My daddy is my favorite pal

My mommy has been sick for a few days, so she asked if I (Thomas) would update the blog for her. Seeing as how I have a lot of time on my hands these days since I'm not too keen on taking a third nap, I was more than happy to fill in for her.

Since Mommy's been in bed most of the past two days and can only hold me long enough to feed me, I've gotten to spend a lot of time with my daddy. I love my dad! He's the best.

I remember when I was born and Daddy got to hold me first and carry me over to Mom while she was laying on the operating table. After I got to meet Mommy, Dad and I went to the recovery room and spent some time alone there before they brought Mommy in and she finally got to hold me.

It was a little hard adjusting to life outside of my mom's tummy. I cried a lot that first night, but Daddy stayed up with me and talked to me and played with me. He hasn't stayed up at night with me since, but that's okay. I usually just want food when I wake up in the middle of the night and Mom's a lot better about taking care of that than Dad is.

I was so excited to leave the hospital and go see my house and meet all my new friends:

Even though Daddy didn't have to go into work for a few days after we got home, he still had stuff he had to do on the computer. That didn't keep him from spending time with me:

And sometimes we'd read scriptures together:

and take naps together

I actually used to sleep quite a bit back then. Now I'm getting to be a really big boy and don't need to sleep quite as much. That means I have lots more time to play with Daddy. We have lots of fun adventures together.

Dad took me to the Oklahoma City Bombing Memorial while Mom was playing her harp at a wedding downtown.

The Survivor Tree

The Chairs

Daddy even decided that I'm getting big enough to race RC cars with him

He even let me steer!

Since my Obaachan (grandma) is from Japan and my dad served his mission there, he thinks it's a good idea to talk to me in Japanese as much as possible. I actually am learning quite a bit, thanks to some fun Japanese games:

Daddy always likes to do nice things for Mommy. Sometimes he lets me help out. We got up really early on her birthday to make her a tasty breakfast.

Remember how I said that I was getting to be a big boy? Well, now I am the one who's reading scriptures!

I love my dad so much! Happy Father's Day, Daddy!

Love, Thomas

One year older.....and wiser, too?

warning: the following post contains excessive use of exclamation points

Sooooo...it's my birthday! It's been an absolutely awesome day. I always get excited about birthdays. Every time I see "June 10" in writing, I get really giddy. When my birthday starts showing up as the expiration date on jugs of milk and cartons of eggs at the grocery store, I know it's getting close

(confession - I will actually sift through the dairy and egg products to find those that have my birthday as the expiration date so I can look at it every time I open the fridge).

Imagine my joy when I drove past the county fairgrounds and on the marquee in big, bold, red letters it said "WEDNESDAY JUNE 10 - FARMER'S MARKET". I was beside myself. I just love all things birthday related. And since our wedding (three years ago, yesterday) the birthiversary celebration has only made things that much sweeter. Add Thomas to the mix and, well, I've pretty much got everything I've ever wanted. Which is great for me - however, it makes gift giving pretty hard for Kenta. What do you get for the girl who has everything she wants/needs?

Despite my insistence that I don't really need anything, Kenta manages to surprise me every year. This year was no exception. On Tuesday nights, Kenta is usually up really late making last minute preparations for his Wednesday morning meetings with his advisors. As I was climbing into bed, he casually asked me what time I thought I would be waking up in the morning. I had set a goal to attempt a 6 mile "run" on my birthday, so I thought waking up at 5 :30 would get me back before it started to get miserably hot outside. Kenta kind of groaned when he heard how early I was getting up. I just assumed it was because he would be getting to bed really late and I might accidentally wake him up when I got up. Well, I was wrong.

After I had slogged through the lamest 6 miles I have ever traveled on foot, this is what greeted me at our front door:

I was so excited about the cold bottle of water, I almost missed the card. It was a birthday card for me from Kenta! I read it and realized that it wasn't just a card - it was a mini-scavenger hunt with a clue. I figured out that my next clue would be in the car and this is what I found -

Sweet! More Love Spell!! I no longer have to ration my old bottle. (I had actually hinted to Kenta weeks before that I needed more of this, so that he would have sufficient time to enlist one of his sisters to go into Victoria's Secret and buy it for him. There is no way on earth he would ever go in that store. He makes it a point to avert his eyes and stare at El Chico as we walk by).

