Carter - 17 Months

I can’t believe our little one is 17 months old.  We’re a mere one month away from having a 1 1/2 year old.  That is just so incredibly unbelievable to me for some reason.  But then again, I say that every month.  So basically, 17 months really is the best age ever.  I’ve been saying that since month 12 though.  I love me a newborn baby y’all, don’t get me wrong, but there is nothing like playing with my sweet boy in the water or in the dirt or just watching him learn how to use his hands and feet in a more advanced way.  He is so much fun to be around and I gotta say, I absolutely LOVE having a boy.  So here’s some things that happened this month:

• Carterman does all kinds of weird things that makes mommy and daddy laugh:

• He’s a big lover of the slide these days and it is his number one choice for what he wants to do on the playground.  Swinging on the swing got pushed back to number 2.

• On the left, Carter is quickly figuring out how to use a spoon.  We’ll give him a spoon and some kind of food and he’ll take one tiny piece of food, put it on the spoon then put the spoon in his mouth.  He used to lose the food on the spoon because he tried to put it in his mouth too fast and the food fell off the spoon.  He’s figured out that he has to do it slowly so he’s gotten much better at it.
• On the right, we got Carterman his first hat from Old Navy and, shockingly, he actually wears it. Sometimes the bill gets in his view of something and he’ll take it off, but for the most part he keeps it on!

• He figured out how to stand on top of his bumpers this month and now he is constantly doing it.  At some point I know I’ll have to take them out because he’ll use it as leverage to climb out of the crib.  Oh and the climbing.  Carter climbs everything now.  He is constantly lifting up one leg to try to put on top of something (like a big toy) to climb on.  He even figured out that if he moves his little red chair next to our couch in the living room, he can climb onto the red chair and then further up the couch.  He’s a climber!

 

• We had a family day at the zoo.  Carter had a lot of fun as usual.  He really likes the zoo!

• We bought him a Pirate Ship water table for the back porch.  May have been a mistake because now all he wants to do is go outside and play in the “otter” (water).  We have figured out that it’s just easier to let him play in his diaper.  Otherwise we’ll have clothing changes multiple times a day.

• Mother’s Day was this month and I sure had a great one!  I got lots of sweet gifts from Justin and from my wee man.  On the left is a quick picture I took of us while riding on the golf cart on Mother’s Day after church.  And yes, he still LOVES the golf cart.  On the right is a picture of the card they made for all the mothers of babies in Carter’s school class.  They only have four babies in the infant class and three of them are ours (Carter and Carter’s twin cousins, Cynthia and Celia).
• Carter’s lower molars that started coming in during the awful first family vacation where he developed a double ear infection and the croup virus are fully in now.  I guess Carter’s pain was consumed by the ear infection and the virus because other than those couple of days, he never showed any pain.
• His upper molars cut through on May 20th (ish) and again, he never showed an ounce of pain with them.  I only noticed them one day when I was changing his diaper and he just so happen to have his mouth open looking up so I got a good view of the pearly whites staring right back at me.  I am in disbelief that he now has all four of the first year molars and they never affected him.  He now has 12 teeth and most of them never caused him to be fussy.  For him, the worst were the upper four incisors.  He cut all four at the same time so I can imagine that was painful.
• Carterman loves stairs.  He practices going up and down the two brick steps going from our kitchen into our back porch.  He just does it over and over and over.  We hold his hand when he’s coming down of course, but he’s capable of crawling up them on his own.  Towards the end of the month, he’s actually starting to hold the railing when coming down the steps instead of holding onto us.
• We went to the pool for the first time of the 2013 year.  The last time Carter went to the pool was when he was around 7 or 8 months old maybe.  He was LOVING it.  He can walk now so we set him in the baby pool without a float or anything.  He initially tried to walk as fast as he does on land and the resistance of the water caused him to fall face first.  Don’t worry, we are next to his side at all times and pull him out of the water.  I think it scared him at first, but he’s fallen like that a few times since then and it doesn’t scare him anymore.  He just shakes it off and keeps on moving.  One of the pools we go to has the water spouts that come out of the ground.  Boy was he LOVING that:

