From 70 to Snow...

This picture was taken on Friday when it was still warm and sunny. Today it was not...it was very cold and windy and flurried all day, occasionally landing on the lawn just to taunt me. So sad. Carter has a whole repertoir of new tricks these days. He loves to say "Uh-Oh" anytime he drops something or bumps into something, he waves, claps, throws a ball as seen in this photo, and points, and Derrick swears he can say "potato" now...which is rather odd, but it's also odd that he has repeatedly crawled into my pantry when I accidentally leave the door open, grabbed a raw potato and eaten part or it. Disgusting, I know.

This is a picture of my MOPS craft from this past week. We made package cakes using fondant icing. It was tons of fun and really cute.

The Big 1

We had a birthday party for Carter yesterday and he really enjoyed himself. We did a dog-themed party so I had a doggie banner, dog bone cookies and paw print balloons....that was the extent of it.
I gave Carter a little cupcake for his "smash cake." He was rather dainty with it at first, just playing with the icing.




It is crazy how quickly one year has flown by. It really does seem like it was just yesterday that I went into labor and we brought little Carter home from the hospital. He has brought unimaginable joy to our lives in this past year and we are all the more excited for the years to come and what new adventures those will hold for our family.

Chocolate Chip Catastrophe

So I thought it'd be cute to make chocolate chip cookies the shape of dog bones for a dessert/favor for Carter's big bday party this Sunday. (We are doing a dog theme for his party) Note to self, stop coming up with these clever but ridiculous ideas, PLEASE!!! I made the cookies just as the directions said, then I was trying to figure out how to get them shaped correctly. I have a dog bone shaped cookie cutter so I pressed the dough into that and then onto the trays...perfect. Stuck them in for 10 minutes and when they came out of the oven they were these indistinguishable blobs, all grown together and really quite hideous looking. Not only that but they cooked all unevenly, (I think the cheapo butter I used totally messed them up) so that made them all the more hideous. So I took the cookie cutter again and cut the cookies out of the blobs, which kinda worked for about 1/2 of them and the other half stuck or fell apart. Trying to salvage some shred of dignity, I made another batch of just regular cookies...but these I burned. My final batch I tried a different cookie sheet...they look so-so...but they are so stuck to the sheet that they are still sitting on my counter, 4 hours later, stuck on the sheet...maybe I'll feel like chiseling them off later tonight.

Lessons learned from this experience today:

1. Buy Land O Lakes Butter for cooking...unless you like crusty burned cookies that are impossible to scrape off the tray

2. DO NOT attempt to make chocolate chip cookies into different shapes - they will spread while cooking and all your efforts will only result in creepy deformed looking cookies

3. Don't make cookies when you are trying to keep to a strict diet...you end up eating all the rejects and in this case when they are ALL rejects, you end up eating like 2 dozen cookies or bits of cookies before it's even 10 am!!!

4. Sam's club sells perfectly good cookies...next year I will remember this.

Spoiled milk and splish splash fun

So I started giving Carter cow's milk over the last couple weeks in an effort to transition him from nursing to regular milk. We were making good progress but the last few days he's been totally refusing it when I offered it to him. So I'm like, OK, why did he stop liking it all of a sudden?? But tonight I got a whiff of it and WHOOEEE...it was smellin' a little shady. So I took a sip, which would have been bad enough as it is because it was whole milk, but it was definitely a few days past being good...nice bitter aftertaste...yummmmmyyy. So I guess that is why the poor kiddo didn't want any. Just hope I didn't scar him from drinking it ever again.

New talent learned yesterday was waving goodbye. I was video taping him and while turning off the camera I said byebye...and when I looked up at him he was WAVING at me!!! Of course, I missed it on tape...grrr. But he keeps doing it all the time now so I'm sure I'll catch him in the act sometime soon. He hasn't gotten the hand wave quite down, it's more like a spastic whole-arm wave but that makes it all the more cute.

His new bath talent is pulling the drain open to let the water out and if this isn't successful, he splashes so much that the tub is basically drained. I think I was wetter than him at the end of the bath, my pants were soaked!