Out of nowhere last night Carter found these cardboard insert things from our new shoes and he started acting so silly! We just wanted to share the laugh. :-)

Carter absolutely LOVES this chair that Mike's aunt gave to us. It is just his size, and he is very proud to sit in his throne. We taught him how to cross his legs and now he is a pro.

What another great and busy weekend. We rested on Friday night, and Saturday we started working. Mike finished patching up the hole in our master bedroom! The hole was caused by the previous owner falling through when he was checking a leak. :-) The leak has been long fixed, but the poorly patched hole remains. To cut down greatly on the dust, Mike got a genius idea of taping off the area with some old plastic sheets. It made a HUGE difference. We still need to texture it to match the rest of the ceiling and that is the hard part so we might need to call in some expertise help.
After we finished the ceiling we went and moved Christina's Uncle Steve Conrad into a new apartment. We've been looking to buy a treadmill with the $300 that Mike's work gives their employees for fitness equipment, and it worked out just right where Steve had one to give us for FREE!!! It was so sweet of him to offer and it was just what we were looking for. Carter totally loves walking on it.

Since we still had $300 to spend and since Sports Authority was giving $100 gift card for every $300 spent through Saturday we went and bought an eliptical that same night! It cost $400 so it was kind of like free as well with the gift card. It took awhile to put together since there were a million parts, but we love it and look forward to getting in shape this year. :-) We'll have to go back to Sports Authority tomorrow to spend our $100 since it has to be spent by Friday, but we're hoping to get some new shoes for each of us. Now all we need is a big screen in our room to make the workout area complete. :-) Eventually we'll move the equipment downstairs, but for now it'll just stay in our room to help motivate us more...at least that's the idea.

We definitely have the smartest boy! We were singing songs with him before bed, and he just started going the actions for "Do As I'm Doing" all on his own! Another favorite song of his is "Once There Was a Snowman". We'll have to get a good video of him doing the actions and share it with you.

We are finally done with painting our ceiling!!! Mike was awesome yesterday and figured out to make the ladder tall enough, with the help of our neighbor's contraption. Then he had to stretch and reach to tape the ceiling, and then use the longest pole to reach up to paint.

Christina could never get a full picture of Mikey and the ladder...it was just too tall!

It looks so awesome! It only took us 4 months to finish the job, now we just need to finish the door frames...maybe by the end of the 2010? ;-)

We've been wanting a bread maker for ever and Christina finally got one for Christmas. We were so excited to use it that the first time we did was the night of Mike's birthday. We thought it would be awesome to wake up to fresh bread in the morning. So we followed the instructions to the T, and even figured out what 7/8ths of a cup equals. Then we set the delay timer and went to bed. When we woke up in the morning we had the wonderful aroma of fresh baked bread, but without having actual edible bread to eat. Here is what our first loaf looked like.
Ha ha! Come to find out Ginger, who was sleeping on the couch in the living room, about had a heart attack at 4 am when the bread maker started kneading the bread. She said that it was SUPER loud and it went on for awhile, probably until it started baking. She almost unplugged it because she was afraid that it would wake everyone else up, but no one else heard a thing, which is a lot to be said since our house is kind of echoey. So after a few good laughs Christina realized that when Mike put the bread pan in the maker he didn't push down on it hard enough to lock it in. Thus, it was a thunderstorm of noise when it tried to mix it only half attached. We tried it again that morning and whallah, a beautiful loaf of bread emerged this time. :-)

We must admit that even though the bread tasted wonderful, it's not exactly what we were expecting. We thought it would bake more like a loaf of bread you can buy, but it's kind of crumbly. We're going to try using bread flour and see if that helps keep it together better...any other suggestions? We tried the pizza dough and it turned out wonderful, so we're excited to keep experimenting and eating.

Here are just some cute pics of our little one and half year old. He loves putting on and taking off hats. He also loves to make practically anything into a gun. (What a boy!) He makes this funny noise and expects you to jump around or fall down. He thinks he's so funny!

The big thing that Carter just started doing today was walking on his tippy toes! Out of now where he started doing it when Christina went to pick him up from Grandma's house so when we got home we captured it on video. Enjoy!

