Halloween 2012

This was my favorite Halloween yet. It's so fun to enjoy these holidays that are new for Asher, especially as he is getting older and having fun too. He was a super cute, furry little monster. It was adorable. He was by far the cutest monster I have ever seen.

Trick or treating was even more fun than I expected. When we first walked outside, he was a little disappointed when he realized we weren't going to the playground, but luckily he got over it pretty quickly once we got started. He was understandably a little confused and afraid the first couple of houses. He would wait patiently at the door with his cute little bucket until someone opened and tried to hand him candy, then he was hiding behind our legs or bolting it back down the driveway. It was too funny.

After a few houses, he got the hang of it. Actually, he didn't want to leave any of the houses after he got his candy. He was too cute. He especially loved the houses that had dogs, he would get so excited and starting barking. We were out for about half an hour or so. At our 2nd to last house he got a Tootsie Pop, and it was all over from there. He dropped his bucket of candy and tried to eat the sucker through the wrapper. We finally pried the sucker out of his hands and tried one more house, where they gave him the exact same thing. There was no way we were going to get his mind off of a second sucker so we headed home. His favorite part of the night was probably when we got back home and got to eat his sucker.

Overall, we had a great Halloween. Asher was super cute and I think he had a lot of fun. We love our little monster!

I guess he was hungry...

I was just looking through some photos and found these from August and knew I needed to post these. I am not very good at blogging the everyday things.

I had been in the other room getting ready for the day while Asher was playing in our front room. I came out to find him in a pile of cereal. He was eating it as fast as he could and shoving handfuls in his mouth. Silly kid. Good thing he's so cute. We did find a new home for the cereal after this, though :)

15 months

Our Asher boy is already 15 months! He just went in for his well check and sure has grown since his 12 month check up. Here are the 15 month stats:

Height: 32.67 inches- 90th percentile
Weight: 24.36 lbs- 48th percentile
Head: 18.3 inches- 31st percentile

He shot up from the 59th percentile to the 90th in 3 months! He has always been a tall boy but I couldn't believe the difference. They even had to measure him twice just to make sure it was accurate! I guess I should have expected it, though. He can reach just about anything he wants now, including the top of the kitchen counters. One of his favorites is to reach into the silverware drawer and pull out a handful of spoons so he can "stir" in the mixing bowls.

He is just getting more and more fun as he gets older. This age has been the best so far. He is sure energetic and keeps us busy, though. He never holds still and is always on the go. He loves to dance, be chased and jump on everything. Each morning when we go in his room he is jumping up and down super high in his crib. He actually doesn't even want to get out most mornings. He just wants us to stand there and watch him jump around, silly boy!

He is learning so much and catching onto everything right now. He is a little parrot and also says a bunch of words on his own. He says about 10-12 words consistently (and mostly in the correct context) plus copies us all the time. Some of his words include mama, dada, kitty (which basically means every furry animal), binky, snack, up, all gone, thank you, no, book, duck and uh-oh. He understands the names for most objects and will go get his shoes or any toys when we ask him to.

He loves to play outside, especially the playground and going down the slide. He loves to walk around and look for the "kitties". Every time we see one of the neighbors cats he gets super excited and runs over to see it. He loves to flip through the pages of his books. He LOVES his milk, a little too much, maybe. He loves toothbrushes, unfortunately. Luckily we catch him before he tries to chew on ours :) He also loves to play/watch other kids now. It's fun to see him try to interact with them and share his toys.

He also loves keys and can't stand to not be holding them whenever he sees them. We were out for a walk the other day and he was holding the keys when all of a sudden he threw them in a storm drain. It had all of my keys, which meant we were locked out of the house and Tim was at work. My sister came to help me look for them. With the help of a police officer and my neighbors we were able to fish them out. It was quite the afternoon!

Our Asher is one crazy, busy, little boy and we love it that way. Not to mention, he's pretty adorable :)

Party #3

Lucky Asher had 3 birthday celebrations. The final celebration was about a week after his birthday with my Dad, Leslie, Mathis, Keaton and Ryan. They came to our house for dinner and cake.

After dinner Asher opened his presents from my Dad and Leslie. He did such a good job unwrapping them, must be from all the practice he's had lately :) 

Asher with his presents. He got the one on the left twice :) He also got a cute outfit with new shoes.


After presents we had some delicious cake that Leslie made. She makes super awesome cakes that look amazing. She pretty much put the cake I made for Asher to shame! It was adorable, and yummy!