• Food-wise, Carter eats pretty much everything.  We went through a little slump around the time he had croup where he was very picky of what he ate.  Even when he was better, he was all of a sudden not willing to eat certain things anymore.  But after a week or so, our little garbage disposal was back and eating everything in sight.  I will say, however, that he seems to have lost his taste for goldfish.  He won’t eat them anymore.  He’d rather have cheerios or some other “nack” as he calls it (snack).
• Developmentally, he really is jumping leaps and bounds!  He has figured out how to full blown RUN.  He also learns new words everyday.  His vocabulary is insane now.  He can say so many things now and he understands what he’s saying too, which is the weird part for me.  He hasn’t said a full sentence yet though, just words.  We have drilled “please” into his brain that the poor thing now says it every time he wants a bite of his dinner.  It comes out as “peas” but that’s what he means.  Anytime he wants anything, Justin or myself will say “what do you say” and he says “PEAS!” in a really excited voice.  He also knows “thank you” (comes out as “tay too”), but he doesn’t use it as frequently as he uses “please”. 
• He now knows 6 body parts (head, ears, teeth, tummy, hand and nose).  He still only knows the colors he knew last month although I do think he’s close with “red”.   After his croup, I noticed he was confusing his colors.  It was like the virus took his memory of  colors away.  So since then, we’ve essentially been “re-learning” yellow, green, blue, purple and red.  We’ve also been working on noises that animals make.   Daddy taught him what a snake says (sssssssssss) and when asked what a tiger says, he says “RAAAARRRR”.  We’re working on what a bird says (tweet tweet) as well as cow, dog and cat. 
• I am so incredibly proud of my boy, y’all.  He has figured out how to “clean up” and “pick up” after himself.  One of the books I read says that this is one of the first things you want to teach your children how to do so that a) they know how to take instruction and b) simply so that they will grow up knowing that they have to clean up their own mess.  We’ve worked on “clean up” with Carter forever, starting with the bathtub.  We have a big green frog that holds all the bathtub toys and when bathtime is over, he has to clean them up:

• Yes my son is great and wonderful (I’m a little bias), but life ain’t all peachy.  I hate reading blogs where everything people say about their kid is all the good stuff and they never mention the bad stuff.  Here’s Carter’s bad stuff:  screaming.  Right now, we’re in a screaming phase.  Half the time he’s just playing and trying to have fun.  The rest of the time, he’s just pissed he’s not getting what he wants.  Most of the time I ignore him.  I don’t want to distract him and give him something else to play with because he needs to learn that he doesn’t always get what he wants.  If he screams too long, to time-out he goes (though we haven’t had to do this yet, been close a few times, but  haven’t needed to just yet).  However I am not the perfect parent.  Sometimes I just want him to be quiet because I’m tired, so I give him food or some other toy as a distraction, however I NEVER give in.  Whatever he’s pissed that he’s not getting, he will absolutely 100% not get it if he’s screaming.  I refuse to feed that kind of behavior.
• Justin and I went to a wedding in Las Vegas this month and Carter stayed with Justin’s mom for one night and my mom for the other 3 nights.  This is the longest we’ve been away from him (well, Daddy’s been away longer, but that was the longest I’ve been away from him).  He did so incredibly well.  I don’t think he missed us at all.  I know there’s a huge debate amongst the “working mom” vs. “stay at home mom” crowds, but I will say this for the working mom; Carter has adapted to being cared for by others very quickly.  In addition to being with grandparents frequently, he’s always done well in school with his teachers.  I don’t know if that would have been the case if I had stayed at home with him.  He may have had a deeper attachment to me if I had. 
• He has discovered mom and dad’s bed.  He just LOVES to play on the pillows in our bed:

    

