Family Pictures 2011

Thanks to my friend Kelly for taking our family pictures this year! She did an awesome job even though it was quite difficult to get Little Blaine to cooperate. We ended up with a few that we all actually look pretty good in.

Blaine Karter 21 months old

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to all our Family and Friends!

Note to self: Certain picture poses are not cute when you are pregnant and should never be attempted when your body is a weird shape and has extra stuff everywhere. Just saying. No worries....I spared you all and didn't share those ones with you.

Mr. Snack Man

It wasn't too many days after I kept finding Blaine snacking in the cupboard that we finally got child-proof locks installed on the doors. He'd been able to open the doors for a long time but was only concerned with what he could reach from the floor which was the bottom two shelves. He then learned to push a chair over so that he could get to his fruit snacks and pretzels.
"Peesh?" "Snacks" How do you tell him no?

Fall Leaves

We spent an afternoon in November raking leaves at my mom's house. There were so many leaves and being pregnant I got out of a lot of work. Luckily we had a four-wheeler and Tiffany to help or we would have been there for days.

Blaine loved playing in the leaves but not as much as he loved sitting on the four-wheeler and playing with Nick, Justin's dog.

Aren't we cute? Blaine wouldn't look at me when I first put the beanie on. He made me take it off and then he saw that it was still me under there and decided that it was okay for me to put it back on again.

He sat on this thing forever! He loves four-wheelers or "motorcycles" as he calls them.

Good old Nick just lets Blaine do whatever he wants to him. You'd never know by the way he is with Blaine that he's a pretty mean dog when it comes to treeing cats, racoons, and mountain lions. He is such a teddy bear with Blaine and Blaine loves him.

Timeout

I really began to wonder how effective timeout was or if we were using it too often when Blaine started putting all of his toys in "timeup". It was pretty cute though and definitely picture worthy. He hasn't done it much lately but there for a while he put his toys in timeout quite often.

Halloween Time

For Halloween this year we were all prepared with a cute frog costume that my mom had purchased on clearance last year. However, when I tried in on Blaine in September is was too tight and there was no way he would fit in it by the end of October. So I purchased this dog costume (Blaine's choice). He loved it! He loved to play with it and carry it around with him and sleep with it. But when it came time to put it on him, he hated it! It only lasted a couple minutes and then it was off. So plan C was to find yet another costume.

Puppies are to play with and not to wear apparently.
Luckily we were given a cute little skeleton costume. He didn't mind it much at all (after we got it all on). I think he liked it better because it wasn't big and bulky like the frog and dog were.

So we ended up with a darling little skeleton.

Blaine's new best friend at church---"A Becky"

Blaine with all of his treats from trunk-or-treat. At first he just wanted to eat every piece as they handed it to him but pretty soon he got it and loved picking a treat from everyone's buckets. We missed having dad at truck-or-treat with us since he didn't get off work until later but it was still fun.

Gardner Village

It has become tradition for us to visit Gardner Village sometime during the month of October with my mom and sister. This year we ended up going on a very busy day but we still had fun nontheless. Little Blaine loved the witches and we loved looking at all of the cute knick-knacks that we could never afford. Someday I will go with a couple hundred dollars to just blow and have fun with....someday.

I couldn't have caught a more precious picture of Grandma with Blaine.
Blaine loves his Aunt Tiffy.

We couldn't get Blaine to look at the camera becuase of all of the cars and trucks going by. He is such a boy!

Playing and Playing

Daddy Blaine would spend quite a bit of time playing outside with Little Blaine every chance he could. The last couple of times that they enjoyed warm weather they both really loved blowing bubbles and popping them.
First time Blaine wore his new coat from grandma. He looked so big I couldn't believe it!

In October we got to go to lunch with my friend Mandi and her little boy Kale. We had a good time and then Mandi had to spoil Blaine and let him ride the rides at the mall (something that I will never do). He loved it and kicked and screamed when it was time to go.

Blaine in the train and Kale in the space ship.

Blaine loved the bus the best!

"A Punkin" Boy

So here I am in January trying to catch up my blog once again. This time I have a pretty good excuse being that my computer has been on the fritz since mid November and we still haven't really figured it out. But hopefully it will cooperate with me as I try to catch up before our new little angel joins our family any day now.

October 2011

Telling you that Blaine loved his "punkins" would be an understatement! He couldn't wait for us to let him go outside everyday so that he could see them, stand on them, sit on them, and admire them. We were pretty proud of them as well since all four of them were grown in our very first garden.

Mr. Dress-Up

Over Conference weekend Blaine got into one of my drawers and found some of my clothes and wanted to wear them. So I put them on him and he thought it was super funny to run around the house in mama's shirts.
He was twirling and twirling hence the blurry picture.

Ready to get it off and for mom to stop taking pictures.

This one was my favorite because it looked like a little dress on him. And yes, by the smile on Dad's face he did approve of this dress-up playtime. Super funny.

Home Grown

Our garden produced a ton of produce for us this year and it was super fun. I wish i would have taken more pictures of some of the stuff but here are our four pumpkins.

We ended up getting three of them from one of the plants and the other one from a different plant. It's kind of funny that they all turned out to be relatively the same size.
One of our tomato plants was called a Jetsetter and it produced some huge tomatoes the size of Blaine's fist.

Hogle Zoo

We have wanted to take Little Blaine to the zoo all summer long but I wanted to wait until the days were cooler so we didn't have to die in the heat and could enjoy ourselves much better. It worker out well that Blaine had to work up there one Saturday morning so we met him up there in the afternoon. It was a cloudy day which was awesome and the animals were more active than I have ever seen them so that was super fun as well.

Here little Blaine is playing at the little playground before we headed home.
He loved the tunnel and the slide below. Too bad I didn't catch him at the bottom and he ended up face planting it right into the bark. Ouch. Oops.

Blaine and Little Blaine with the "elepents".

He is at the perfect age for the zoo because he knows what a lot of the animals are and he could see what we were pointing at. It was really fun.

Playing peek-a-boo around the elephant sign with daddy.

The alligator was so big.

The tigers were super active. Running from side to side in their cage. Swimming in the water. It was so fun to see them do something besides sleep.

Daddy and Blaine looking at the first tiger.

Taking a break for a little pear snack.

The monkeys were all over the place. It was crazy to see them eating and playing like they were.

Right as we got to the giraffe house they were opening up their garages for lunch time so we got to watch them walk in to their food and start eating away.

There were three of them eating at that time.

Blaine acted like he really wanted to ride this merry-go-round but after our experience at the carnival we decided that watching from the sides was enough action for him =)

We did let him ride the train though. He could hardly wait in line for it he was so excited.

Teasing Daddy while waiting for the train. I couldn't have caught this picture at a better time.

Daddy and Blaine on the train. He could have rode that train all day long if we would have let him. He loves trains because of the Dinosaur Train cartoon on PBS that we watch every morning.

It was such a fun visit at the zoo. I highly recommend going to the zoo in late September on a cloudy day around 2:00. The weather is perfect and that's feeding time for all of the animals.