Lois the singer

Lois has always had a propensity for music. She loves it, even from freshly born.

I remember holding her in the hospital, not a day old. Oh, tangent. Lois had her eyes open as soon as she was born. She was looking around, and not with a dazed newborn sort of look. She would look you in the eye. She's still really observant. So I'm holding her in the hospital, not a day old, and I start singing to her. She looks at me watching and gets these big, wide eyes. I felt like she had recognition on her face. Like she and I had sung together, that she loved music before she was born and that's part of why she was born into our family - to have music.

So Lois loves music.

Well, recently at nap time or when we're putting her down for the night, Lois has started to sing along with us. She'll sing the last word or two to a phrase then the rhyming word of the next phrase. It's so fun when she sings along. And so cute. She first did it with "punzel song". That's the song "When will my life begin" from Tangled. Tonight she did it with the hymn "Love at Home." It's so sweet and so cute. And you know what's even cooler? She sings the right notes. Awesome. I'm very proud.

I love my little lady. Oh, and she's also been really affectionate to me recently. "I wuv you, Daddy," she'll say. Sometimes just out of the blue, even. So cute. "I wuv you, too, Wois," I'll tell her. :) I love my little girl.

Baby William

My best friend, Shellie, is taking a photography class and asked to practice on William, so of course I said yes! This was back when he was a little over a week old. This first one is my favorite...

A couple classic William faces:

And Lois, happy to be "Yum Yum's" big sister:

Georgia, a house, and a BABY!

August 7th??!? Really? We haven't posted since August 7th? Wo... that's a long time.

Well, here's an update. It will likely be brief.

First and foremost, we had a baby! :) On February 1, 2012 at 11:37am, weighing 7 lbs 3 oz at 19.5 inches, William David Krueger was born. He's got red hair, (which his daddy loves :) and he loves to be held.

There is so much I could say about William being born, the labor and delivery, the extended stay in the hospital in the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU), how Karen didn't take any medication during labor except for some mild thing. I will say more later, but I have to at least say now that I love William. I'm so glad he's in our family. Lois is such a loving big sister to him. We try to help Lois feel ownership of the baby, by referring to William as "her baby". We'll say, "Lois, you're baby is crying." or "Lois, where's your baby? Should we feed your baby?" that sort of thing.

Karen is also doing well. We had a little scare with her fainting in the shower 8 days after William was born. She spent three days in the hospital to find out she they didn't know what was wrong and just have her some antibiotics. She's fine and healthy now. - I love her so much and am so grateful for what she does to take care of all of us. She's awesome and amazing.

Next, (working in reverse order), We bought a house on October 20, 2011! Our first house. It's awesome. We

love it and got a GREAT deal on it. Will talk more on it later. The address is 1818 Beckett Ct, Lawrenceville, GA, 30044.

And, last July, we moved to Georgia! Crazy, I know. I never thought we'd be living here. But here we are.

Obviously, this short post doesn't do justice to any one of the great things that have happened in our lives. I just wanted to get something updatd on the blog.

Communicating: a story with no pictures

So yesterday we came over to Colleen's, Karen's mom's, house to spend some time and play some games. We left her dad's place about 4:30 in the afternoon, planning on coming back when Lois got tired.
We had a fun meal of tuna and sweet potato fries. Lois loves running around and playing with all the toys Colleen has saved since her kids we little. Old cabbage patch kitchen set, pop-up Sesame Street toys, flash cards, connect-together plastic chains...the works. Well, we wanted to play a game with Colleen, so Lois entertained herself with the toys while we played Rummi-Up Uno. It's this board game with the similar rules to Rummi, but the tiles have Uno pictures like the colors, draw two, and whatnot.
So we're playing for a while when Lois comes up to me with one of her croc shoes. She hands it to me and says "eeh go."
I looked at her. "Let's go? Do you want to go?"
"Yehh." (yes) and scurries over to the front door to then bring Karen and me our shoes. A pair of flipflops in each hand, she gives us each our shoes. This girl is ready to go home.
We finished the game maybe a minute later. And it's time to clean up, right? Well, Lois was mo-tivated! She was flying around putting toys away. She not only put all of the giant checkers in their bag, she also carried them to the cabinet, put them in, (well tried to; the bag was awkward) and tried shutting the door. It was really cute.
Oh, and Karen told her we need to change her diaper. So she stops right there and lays down, not moving until I had come over and finished changing her diaper.
We get home and I don't know if she said a peep the whole way from leaving Colleen's to putting her in her bed. We went inside, walked up to her room, read scriptures, prayed, sang and put her to bed - all way faster than it usually was.
It was really funny to have her communicate how tired she was. She's like, "I'm tired, and we're going home. Here's your shoes. Now, come on. Let's go."
She's a smart little one and is figuring out how to tell us what she wants, if not with her increasing vocabulary, then with the ever-important body language.