• Naps.  Naps have changed a bit with Carter in that he now only has one nap instead of two.  We’ve been weaning him slowly to one nap with the help of going to school on Tuesdays and Thursdays.  On those days, he has school from 9-1pm, during which he NEVER sleeps, so on those days, he only had one nap and on days he wasn’t at school, he had two.  On the days he had one nap, that nap was only an hour and a half or so.  I was nervous dropping him to one nap all the time because I wanted him to sleep more than that!  However after finally dropping one of the naps, he proved us wrong yet again.  There are days where he still only has about an hour and a half nap, but even those days, when he wakes up, he stays in the crib for at least another half hour so he’s in the crib for two hours.  But most of the time, his one nap ranges from 2-3 hours. 
• Night time sleep is still the same.  Goes to bed at 7:30pm (though sometimes he doesn’t fall asleep until after 8pm) and wakes up around 7:00-7:30am.  On the weekends and when Justin is in town, he doesn’t actually get out of the crib until almost 8:30am though, to give mom and dad enough time to move around and get ready for the day.  We have definitely been blessed with a child that knows how to entertain himself in the crib and doesn’t need to get out the second he wakes up. 
• Clothing-wise, he’s between 12 and 18 months clothes.  His 12 month ones are starting to get snug, but the 18 month ones still are too big, but we wear them anyway. 
• I weighed him yesterday and he was 24lbs, 3oz.  No idea on height though.  I’ll have to measure that and come back and update this later.

#2 and #11 - CHECK!

Marking off two more bad boys from this never ending list!!  Number 2 on my list of 101 things to do in 1,001 days was to go to the Grand Canyon.  Big fat check on that!  I’ll do a separate post on the entire trip, but Justin and I have some friends that got married in Las Vegas last weekend.  We decided to go a few days early to hike the Grand Canyon and we invited our favorite hiker friends, Bonnie and Andrew, to join.  We were also joined by another friend Rob and one of his friends. 

Bonnie, Andrew, Rob, Courtney and myself all headed to Phoenix on Wednesday night, but Justin was already there.  He flew out early Tuesday morning and drove to the Grand Canyon for a “rim to rim to rim” run all day Wednesday while the rest of us were traveling.  Justin ran a total of 45 miles.  He went from one rim, down into the canyon to the river, up the other rim and then back, hence the name “rim to rim to rim”.  It’s not even suggested to hike to the bottom, where the Colorado river is, and back in a day, but Justin did it, twice, within 18 hours.  He’s a rockstar.

Anyway, back to the pictures, which is all anyone wants to see anyway:

We took a lot more than just three pictures, but I won’t put them all on this post since this is really just marking stuff off the 101 list.  I’ll do a separate Grand Canyon post later when I have a little more time.

Number 11 on the list was to see a Big Horn Sheep up close and personal.  See, Justin and I along with our hiking buddies Bonnie and Andrew went to Colorado back in 2008 to climb Mount Elbert, Colorado’s highest peak.  While there, we went for a day drive through Rocky Mountain National Park (an absolute MUST at some point in your life-see my post on that here).  While driving through the park, we noticed a trail where we were guaranteed to see Big Horn Sheep.  We were so excited.  Except that the trail was closed.  It was a new trail and hadn’t opened yet.  It was literally going to open the next day.  We were so upset.  So anyway, we never saw any Big Horn Sheep.

While driving from Flagstaff to the Grand Canyon, we noticed some signs for this place called Bearizona.  It was a place where you could drive you car through a “zoo” of some sort and all the animals would be right outside your windows.  Guess what their biggest attractions were?  Bear and Big Horn Sheep.  Since the four of us never saw them in Colorado, we had to go to this Bearizona place.  Which is where we saw these guys:

Mission accomplished.

Miscellaneous Things…

It’s been a while since I’ve had time to sit down and write a blog!  I’ve just been so so busy lately!! 

I did Carter’s 16 month update, but there were no pictures in it at all, so here’s a few Carter pictures and new videos for you!

