR" on the big screen. I liked it quite a bit. Of course there is ALWAYS something that could be better - in this case it was the ending mostly, but surprisingly, Risa didn't like it so much, which is weird because she is generally way less harsh on animated films than I am. I personally think that even animated films should be able to feel the wraith of my critical analysis and stand up to it. A few have - like "Nightmare Before Christmas" (tis the season baby), and "Monster House", but most fall short. Speaking of critical analysis, I have a game critique that I simply must expound on here. I recently played through "Advent Rising" - a game created here in Utah about 3 years ago and which Orson Scott Card wrote the story for. I gotta say - every game should have a professional writer working on it, because it pays off. The story in this game was AWESOME. Though, that was also part of its downfall. The game was more like a movie "trying" to be a game. In my opinion there needed to be way more gameplay and way less cutscenes. Plus - it seemed that, because they spent so much time on the story, the gameplay mechanics suffered. The geometry didn't mesh well, the progression system was a way cool idea, but was overall pretty limited and superficial, and I found myself saying "what - the game's over already? Come on!"

Anyway - Risa will probably get mad that I spent all my time talking about a game critique. Plus, I need to go facilitate "weird movie night" now that my aunt Laura and cousin Gage are here. So - I will write more later. Peace,
Mike.