4 Posts in one month!

This hasn’t happened since June of last year… I don’t even know what to say. Does this mean we’re committed to our HUGE fan base (sarcasm included) to post once a week? Possibly. Will it happen? Yeah, I dunno either.

Two noteworthy events for the week. I’ll let you choose which one ranks higher.

First: It was off to Wal-Mart  yesterday. That is not noteworthy, Wal-Mart visits happen all too often. I don’t care for Wal-Mart; never will. But man, it’s cheap. And it’s so close to our place. Usually it’s crowded, I can’t park anywhere, and the whole experience makes me a little more disappointed with the entire human race.

Yesterday though, there must have been something in the air, because parking was a cinch and that place was dead quiet. Cindy and Carter were with me, and Carter, as usual, insisted that we look at all the toy machines that beckon to little kids as we entered. He saw the grabby-arm-claw machine with little stuffed animals and proceeded to identify some of ‘em by pointing and grunting (he’s a genius, I know). I had a dollar on me and tried my luck. And wouldn’t you know, I landed Carter a new toy on the first try. Combine that with a $3.00 Cars book (he’s obsessed with Lightning McQueen) and this is how he felt about the whole trip:

Second: Aside from my extreme crane-toy skills, here is the other noteworthy event. Carter’s vocabulary is increasing, and we caught it on video. He’s bit grumpy, but the video is most definitely worth watching (and under a minute; you can handle that, right?)

YUP! How great is that?! I couldn’t be more excited, and Cindy feels the same way. Carter has no idea what’s going on, but he will soon enough and he’ll love it. End of September is what it looks like, but we’ll know more in a few weeks.

HOORAY!!

Video Time! (#3 is my favorite of the bunch)

I have a junk load of pictures I need to upload, catalog and then toss into Flickr, but why upload pictures when videos are so much better?

First off, as Cindy mentioned, she has graduated from “working-at-a-job mom” to “stay-at-home mom”. Guess what? She’s really good at it. No surprise, but this house is functioning a thousand times better then when I tried to be in charge of cooking, cleaning and taking care of Carter.

Cindy’s got Carter doing fun things during the day, and his favorite past-time as of late is making COOKIES. In fact, “cookie” has replaced “ball” as the word of choice and when in doubt he’ll just call something a cookie.

Here’s Carter making cookies with Cindy:

 

We got him to make some animal sounds, too:

 

Lastly, and my personal favorite, is Carter’s bath time. I really think he only eats dinner because he knows he gets a bath afterwards. If life was just bath time, Carter would do just fine. With that in mind, during his bath tonight, we tried capturing his splash sessions and cannonballs, but ended up with this instead:

 

Yo Gabba Gabba taught him funny faces and he rather enjoys them from time to time. So do we.

Everyone should try this

**Update**

This post was actually written by Cindy but she seemed to have posted it from account. So, there you have it. This wonderful post was created by my loving wife.




So this is really fun. Our friends did this and I couldn't believe how real the kids look. So I tried it out. It's really fun. So for those of you who didn't know we had a little girl before Carter, here is a picture of her. We had to put her up for adoption though. We just weren't ready to start a family yet! :)

Stay at home mom!

Well, unfortunately the poor economy took it's toll on us, because the construction company I worked for ran out of work, and therefore, I no longer work there as of the end of December.

Although this isn't ideal for us, it has been kind of nice being able to get a taste of what it will be like to be a stay at home mom, which is such an awesome job.

I love being able to have more time and energy to work on our house, fixing healthy meals, budgeting and especially taking care of Carter. We have been having so much fun together. He's such a great kid. I appreciate him so much more now, and don't get frustrated with him as easily now. I'm really glad I've been able to have a little time to enjoy Carter at this age rather than have it fly by because I'm too busy and realize too late that his fun experiences went by unnoticed.

Also, this time has helped me not get so discouraged as a wife and mom. When I was working full time, I was always frustrated because I just couldn't do everything at 100% which made me a failure at everything. I kept telling myself I needed to find more time and more energy somehow. It had to be possible because so many people are successful. Of course, all this thinking ever did was cause me to get sick every few weeks, which would put me further behind my self-imposed perfection schedule and this cycle continued.

Well, even though I still stress a little at the need to find a new job, taking care of myself, my home and my family has finally become more doable.