 

Last week at school, they had “water day”.  They took a bunch of those fun water tables you can buy at any baby store and put them outside.  All of the kids played outside most of the day that day.  I made sure to put lots of sunscreen and bug spray on our little one and even put a hat on his head.  Let’s face it, he doesn’t have much hair yet and what he does have is bright blonde so he needed a hat to protect his little noggin :)  How grown up does he look in his Under Armour outfit and Old Navy hat?!?!

Carterman loves his doggy.  As I’ve mentioned before, our dog’s name is Gizmo, however, Carter calls her “good girl”.  All because he heard Justin call Gizmo “good girl” one day for doing something good.  And now her name is forever changed.  Justin and I both even call her “good girl” now.  Bless this dog y’all.  She just takes a beating from our kid.  She lets him roll all over her, step on her feet, pull her tail, etc.  We always stop him when we see him do it though.  But deep down, I think Giz likes the attention.

With such nice weather lately, we decided to take a golf cart (or as Carter says “gol car”) ride over to the playground.  Carter is loving playing on slides.  He used to love the swings, and he does still like the swings, but he doesn’t like being on them for long.  He’d rather walk around and play with other things.  But he is beginning to LOVE the slide.  As soon as he’s at the bottom, he turns around and tries to walk back up the slide.  He doesn’t quite understand that gravity won’t work in his favor if he does that!

On Saturday night, we went to a crawfish boil (the THIRD weekend in a row that we went to a crawfish boil….tis the season I guess).  This one in particular was to raise money for some friends that are moving to Asia for two years to become missionaries.  Carter was having a blast!  There were a bunch of soccer balls, baseballs, basketballs, all kinds of balls for kids to play with.  Balls are Carter’s FAVORITE thing and when he sees one, he just yells “BAAAAWWWWLLLL” (yes, he takes a four letter word and makes it sound like a 20 letter word with the way he annunciates).  He chased and played with balls most of the time.  It did rain pretty hard while we were there, but it was super fast and didn’t last very long.  The tables did get pretty wet though.  I think the water day at school got Carter’s love of water spiked to an all time high.  He just wanted to slap the table and watch the water splash up!

That’s  the face of a kid in pure Heaven!

Then came Sunday, which was Mother’s Day!  My mom was working (she came over to our house earlier in the weekend and I gave her her present) and Justin’s mom was out of town visiting her own mom in Pensacola.  So we had no mothers to celebrate the day with.  So it was just my day :) 

We went to Sunday School and even got to go to the normal church service.  We usually only go to Sunday School because Carter’s nap is right after Sunday School.  But now that he’s pretty much weaned from two naps and is only taking one long nap around 12:30 or 1pm, we can go to both services!  After the service was over I wanted a few pictures with my little one:

      

And big props to my baby daddy for the card.  It was one of those cards that you can make handprints on with some stuff that comes with the card.  So sweet of him.  And yes, the card says “Carcar”.  Like I’ve said in previous posts, Carter started saying his name, but it comes out without the “t”, so he says “Carcar”.  I think part of this is because his cousin Cynthia calls him Carcar, which means his teachers at school also call him Carcar…so now everyone just calls him Carcar!!  We realized last week that he actually can say the letter “t”, he just doesn’t when it comes to his own name.  He can say water, but it comes out as “otter”. 

Today was also his last day of school.  Sad :(  He loves school.  But he’ll be back for summer school.  They’re doing a summer program that’s three days a week from 9-1 for three weeks in June so we signed him up for that.  He’ll start that the first week of June.  He’ll also be in the toddler room and around BOYS that are his age or a little older.  I’m sure he may enjoy being around boys for once since his infant class is nothing but girls!

Oh and we took some great videos of Carter lately.  Here’s one of Justin showing Carter how to kick a ball.  The kid loves balls, but he always picks them up with his hands.  He’s never tried to kick one.  So Justin grabbed his hands so that he couldn’t pick it up and showed him how to kick the ball.  So adorable!

