October Happenings

I’m delayed on this post.  Apologies.  I very rarely have time to blog anymore!  October was a big month full of lots of happenings.  Our church’s Trunk-Or-Treat was so much fun, but I already blogged about that here.  And then Justin ran his insane 100 mile run that I blogged about here.  But so much more happened in October!

We took Carter to the Oak Mountain petting zoo!  He’s been here before, but I doubt he remembered it because it was probably a year ago.  Justin was running at Oak Mountain with his running buddies and they had a cookout after the run, so Carter and I went to meet up with daddy.  After hanging out at the cookout for a while, we all headed to the petting zoo.  Carter LOVED it!

   

I went to see my nephew play at one of his flag football games:

 

That gorgeous little girl is my niece, Lydia.  After the game I went to dinner with the Smith Family.  We had a great time and I was glad I got to go to at least one of Anderson’s games!

Carter has decided that when it’s time for him to eat, it’s also time for his animals to eat/drink:

I went to see my grandmother and grandfather in Moundville one day and ended up meeting my sister and Anderson and Lydia for the visit.  We unexpectedly spent the whole day in Tuscaloosa that day.  We went over to their house after the visit with our grandparents and played outside with the kids.  Carter took a nap over there too.  I didn’t have nap clothes, his giraffe that he loves to sleep with, nor did I have a noise box or pack-n-play for him to sleep him.  Talk about unprepared!  But we made it work.  Took him forever to fall asleep, but eventually he did.  He had SO much fun playing with Anderson and Lydia that day.  It showed me that we will indeed need to purchase one of those outside playgrounds for him one day.

When we left Moundville, Anderson and Lydia both wanted to ride in the car with Carter.  Anderson asked first, so we let him.  But Lydia was so upset that we had to stop at my sister’s studio in downtown Tuscaloosa and let the kids switch places so Lydia could have her turn.  It was the sweetest thing!

What cracked me up was that during Carter’s nap, both kids kept asking when he would wake up.  They got SO impatient and wanted to play with him.  When he finally did wake up, they wanted Carter to see Anderson’s fish so Lydia picked him up so he could see while Anderson pointed out all the fish.   So cute!  

Carter and my twin nieces decided to go visit Papa at work one day and have lunch in his office.  These kids do almost everything together and I love it!  They all get so excited when they see each other!

We got our school pictures back!  Carter looks WAY older than he actually is in this picture (in my opinion):

We spent the night with Gigi a couple of times for various reasons.  He loves Gigi!

 

Carter got sick in October.  He was developing a bad cough and Justin put the bug in my ear that it sounded a lot like the coughing he had when he had the croup virus back in April.  I took him to the doctor and sure enough, he had croup and a double ear infection.  We caught both of these VERY early this time around.  In April, the worse stages of croup had already developed before we realized he was sick.  This time we got in early.  I even argued with a nurse that tried to tell me Carter couldn’t come in until late in the afternoon because that was the only time his doctor was available.  I told her that I found it extremely unacceptable that I was supposed to allow my child to be sick all day with no medicine because of a stupid policy that we had to see Carter’s doctor as opposed to another doctor.  Needless to say, she called me back and changed it to a 9am appointment.  I feel bad because I may have been too mean, but you know, you fight for your cubs when you know they’re sick.  Other mama bears know exactly what I mean!

This is what he did while waiting on the doctor.  I assure you we had a bath immediately after leaving the doctor’s office.  He just wanted to lay on the cool floor with Henry (the giraffe).  Carter seriously did MUCH better this time around with croup and the double ear infection.  He’s only had an ear infection twice and they were both double ear infections and they were both developed with croup.  We have been extremely blessed with Carter when it comes to sicknesses.  He is very rarely sick and if he is, he isn’t acting like it!  Excuse me while I go knock on wood now…..

We had a surprise 60th birthday party for my mother-in-law.  Carter shockingly ate cake during the party.  He’s NEVER had any interest in cake.  I was excited that he was starting to like it.  He’s only had it a couple of times, but so far, I think he’ll be EXACTLY like his daddy….eating the icing first, then the batter.

Then came Halloween.  Carter was a tiger this year.  This was also the first year we allowed him to trick-or-treat.  Last year he was only 10 months old so there was no way he was ready nor was I about to let him eat candy at 10 months old.  So we decided to wait another year.  We worked with him all week on saying “trick-or-treat” and eventually he started saying it.  However, when it came to the night of Halloween, he wouldn’t say it to anyone.  It took him a few houses to get the hang of it, but he figured out that we were wanting him to walk to a front porch, ring the bell, then take the candy the person was giving.  He always said “thank you” when he left, but for some reason, he wouldn’t say “trick-or-treat”.  Maybe next year. 

Daddy was helping him sort through some candy to make room for more candy.

 

There’s a TON of small toddlers in our neighborhood, so lots of neighbors got really smart and were handing out toddler snacks (like goldfish) and bubbles, instead of hard chocolate or chewy candies.  Carter was loving the bubbles he got!

He was so cute carrying his little pumpkin carrier and walking from house to house!  The snow white that’s with him is one of our neighbors.  She just LOVES Carter and walked with him for a few houses.  Eventually we got in our golf cart and hit random houses throughout the neighborhood.  This is what trick-or-treating looks like in a golf cart community:

  

There goes burning off those candy calories by walking from house to house!

That pretty much sums up our October pretty well.  Life is going so fast right now y’all.  I don’t know if it’s because Justin’s out of town every week or if it’s because I’m super busy at work trying to wrap up all my projects (we finally set me last day at my job-December 27th).  I have 7 weeks left at my job, but really it’s only 5 because one of those weeks is Thanksgiving and the other is Christmas so I’ll be off work most of the week those weeks.  Not a lot of time to get things done!  I also paid my 2nd payment towards my trip to the Holy Land in February.  I’ll have to blog about that some more later on.  I’m honestly baffled that at the end of this week, we’ll be halfway through November.  That month came and went like the speed of light!  After Thanksgiving it’s going to get CRAZY.  I’m sure everyone’s calendars get crazy in December because it gets packed full of Christmas parties, family functions, church gatherings, etc. 

Hopefully I’ll find time to blog again between now and December :)  I do think the change in my blog frequency is interesting.  If you look at my blog roll on the right, you’ll see that since summer, I’ve been doing good to blog twice a month.  When compared to how much I used to blog back in 2010-2011 (anywhere from 8-13 times a month) it’s easy to notice some serious slacking!  I don’t really know what to say other than when you have a kid, there’s just not enough time!  It’s a struggle to blog now and part of me wants to stop all together, but the other part of me knows that I want to document as much as possible while our kids grow up.  I’m hoping that once I start staying at home, I’ll have more time, but we’ll see if that’s the case!