Lois's First Haircut

Our dear Lois was looking like a little ragamuffin,

Which simply could not do, so we decided to take on the seemingly 

insurmountable task of cutting a 18-month-old's hair.

Indifference turned into 

boredom, which then turned into

"No, I will not hold still or keep my hands down."

Which led to desperate measures.

You know, a pacifier to keep her happy.

But in the end, we all survived without any jabbed eyes or too many jagged hairlines. 

Cute as ever. Maybe cuter even.

Although she's just as sneaky as ever. :-)

ASA presentation, thesis, and graduating

Writing this post is an effort to distract myself from my current tasks. I wouldn't normally indulge in such an endeavor, but I feel it important to document the craziness I find myself in. At least I want to so that in the future retrospection proves funny and hopefully inspiring.

For the last month or so, Karen and I have been working super hard to get me graduated. I started writing my thesis on Saturday April 16 and had an ambitious goal to finish the first draft by Friday April 29. In order to graduate in June, I need to defend my thesis by Friday June 3; so I worked like a mad man and wrote almost a section a day. What I had hugely underestimated was the amount of time it would take to generate the results I would put in my thesis. Instead of the day I had scheduled to generate the results, three weeks later (Thursday 19 May) I had the results finished and thesis submitted to Dr. Gee.

Meanwhile, other deadlines were coming and going. I needed to submit my thesis to my committee by Wed 18 May in order to defend Wed 1 Jun. That obviously didn't happen. So it comes down to my committee having less than the University-defined two weeks to review my thesis. As it is, I question if they will be able to review it all before my defense. Dr. Gee edited my thesis on Sat 21 May, already within the two-week window. Now I need to pump out the revised draft as soon as I can and send it to my committee.

Further complicating matters is the timing of the national conference for the Acoustical Society of America, at which I am presenting a section of my graduate work. It's happening this week (Mon-Fri 23-27 May). When we drove up to Seattle on Sat 21 May I hadn't yet prepared my presentation. I spent all day Sunday after sacrament meeting to start and finish it.

So now I'm sitting here at the beginning of the conference documenting a piece of the craziness that's going on. And I can't finish this post without trying to express how awesome my wife is. Karen is so awesome. This has been such a wild process. And while I'm doing all I can to graduate, Karen has been working so hard taking care of Lois and prepping everything for the move to Georgia. She is prepping everything. She scoped out ways of moving our stuff and found some movers to drive it to GA. She takes care of the food and house and packing. And in addition to all that, she is aware of the needs of her family and maintains a happy outlook when our apartment complex offers less-than-desirable living conditions. (Maybe the happiness comes from knowing we won't live there much longer.... :) I love my wife and am so blessed to be married to her.

So my presentation is tomorrow, thesis is due in a couple days, and I'm hoping to be a BYU graduate (again) in a couple weeks. So I'm moving forward with faith that the Lord will help me get it done.

Onward and upward!

Georgia Trip

Lois and I got to go to Georgia to visit my family a couple weeks ago. It was so fun to see everyone. :)

We went to the zoo.

Lois stole Abbie's boyfriend.

 Just kidding!

Lois loved looking at all the animals. Here we were looking at the giraffes.

The animals she loved best though? The kitties at Grandma's!

And the squirrels at Grandpa's. 

The flying necklaces were fun too.

We also went to the Atlanta Temple open house. They recently renovated it and have tours open to the public before it's rededicated for the use of members of the LDS church. It was great to see it again. I hadn't been to it since David were married here in 2007,