Mr Personality

A week ago on Sunday the space shuttle took off from Cape Canaveral. We were able to see the shuttle from our backyard. It was really cool!! We were able to even see the shuttle separate from the solid rocket boosters.

Sometimes I am confused as to who is the dog around our house.

Here is Austin standing at the coffee table. One of his favorite activities these days is stand at the coffee table, grabbing everything possible, or banging on the table.

Here are a few fun high chair pictures...




Saturday while I was at work, Nathan and Austin went to the barber shop for Austin's first haircut.
Checking out the cool cape!

"Not too sure about this, but hopefully Daddy will protect me if things get hairy."

Here we are, all done. What a handsome boy!!

The only downside to the haircut was the stylist's fragrance. Two whole days later, his hair STILL smells like the lady. And it isn't a pretty fragrance. I've even tried using adult shampoo on his hair to get rid of the smell, but to no avail.

Up and Moving!!

Yes, this post is quite belated, but there is this pesky thing called tax season that has been keeping me rather busy. The latest pictures will be posted soon, along with a video or two.

So tax season has been going well. Balancing work and family has been challenging, but the stress is mostly self-induced. I won't bore you with the details of my crazy schedule other than to say most mornings I feel like a zombie. I am trying to learn as much as possible and make up for my shortened tax season last year. Which brings me to another thought - At this time last year, I was on my second week of "house arrest" and wondering when this baby would come. Life has changed so completely for us in the past year and we love it!! We are so blessed to have such an amazing, happy, healthy little boy.

So here's what the Carr family has been up to the past month.
Somewhere around the middle of February, Austin began to army crawl over to you and try to pull up to a standing position on you. He needed only a little bit of help.

Feb 22 - Nathan leaves for his annual ski trip with work. The same day, Austin sits up by himself. It is a slow process, but he has it mastered by the end of the day! This is a great improvement because it means that he can sit up and lay down at will, and doesn't have to scream when he lays down and can't get back up!

Beginning of March - Tooth number six breaks through. Austin now has three on top and three on the bottom.

March 6 - Austin stands up by himself in the pack n'play at Karie's and stands for several minutes at a time.

March 10 - Austin begins cruising in the pack n' play. For those of you unfamiliar with the term, cruising refers to the action of holding on to something and walking. For example, holding on to the coffee table while walking. He is still very unsteady, but is ready to move!

March 12 - Tooth number seven breaks through. Austin now has the four center teeth on top and three teeth on the bottom. He is also chewing on his fingers like crazy, so I think another tooth is on the way.

As you can see, it has been a busy, busy month! Baby boy is SO much fun right now. He is saying all kinds of baby words - ma, da, ba, doe, la, etc. He finds beating on things to be great fun - anything that makes noise is fair game. I gave him a large plastic serving spoon from the kitchen a week ago and you would have thought I gave him gold! He waves it around and bangs it on stuff. One night he insisted on taking it into the bath, so for the time being it is a bath toy.

Lotsa Pictures!!!

Austin finally has enough hair to play with and so we had a little fun with it!!


Austin and Mommy having fun. If you look closely, you can see his single upper tooth on the left side of his mouth. He looks totally snaggle-toothed!


Whatcha got there mom??


Here is sleepy baby boy early one morning before going to Miss Karie's house. He looked so cute and snuggly warm in his car seat that we had to take a picture. Notice the cute hat on his head - this winter hat is a size 2-5T. Yes, that's generally for TODDLERS. He has a LARGE head!!



A couple of weekends ago, Grandma Short (aka GG to her great grandkids) came to Sarasota with Aunt Sandy to meet Austin for the first time. We had a great visit!


Tiger decided that it would be fun to see what the pack-n-play is like.


My two favorite Gator boys. Austin has finally learned to hold his own bottle.


Here are a couple of my favorites from our attempts at a Christmas picture.
These two definitely look like they will be getting into trouble together soon!!

This picture cracks me up every time I see it.

Thank Heavens for Good Sleepers!!

I recently discovered how much I take for granted the fact that Austin is a GREAT sleeper. Austin typically sleeps about 10 hours a night during the week and anywhere from 10-12 hours a night on the weekends. Straight through. It's wonderful!!
Until he got his first cold. He and I both had a cold two weeks before Christmas. I am not sure if I gave it to him or he gave it to me. At any rate, the poor thing was quite congested at night and began waking up about every two hours. He would then be awake for a half hour to an hour. It was AWFUL! I felt like a walking zombie during the day from feeling miserable myself and then not getting any sleep. (Luckily Nathan stayed well through the whole ordeal and he was a champ taking care of both of us.) We finally called the doctor when Austin's congestion didn't go away during the day and he stopped wanting to eat. Turns out he had a minor ear infection. We got some medicine and within 2 days or so, everyone was feeling better.

At the risk of sounding insensitive, I must give kuddos to my friend Allison, who spent all of Thanksgiving at the hospital with her little boy, Caden, who is 2 weeks younger than Austin. She was sick at the time as well, but their ordeal was much worse than the cold/ear infection we had. So to keep things in perspective, I suppose it can always be worse. But I'm very very glad that everyone in the Carr house is sleeping peacefully again.

Other exciting things in the Carr household include table food, teeth and house projects:
Table food - Austin has started eating some table food. He is turning into quite the little meat eater (wonder where he gets that from?!?) both in table food and baby food. This week he has starting eating like crazy, so I think we are entering another growth spurt.

Teeth - Overnight on the night before New Year's eve, his third tooth broke through. He has about five teeth that he has been working on for awhile, but the first of these finally came in. He is going to be very snaggle-toothed though, because the one that broke through is on the top, to the left of center. This one came in with surprisingly little fanfare (hooray!), so we didn't even realize it was there until Karie called me at work and told me it had come in! I will try to get some pictures of it but Austin is rather protective of it at this point in time.

House projects - Over the holidays, Nathan got a wild hair and pulled the carpet out of our bedroom. We were planning on pulling it out and putting down wood, so its nice to get the project started. Once he pulled the carpet out, he realized that we still needed to paint the walls before putting down the new flooring. So this past weekend he painted. Let me interject to say that I did, in fact, offer to help several times but was rejected. I think he does not believe that I have any painting skills. I am not too terribly upset by this rejection as I was able to take a nap on Sunday while the painting was in progress! We are very excited about this because our bedroom is starting to look more grown up (It was blazing yellow with teal carpet before. Icky. Believe me.) and is now going to look really really nice when the flooring is all done. I will post pictures as soon as it is finished.

That's about all the new news from the Carr house. I know the real reason you read my posts is for the pictures, so I will get some up soon, I promise.
Ta ta for now!