Christmas 2013

Wow, what a fun first Christmas for our family!

Here are a few highlights from our week:

We had our first visit with Santa Claus.

Then after months of watching us eat,

Carter finally got to start solid foods!

We tried oatmeal first and Carter loved it.

Then Mommy made a huge batch of organic

butternut squash and he's been loving that even more!

Our first Christmas get-together was Carrie's extended

family gathering at Aunt Bonnie's house.

Carter loved visiting with his Great Grandma,

who turned 90 this summer.

4 Generations:  Great Grandma, Grandpa, Mommy and Carter 

Then we had our annual Christmas Eve dinner at Aunt Beth and Uncle Brad's house.

Mike's mom enjoyed having both of her grandsons together

and the boys learned a little bit about how to share Grandma.

Cousin Kai was even sweet enough to offer Carter a kiss!

Carter just loves his Grandma!

We waited a little too long to snap a family photo

and Carter had already started to melt down... 

After a good night's sleep, he felt much better.  Here he was,

just waking up on his very first Christmas morning.

He had slept between Mommy and Daddy all night and

when he began to stir, we sat him up and Daddy explained to him

that Santa had been here overnight.  Carter was still sleepy,

but Daddy was excited enough for both of them!

Once we started opening presents,

Carter got pretty into it.

Mike's parents came over for Christmas brunch

and Carter's Uncle Brad, Aunt Beth and Kai

stopped for a quick visit, too.

Later that afternoon,

Carter enjoyed playing with some of his new toys.

Then in the evening, Carrie's parents and Elisabeth

came over to exchange gifts.

Carter stayed up later than usual, but finally crashed

and gave Mommy a relatively Silent Night!

Yesterday we visited a "Winter Wonderland"

at a nearby nature preserve.



Carter was so proud of himself, sitting in

the playhouse like a big boy.



And he even got to go down the slide

(with Daddy's help, of course!).

Wheeeeee!!!!!

Then we visited the nature center and saw some

baby eagles that were as big as Carter!

Carter's very favorite thing this week has been

giving enormous hugs.

Really, really tight ones, complete with grunting.

Despite the associated hair-pulling,

Mommy just eats them up!

I'm also loving his open-mouth "kisses"

all over my face, including trying to chew on

my chin, nose, cheeks and even eyebrows!

Linking up with Sunday Snapshot at Ni Hao Y'all

 and hoping everyone else had an especially

blessed Christmas this year, too!



Christmas Prep

The shopping is done, the cards are mailed, the gifts are wrapped, but the decorating?

Not so much.

We usually decorate our house like crazy for Christmas, with multiple large trees,

a different theme in every room, etc.  We even decorate the guest room and bathrooms!

This year?  We did one tree.  And most of the family room decorations.  Sad, I know.

A few weeks ago someone else shared pictures of her beautifully decorated house

and I thought I'd play along and post pictures of our decorations, too.

I'd just have to wait until the next week because I wasn't ready yet.

Guess what.  Several weeks later I'm STILL not ready!

I'll share what I have been able to get done so far and if I have a chance

to get any more decorations up, I'll update with more pictures.

Since we spend the most time in there, we decided the family room was a priority.

That room usually has beach colors, but in the winter I switch it up for more of a

ski lodge/woodland theme.

I have been collecting vintage winter sports equipment since we got married 

and have stumbled across quite a few steals over the years.

Like this pair of vintage wood skis I found on craigslist.

 

 I picked them up from an elderly gentleman (his daughter had listed them)

who used to wear them to ski the alps! 

He had the most adorable accent and hearing him talk about actually

using them makes them even more special to me. 

Plus the thirty-dollar price tag beats Pottery Barn's

three-hundred-dollar-plus-tax-and-shipping "Found Skis" any day!

This other pair of skis I found at a local antique store two summers ago only set me back fifteen dollars,

including the wooden poles!

The little girl's white skates were three dollars at the Salvation Army thrift store and the boy's skates were less than ten at the antiques store.

The snowshoes were the most difficult to find. 

 They were listed on craigslist ($25) and when I picked them up, the owner

took me down to the basement (not as scary as it sounds) and proceeded to show me

his entire taxidermy collection before he gave me the snowshoes. 

Then he showed me how he had rewoven them by hand out of rawhide. 

He said he wore them to hunt these certain little white owl-looking birds that hide in snowdrifts. 

And he showed me a couple of them that he had stuffed. 

Being a vegetarian and huge animal-lover, it was a lot for me to take in and still keep

a smile on my face and act interested in his work. 

He wanted me to try on the snowshoes so he could show me how to adjust the leather straps

and I didn't have the heart to tell him I was buying them as a decoration!

This toboggan was a birthday gift from my parents to Michael before we even got married. 

My mom had found it at a yard sale and it's one of our favorite gifts ever.

We have several snow sleds that never made it out this year, but with all of Carter's baby equipment all over the family room, there's no room for them anyway!  I put some stuff on the hearth, and that's about as far as I got...

Our stockings were finally delivered, but I didn't have a chance to snap a picture after we put them up.

On top of the entertainment center, we have an antique birdhouse.

At Christmastime, I add evergreen trees and a few deer and the birdhouse

looks kind of like a cozy cabin nestled in the woods.

There are usually white Christmas lights on the "snow", uplighting everything, but I didn't get a chance to add them yet.

We had great ideas about starting a family tradition of cutting down a live tree,

but practicality won out and we brought out one of the artificial trees instead.

This one is five or six years old and soon after I took these pictures, a large section of the

lights went out, so maybe we will be starting the "real" tree tradition next year!

