Goodbye Wolf-Boy

I resisted and resisted because I wanted to have a little long-haired punk for a little longer, but it was time. 

It didn't go so well:

I have to hand it to Tiffany and the whole gang at TNT hair salon in good old Cape St. Claire - they were troopers.  Carter pretty much screamed the whole time - iPhones, purple hair spray bottles and orange gel didn't distract AT ALL.  They were great and handled the whole ordeal with aplomb.  AND it was only $16.  They should've charged more.

 

But he got a lollypop afterwards and that made it all better:

Any of you still reading that aren't Carter-obsessed can probably move along the interwebz now and continue on your surf-journey.   The rest of these pictures aren't any better than the previous ones, but I thought Carter was SUPER cute with his Dum-Dum (gum-gum?) that I had to post several more in the series.

OK, thanks for indulging me.  You can click on those pictures to embiggen in case you want to make a t-shirt out of them or anything (just saying).

Some Christmas Videos

Even though he walks almost everywhere, sometimes the urge to crawl still strikes him...

 

Everyone seems to want video of walking and for some reason, we didn't get any good ones.
Here's a montage of bad ones -- hopefully the special effects will make up for the poor video quality...



 Finally, here's some playtime...

Christmas in Cinci

We went to Cincinnati for a winter holiday and Christmas with family - Aunt Lynn's house with the Ochs', Thomas' and even Marnie made an appearance!

We did some walking (not as much as we should have!) and Carter played in the street for the first time (not the last - we do live in suburbia)

We hung out with family and had some laughs...

Carter spent a bunch of QT with Marnie...

And Poppy...

And the ladies...

He couldn't get enough of his pretty cousins!

Hanging out with Uncle Jason...

who taught Carter some things about blocks.

And jammies ing with Aunt Lynn on the piano.

Everybody seemed to have a great time with minimal fussing, although Christmas morning was a little overwhelming for the little guy.  He did fine, but just needed a little quiet time in the next room from present-opening activities.  Totally understandable.  

But then goodbyes needed to be said...

Marnie didn't want to leave to go back to Illinois.

Then Poppy left, and then:

Crash-o bang-o.

We got to spend an extra day with just Aunt Lynn, Jack (who's now on record as Carter's best friend besides Linda), Katie, Liz, and Grammy TT (does anybody have a picture of C and TT together!!??!?).

Then we got in the car...

For a long trip home...

(I wish I could say that this picture is representative of the car trip, but I'm afraid that's not the case...)

We will be posting a couple of videos soon - just didn't want to make this picture-heavy post any heavier...

And Now for Something Completely Random

Going through pictures from the last year or so, I found a bunch of cute pics that didn't (I don't think) make it to the blog.  So if you're one of the folks that needs a little shot of Carter-ness today (I know I do), here's a whole whack of randomness:

Apologies for the lack of theme, mood, or inspiration.  It's crazy pie around here these days.  We've all had various colds now for going on 2 months, so we're run down and sleepy all the time.

In Carter news: he is walking (as you already knew) a bit.  He gets a little timid after taking a few steps and if things aren't exactly as he likes, he'll crawl after about 4 steps.  He's starting to do it more and more on his own, though.  I think he says "agua" - hard to tell, but he will make sounds like that reaching for his water, so I'm hoping he's actually picking up some Spanish from his daycare provider.  He will periodically say "Da, da, dad-dee" and he might actually mean it, again, we're not quite sure.  And one day when no one was around, he said "Ma-ma!" looking at me with a big old smile.  :)  I haven't gotten him to do it since then, and no one else can confirm it, so I guess it doesn't count yet, but I'm sticking with my story, dang it.