Here come the aunts and uncles!

Here are the pictures of Joy's new aunts and uncles that we promised.

Everyone is more energetic around Emily, and Joy is no exception!

Except when she's asleep...

She snuggles contentedly with Laura.

Andrew visits Joy for a few minutes while down from BYU.

From the very beginning, Robbie has showed us that he's going to love being an uncle!

Heather told us before Joy came that she was going to spoil her silly. We're trying to prevent that, but it doesn't change the fact that she's excited about her new niece.

Except when she's asleep.

I know - these aren't aunts and uncles, but when I saw the picture, I just had to include it in the bunch!

That's all, folks!

How to get copies of pictures

Ok,

Since I'm an engineering student, and most engineers like to make things as quick and efficient as possible, I'm changing the way that you all can get any image files that you want. In this post, at the very end of the post, I said that you'd have to go to our family website if you wanted the full image files, since Blogger scales the image size down.

However, that's a lot of work for both you and for us. You've got to remember the URL of a site in addition to this one (and who likes to remember the address of lots of websites?), and I end up having to upload multiple copies of the same images, which takes a long time and is tedious.

So, from now on, so that I only have to upload one image, and so you only have to come to one site, I/we will post images in such a way that clicking the image in the blog will give you the full file, if you want it.

And again, maybe I'm making this a bigger deal than it is, but I'll be glad to not have to do so much work.

Happy Holidays from the Hendricksons!

I just ate, and Daddy's holding me, so I'm happy!

Archery?

Both Kimberly and I like archery, though Kimberly has been shooting for many more years than I have. We went target shooting today, and took little Joy along with us (we were shooting with a couple of guys who had longbows and back quivers - they looked like Robin Hood and "Little" John!). Had someone told me a year ago that I would be taking my first child to an archery range before he/she was three weeks old, I might not have believed them!

Phillip shooting from a distance of 20 yards. I'm using a trigger release mechanism and a pin sight.

Kimberly shoots. She had just replaced her arrow rest with a much more sturdy one.

Our family at the target. All of the arrows hit the target, which is good. :)

We like turtles

Why do we like turtles so much? Well, we don't necessarily love turtles more than we love some other animals (like dolphins) - Alissa is the one who really likes turtles - but the turtles I'm going to talk about have a story.

The story begins in Catalina when we took a weekend trip there with the Sorensons. We slept on a sailboat that they had rented, and at one point, we went to look in some of the shops in Avalon. Kimberly and I walked into a store where they had all kinds of souvenirs for sale, but what immediately attracted my eye were a bunch of hand-carved animal figures. The paper with information about the figures explained that they are made out of a iron wood, which is one of the most dense woods in the world, and which grows natively in Mexico. These figures had been hand carved in Mexico, and the sent up to the United States (how they found their way to Catalina, I don't know).

One figure - a nicely sized turtle - quickly caught my attention, and I decided that I wanted it (I'm a big fan of wood things). I showed it to Kimberly, who said she liked it, but that she like a smaller turtle better, as it had more personality. We went back and forth for a while about which one we were going to get, and I eventually conceded - we got the smaller of the two turtles.

This is a picture of the turtle we ended up purchasing while at Catalina.

However, there was more to the story that I didn't know. At the time we knew that we were expecting our first child in December, and Kimberly thought that it would be a nice Christmas gift to complete the turtle family. So, unbeknownst to me, Kimberly had Mom Sorenson return to the shop after we had left it, and get both the larger turtle that I had liked, as well as a very small turtle that we had also seen while we were there. When Christmas came around, we ended up with two more turtles that totally took me by surprise. The turtle family, though, is now complete, and they are all so very cute. :)

Our turtle family. The original turtle we purchased is on the top left. Both mommy and daddy are looking out for baby, who swims ahead.

Joy gets to know the world around her

As the days pass (Joy passed her 2-week birthday yesterday!), Joy has started to explore the world around her, and get to know her new home. She does this exploration when she's not eating or sleeping, but at least it's no longer at 1:30 AM, like it was for a couple days!

Just getting to know my finger. (We've read that newborns get to know things with their mouths...)

Ok, time to get to know Mom's finger...

Just in case you didn't know, high collars are now the hip thing to wear.

I'm just stretching; don't mind me.