After years of trying to carefully vacuum dust bunnies around the tree without sucking up

our tree skirt, I was over it.  But I couldn't leave the ugly stand exposed either.
A while ago I had bought an old wine barrel to make into a dog bed for Molly.
Like so many plans, it never happened, but it came in very handy for hiding the tree stand!

For the garland, I went to the craft store and purchased an entire roll of upholstery webbing for

about $13 with my 40% off coupon.  It's over 100 feet long which is more than enough for our whole tree.

The best thing was that after I bought it, I saw the EXACT webbing at Pottery Barn for some outrageous price like $10 or $15 per yard.  It was called "Burlap Ribbon" or something like that.  They even showed it being used as garland on a Christmas tree.  Michael was impressed with my thriftiness when I showed him the catalog!

So that's about it for my decorating.  I did get the foyer done, a little bit in the
kitchen and the nativity in our living room, but not much else.

This year our focus has been on Carter.  Just taking time to enjoy having
a little one in our family at Christmas.  It's something we dreamed of for so long and
something that Michael mentioned every single Christmas until this one.
He always said this was his favorite holiday, but it would be even better with kids.

We took Carter to see Santa this week.
I didn't get to take any good pictures of him, but this is the one
the people at the mall took:

Not his best smile, but at least he wasn't crying!

I tried to find out what Carter wished for, but he and Santa aren't talking.
I'm hoping it was a referral for his sister from China!
We've been thinking of her even more around the holidays
and praying hard for her as always.


Wishing everyone a very merry Christmas!


Linking up with Sunday Snapshot at Ni Hao Y'all.



6 months old

How can it be that my baby boy is half a year old?!

I'm having mixed emotions about this milestone birthday.

I'm happy and excited for Carter as he is learning so much and having

more and more fun each day.  It's amazing to watch him grow.

But I am also sad, knowing that he will never again be my little baby.

He's about to start eating solids this week.  Real food that wasn't made by my body.

I've watched him thrive and grow all these months with no other nourishment but what he gets from me. 

Now that is going to change.  He's going to be getting food that anyone can give him. 

Part of me worries that he won't need me the way he does now. 

And another part of me is excited for him that he's becoming more independent. 

Like I said, my emotions are all over the place.

  

Carter pulled out all his tricks this month, making picture-taking interesting yet again.

In addition to his usual repertoire of cracking up and talking non-stop,

this month he added singing.

And tongue-clicking.

I thought in a few more months Carter might try climbing out of the chair,

but I was wrong.  Here he was contemplating:

And going for it:

Luckily Daddy was there to grab him before he took a nose dive

onto the hardwood floor!

Since he's halfway to one, I thought I'd post Carter's progression from one to six months. 

Still kicking myself for not getting a newborn shot!

Doesn't he look so much older just since last month?!

My heart is breaking.

Linking up with Sunday Snapshot at Ni Hao Y'all.



Two Weeks

Can it be?

Only two weeks 'till Christmas Eve?!

Where does the time go?

To say I'm a little behind this year is a bit of an understatement.

We did most of our shopping on line this year, mostly to avoid germs.

As typical first-time parents, we are completely paranoid about Carter getting sick!

Between Black Friday and Cyber Monday, we are almost completely done with our shopping.

Hooray!

And I'm proud to report that our Christmas cards were mailed out on Saturday.

Not our best cards ever, but at least they're out!

Here's what they looked like:

Inside, I made sure to include our blog address again for our family and friends

to follow our adoption journey.

And I couldn't leave out Molly.  I always think it's sad when people include their pets on their cards each year until they have a baby and then the pets are forgotten.  Unfortunately Molly didn't get her holiday haircut until Saturday, so we didn't do a Christmas picture of her.  Instead, I just used this one I had from the summer.  Gotta love the Santa hat app!

I know it's silly, but it was only the BACK of the card...

I wanted to take some cuter pictures of Carter, but he was in a fussy mood most of the week, so I wound up just using some of our "practice" shots.  We'd already had some of the most frustrating photo sessions ever - for both of us - so I decided not to subject either of us to another attempt!

As wonderful as it is to have Carter more active and mobile, it certainly makes it tougher to take his picture than it used to be.  That Santa hat picture was the only decent shot I got before Carter grabbed and wrinkled up the wrapping paper and then pulled it off the wall and onto himself. 

And that red background?  It's his changing pad with a furry red cover on it.  I had tried to take pictures in his Santa outfit, but he was fussing, so I started undressing him and he cheered up.  I carried the changing pad (with Carter on it) over to the floor by the window and snapped away.  Happy shirtless-baby pictures are better than crying Santa-suit pictures any day!

That large bottom shot that looks so artfully cropped was actually done that way out of necessity.  

Carter kept moving around and his head was extending over the edge of the green wrapping paper I had wanted in the background, revealing a giant pile of laundry on the bedroom chair behind him.  So I cropped the picture right along the edge of the wrapping paper, eliminating the laundry pile.  You'd never know it, though, right?

  

Just for fun, here are a few of the shots that didn't make the Christmas card:

  

Mr. I-know-how-to-sit-but-I-think-it's-much-funnier-to-see-how-aggrivated-Mommy-gets-when-I-lie-down! 

I got smart and put him in a seat to MAKE him sit up...



"You can make me sit up, but you can't make me smile!"



 

So, yeah.  I think we did pretty well, all things considered.

A five-month-old doesn't make things easy.

At least MINE doesn't.

Linking up late with this week's Sunday Snapshot at Ni Hao Y'all.