And this one is hilarious to me and Justin.  I was giving Carter a bath and was using a yellow cup to wash the shampoo out of his hair.  He turned his face towards me and tried to drink the water from the cup!  I thought that was so funny because he’s never done that before.  Justin came in and started videoing it and I was using water from the spout instead of letting him drink soapy water.  His face when he drank the water was just cracking us up!!!

My 30th

I turned 30 last week!  I keep getting the same question “do you feel any different?”.  Easy answer.  No, I don’t!  30 is the new 20 my friends!!!!  There are days, however, that I just feel like my life is flashing by and before I know it, I’ll be old and in a nursing home.  I still can’t believe that I graduated college…and I did that 8 years ago!  I’ve been working as an accountant/CPA for 6 1/2 years now.  I’ve been married for almost 4 but have been with my husband for over 5 years now.  And of course, the big one, I have a toddler that is almost one and a half years old.  Time flies.  There has never been a more true statement. 

Anyway, Justin was asking me what I wanted to do for my birthday.  I don’t typically care to do anything special, but since it was the big 3-0, I told him I just wanted to spend time with our friends.  So we started the celebration weekend by heading over to the Ross Bridge crawfish boil.  It was supposed to rain, but it held off and gave us some pretty nice weather!  We met our friends the Lobdell’s who came with us to the same crawfish boil last year too.

 

They brought little Harper with them.  We had fun playing with him.  I can’t get over how fast our two boys are growing up! 

After the crawfish boil, we headed home to change before going to meet all of our friends for dinner at Margarita Grill.  This momma LOVES some mexican food and I feel like I haven’t gotten to eat it much lately!

Just a few of my favorite people :)  So glad they could all come out to dinner with us!  We were too close to Oak Mountain Lanes to NOT go bowling, so we did (well, most of us did-a couple of people had to go home)….

Me and Justin goofing off and me with all of my lovely lady friends!  We haven’t bowled in forever!  We had so much fun though!  I usually can never break 100 (I never claimed to be a good bowler), but Justin is ALWAYS on his game.  This sucker even has his own bowling ball and bowling shoes.  Yes, he’s the nerd that walks into the bowling alley with his own stuff.  Weirdo.  Naturally, I was SHOCKED when I beat him in the first game!

That’s my 130 and Justin’s 124.  I was so excited!  I never beat him at bowling!!!!  (We’re not a competitive couple AT ALL.  Wink.)

This was the 2nd game we played.  Justin beat me that time because, well, look at those strikes!!!!  By the way, “Mel” is Melanie Trimm, “M” is Marcie, and “Me” is Justin.  Justin got a spare the first round, followed by five strikes.  We were all watching him so closely wondering if he could get all strikes, but I think he buckled under the pressure ;) 

    

And this was just funny for me.  It started raining when we were walking in so I got my umbrella when I came inside from the car.  It’s my BMSS (the firm I work for) umbrella.  Tiffany and Trevor were already there and when I saw Tiff walking, she was also carrying her BMSS umbrella.  She doesn’t work with me, but her husband works for his dad and they are one of our clients so I’m always finding random BMSS stuff at their house.  They even have some things I don’t have!!

It was a great weekend overall and I greatly enjoyed our night off from being parents so we could focus on being spouses and friends.  Here’s some of the things Justin got me for my birthday:

To the left, a new pair of shoes.  The Mizuno’s I’ve been sporting have been needing to be replaced desperately so we took a trip to Dick’s Sporting Goods and got these bad boys.  Love them!  He also got me a 75 minute swedish massage followed by a 25 minute facial at the Spa at Ross Bridge.  AMAZING.  I’ve never had a facial before so that was my first and it was great!  My skin felt so incredibly soft afterwards!  Then I came home to this:

 

Actually, I came home to nothing.  Literally.  Justin and Carter were gone when I got home.  I took a shower and when I got out, they were home and I had beautiful flowers and two fun cards!  I love when Justin signs cards for Carter.  This time, he signed it “Carcar”, which if you read my post below, you’d know that Carter now calls himself “Carcar” because he can’t pronounce the “t” yet.  So funny and very sweet.

Here’s to another decade of fun!!!