But the fun didn't end there...another clue!! I figured this clue had something to do with food, so I went to the front door and knocked and waited for Kenta to let me in. He took his sweet time to get there because he was really busy making me......

A delicious breakfast!! Yay! Pancakes, cream, fruit and scrambled eggs just the way I like them (with little bits of spinach - I need all the antioxidants I can get if I want to live to be 100). Thomas woke up right as we sat down, so we ate together as a family. It was a great start to a fabulous day.

Later in the day, we celebrated over a little gift that I had actually made myself yesterday - leftovers!!! (Do I want to cook on my birthday? No way, man!) And in lieu of a birthday cake, we went to Coldstone for some birthday ice cream. Pretty cool birthday, huh?

I think the best thing about this birthday has been that I really did feel like my life was complete and not missing anything, so anything extra that I got was just icing on the cake. I guess you could say "my cup runneth over" because - really - it does. And for the first time that I can recall, I'm not sad for the day to end. I know that tomorrow (and the day after and the day after that) can be just as special as today. I guess becoming a mommy has really changed my perspective on life. I think I have found my true purpose - I love being a mom and that is, by far, the best gift I have gotten this year. Thanks to everyone for the birthday phone calls and messages! Happy birthday to me!!

Hair today, gone tomorrow

One of the big debates before Thomas was born (aside from whether he would be a boy or a girl) was if he would have any hair at birth. Hair is a precious commodity in my family. Most of us are born bald and it takes us a good three or four years to grow anything of substance atop our heads:

This is me at about age three (I'm the cute one on the far left). My lack of hair at this age makes my gender a little ambiguous. If I wasn't wearing that dress, I could easily pass for a dude. (I'm not even going to make excuses for my sisters. They are just innocent victims of being adolescents in the '80s).


If you are male in my family, you have about fifteen years to enjoy your hair before it will probably start falling out. Kenta, on the other hand, had more hair at birth than my dad did in high school:


He also claims that his uncles were the hairiest Japanese people he ever met. Despite his hairy Japanese heritage, I'm afraid that the inferior Scandanavian hair genes that Thomas inherited from me will determine his future hair growth. According to Wikipedia, the maternal line plays an important factor in the inheritance of male pattern baldness. Since I am Thomas's mother, I would say that his hairy days are numbered. Sorry, Thomas. The odds are pretty much stacked against you, son. Let's examine the evidence:

Grandpa Michaelsen (my dad) and Great-Grandpa Michaelsen (my grandpa)

I don't have the pictures to prove it, but I'm pretty sure both my great-grandpa and great-great grandpa were also bald. Baldness is a tradition that runs deep in our Danish roots. And now, Thomas, I pass these genes on to you. And from the looks of it, they are already beginning to manifest themselves. That nice head of dark fuzz that he was born with has been dimished to a stripe along the back of his head - pretty similar to the stripe of hair that my dad has. It's a look that is perfectly acceptable for a grown man, but on a baby, it just looks like some heinous hybrid of the Skullet and the Child Neglect:

I would cut it, but there's so little that I don't really know if it would make a difference. I would pretty much have to shave his head if I wanted to even things out anyway.

I've got issues myself when it comes to getting haircuts. I finally cut my hair last week for the first time in almost fifteen months. Going to get my hair cut just stresses me out, though I've only had one really bad haircut in my entire life. I had been out on my mission for almost a year and I decided it was time to get my ONE haircut that I was going to have for those eighteen months. It was right before my birthday. Every street corner it seemed had a peluqueria (barber shop) so my companion and I chose one near our home owned by hairdresser named Miguel Angel. Let's just say this guy was a lot more "Angela" than "Miguel". Anyway, he snipped off my sun-fried, dust-coated, stress-thinned hair and - voila! - I ended up with some horrible version of a Peruvian mullet. It was awful. When we got home, I had my companion take our dull little pair of scissors to try and even things out and minimize the visible damage. I didn't wear my hair completely down for the next seven months. Like they always say: "It'll grow back". Eventually, it did. But that doesn't keep me from stressing out about it. What if they cut too much off? What if I don't like it? What if it's just never the same again? I don't want to do something to Thomas's head that I would later regret. The more I look around, I realize that lots of babies are sporting bald spots on the back of their heads. So, I can justify my son sporting a skullet. Why not? Everyone else his age is doing it.

In other non-hair related Thomas news.....

.....tummy time was a success this week!

Well, sort of.