Carter is 18 months old today!! He has grown up so much. We are constantly amazed at all that he can do. He is finally starting to talk a little bit more now, so it's fun to try and get him to repeat things. At the end of this video we get him to say Daddy really good, which is a big deal because until semi-recently he would only say Mom for both of us. We also try to get him to say Ginger because he's said it before, but he was too distracted.

We think that Carter just has a fun personality. He is always doing silly things to get us to laugh. He probably learned most of his funny things from his daddy, but this one is an original Carter that Mike has just embellished a little. ;-)

Within the last year Carter has become very hand eye coordinated. He's been drinking really well out of a cup or water bottle for awhile now. He can also play the drums, draw/scribble on paper, do all sorts of things with tools, and since we have the space Mike has taught him recently how to kick a ball.

Today was also the first day of the last semester of Mike's college life! So to prepare for one more semester of books, reading, projects, and tests he went snowmobiling with his dad, brother Andy, and his friend Alex over the weekend. The weather was a bit cold, but of course totally worth it. Alex did some crazy sledding down the steepest hills. Check it out.

Snowmobiling is such a fun rush! It's awesome speeding across the snow covered land. We can never get sick of it.
So beautiful!

So we've had this project that has been on the to do list for awhile now, and we finally finished it last night! We got some fun letters to spell Carter's name, and since we love color we couldn't just put them up white, we had to use this awesome scrapbook paper to give each letter a little vibrancy. Mike really did all the work on the letters. He cut the paper out perfectly and then glued them on, but we ran into trouble with figuring out how to seal them. With Ginger's help we discovered this stuff called triple thick. It's awesome and much better than modge podge.

We tried to make light markings on the wall so that we knew where to place them, but it was still a little scary putting something permanent on our "newly" finished and painted walls.

Here is the final product! We also hung up a couple of the pictures Kelly had printed and framed for us. Now we just need a toy organizer to complete his room.

What a great weekend! After our fantastic snowmobiling trip, we started our last day with Ginger at the Dinosaur museum at Thanksgiving Point. We had never been before, but it was awesome! Carter told got into it and loved looking at everything. By the end he knew exactly how Dinosaurs sounded.

It was fun to see Sarah's kids and they LOVE to help take are of Carter. Carter sometimes doesn't appreciate their constant pulling and tugging, but it's fun to see them interact with each other.





The first stop before the dinosaurs is actually this science section where kids can do experiments and see how things work. There were two favorites of everybody, and of course one of them was the electric globe. It's so crazy how the light was drawn to your hand. Carter thought it was pretty sweet.

The kids liked exploring and trying all the different experiments, but another favorite was the wind tunnel. There were scraps of paper that you could put in and see if they would be blown out the top of the tube.

It's always fun to have Carter and Jared (Joey) together. Joey absolutely loves Carter and is kind of rough showing it so Carter is a little more timid around him, but at the museum they played pretty well together. They had this basketball thing where you would use these glasses that would throw off your vision so it took awhile to actually make a basket.
The museum had so many complete skeletons of different type of dinosaurs. The favorite was definitely the t-rex and then the giant sea turtle thing below.
By the end Carter was being pretty silly...this video takes a little bit to show his funny new sound, but it's worth waiting for it. :-)

At the beginning of the museum you can actually watch the scientist cleaning off dinosaur bones and see their whole lab. We also thought this display of skulls was pretty impressive. It's crazy to think that such large and diverse animals were on the earth at one time.




After our dinosaur fun we went home for a short while before we headed to Cindy & Colin's for their annual family Christmas party. Again, it was so fun to have Ginger there to celebrate with us. She actually extended her flight a day so that she could be apart of it all. Cindy and Colin did an AMAZING job with all the food and decorations. They had a fun game for all the kids with their gorgeous Christmas tree. They had a list of things for the kids to find throughout the house and on the tree. Carter loved helping Cindy out, who even though she made the list couldn't find the zebra. :-)
We didn't get as many pictures of everyone as we would have liked, but there are about a million pictures of the Habel sisters. Our cousin Darrin, did a photo shoot with his fancy camera.

The funniest thing was that the first half was with the flash, which Jana can not keep her eyes open for the life of her, so there are tons of pictures like the ones below.

There were quite a few extended family that were able to come, which we loved seeing and catching up, but we definitely missed all those who couldn't make it. Life seems too busy and short to do it enough, so the holidays are so nice to be with all your loved ones. Thanks again Cindy & Colin for such a great night!