Joy is the cutest baby, and just looks absolutely tranquil here.

Hi there, I'm just minding my own business, resting in my happy hippo.

Hope you all enjoy these photos as much as we're enjoying them!

Family comes to visit

Since Joy is the first grandchild for both the Hendricksons and the Sorensons, and since both families aren't more than 40 minutes away, they’ve both been very excited to visit and get to know Joy. They’ve been out to South Pasadena various times and we went out to both Fullerton and Chino Hills for Christmas, so each family has had a chance to get to know this new little spirit who so recently left her Heavenly Father’s presence. Here are pictures of her with her new grandparents. Pictures of new aunts and uncles will be forthcoming soon!

Grandma Hendrickson has a magical touch with Joy, who won't even fuss over a change of diaper when she does it!

Grandpa Hendrickson holds his new grandchild in his arms during a Sunday visit.

Grandma Sorenson spent a few days with us after we came home from the hospital, and we took this photo a few minutes before she left. We both absolutely love this picture.

Grandpa Sorenson has a great love for Joy, and we think she knows this. Some of the most happy faces we've seen her give us were when he was holding her!

Yes, this is not a picture of grandparents, but it was so cute that we had to include it anyway!

More pictures

Here are a couple more very cute pictures.

Please welcome JOY RUTH HENDRICKSON to mortality

Tuesday, December 12, 2006 was a life-changing experience for our family as our first child, Joy Ruth Hendrickson, came to join our family. After a very short and very intense labor (Kimberly started having strong labor pains at about 1:30 am Tuesday morning), Joy was born at the San Gabriel Valley Medical Center at 7:45 AM.

When born, Joy weighed 7 lbs, 9 oz, and was 20 inches long. She has a whole head of black hair, long thin fingers and toes, dark blue eyes, and very cute lips! She is a very cute baby, and, as we're finding, all systems are fully operational - she's feeding well and is very curious about the world around her (when she's not sleeping :).

Both mom and daughter are doing well, and were released from the hospital yesterday evening after Joy underwent some treatment for minor jaundice (which, from what I hear and read, is common in newborns). We're all very excited to welcome this new addition to our family, and hope you will join us in welcoming her too!

Below are some pictures that we've already taken, and as we have more, we will post more, so feel free to come visit our blog often!

Joy on her first day of life. Her eyes have the ointment that the nurses put on all babies to protect their eyes from a potentially blinding disease.

Joy half-smiles for her happy parents. This was on her third day of life.

Joy with her happy mom.

Joy with her new father.

Note: these images are probably not high enough quality if you want to download them and print them out. If you do want to print pictures, we would suggest that you visit http://knph.net/images.aspx and download the full-sized images there.

USC vs UCLA

Being a student at USC, I've never really been anti-UCLA (though Kimberly might disagree with me), but I do like to keep the traditional rivalry alive between the two schools. Thus, I was a little sad when USC lost to UCLA last week, even if I'm not a football fan & even if I think that USC had it coming to them (they haven't really been playing well all season).

Here are a couple of interesting facts that have helped encourage me to keep the rivalry alive:

• When applying for undergraduate programs, I was accepted to both USC and UCLA. However, my sister, who was then currently at USC, told me that if I decided to go to UCLA, she would never talk to me again. I couldn't have that, so...
• Every time that Kimberly and I used to sit down to watch a movie at home (which is not very often), if the movie had a blub about THX at the beginning, I would always comment that THX had been invented at USC. I think Kimberly got tired of hearing that, because she started beating me to the punch, and asking, "Is this the technology that was invented at UCLA?"

Anyhow, one last interesting comment: you'd think that, given my feelings about UCLA, I wouldn't have anything of theirs coming into my home. Imagine my surprise, then, when going through some documents I had saved, I found their acceptance letter to me! But then again, maybe that shouldn't be such a surprise: after all, I don't really have hard feelings toward them :).

We just set up our family blog site!

In anticipation of our daughter's arrival next month, and knowing that lots of people will want to see all of the latest pictures of her as she grows and gains her personality, we decided to create this blog so that we could keep you all up to date. Look for further entries as the days go by.

(Oh, and by the way, for those of you not familiar with blogs, you can respond with comments about our entries, if you feel like it. :)