Asher's cute dragon cake

 

We tried to get a photo of him with the cake but he just wanted to pull off the dragon's spikes and eat them :)

We had a super fun night celebrating! We are so grateful that Asher has so many people who love him and want to celebrate with him!

Party Time!

 Asher was a lucky boy and pretty much had 3 birthday parties. On his actual birthday we decided to celebrate with just our little family. It was fun to spend the day with just the 3 of us and I think that's a tradition that we'll probably keep every year.

The Saturday after his birthday we had a little party at my Mom's house. It's so hard living in a little condo when things like this come up. We just don't have the room to have everyone over at our house. Maybe next year :) Luckily, we have family that is willing to help us out whenever we need it and my mom and Rudy were more than willing to let us have the party there. The guests were my mom and Rudy, Ashley and her kids, Tim's mom and dad, Amy, Ryan and their little family, Tim's brother Jonathan and Tim's grandpa.

The invites

The cake- It's supposed to look like water with graham crackers crumbs as the sand :)

The cupcakes

I decided to have a pirate theme thanks to some cute invites I found on Pinterest. It just so happens that Asher's swim trunks are the same color with a skull and cross bones, I think it was meant to be :)

We kept it pretty simple with a BBQ, a pool set up for the kids, and of course, a cake smash for Asher. For some reason Asher was so not into the pool that day so he was in there for maybe 3 minutes. Long enough for me to snap a couple of photos and he was done. We had a big pool for the older kids and little baby pool for Asher and Addy.

After everyone had eaten we let Asher open his presents. He actually did really well opening his gifts and was excited to play with his new toys. He ended up with new clothes, a wagon, books, some bath toys, a tonka truck and this cute wooden activity cube.

My favorite part was the cake smash. Asher was hilarious. At first he wanted nothing to do with is. I was worried he wasn't going to eat any. Turns out all he needed was a spoon!

 A quick family photo before the cake

Singing Happy Birthday. Dylan got a little excited and blew out the candle for Asher before the song was over. Asher didn't seem to mind ;)

 Not too excited about the cake...

 Once he has a spoon he decides it's not so bad...

The he decides the spoon is just slowing him down!

He went at it like that for a while, too funny!

Digging in!

After the cake we thought we'd be super great parents and let him have an ice cream cone too. Hey, it's only your first birthday once, right :) He thoroughly enjoyed it, although you might not be able to tell from the picture.

Asher had a great party! We were very happy we could celebrate with our families! Party number 3 was the next week but that will have to be yet another post!

Asher's Birthday

We had so much fun celebrating Asher's birthday. Tim took the day off so we could have a fun family day together. We decided to go to the splash pad. Asher loves to be outside and it was so hot we figured that would be the perfect thing. So right after Asher woke up from his nap we had some lunch and  headed to Highland to the splash pad. We had a great time. It was the first time Tim had been able to go with us and Asher had way more fun with him there.

After the splash pad we came home, had dinner and let Asher open his presents. I was so excited to give him his presents. He was so cute and opened them himself even. Tim just gave him a little help getting the paper started and he did the rest on his own. He loved his gifts, I was so glad. We gave him a drum filled with a bunch of musical instruments, blocks and some cars. 

I wasn't originally planning on making a cake for his actual birthday since he would be having a whole cake to himself in a couple of days. That morning we decided that we would make one though, it just wouldn't feel like a birthday without birthday cake. I made one while Asher was napping, nothing fancy but he didn't seem to mind :) It took him a minute to decide he actually wanted to try it but once he had a bite he loved it. Well, the frosting at least. He pretty much just ate all of the frosting off and then threw the rest on the ground. Now we know he's Tim's child, the frosting is all he cares about too, ha ha.  Unfortunately, the camera died right as he was about to dig in. So we only have phone pictures of him eating it.

Overall, I think Asher had a great first birthday, even though he doesn't know what a birthday is :) A couple of days later we had a family party at my mom's house. That will have to be another post though.

Twelve

12 month stats-
Weight: 22lbs 8oz -46th percentile
Height: 30 inches- 59th percentile
Head: 17.9 inches- 25th percentile

My baby turned one today. Where did the last year go? I swear we were just at the hospital, in awe of our perfect new baby. This year has flown by so quickly, I hope they don't all go this fast. I want Asher to stay little for a while longer :) He is at such a fun age right now. We can't get enough of him. We are always still in awe of how much we love him and how perfect he is to us. Don't get me wrong, he can be quite the handful, but we love him even more for it. 

He keeps us laughing all day long. He is super playful, and oh so very curious. He is into EVERYTHING. And when I say everything, I mean everything. I'm pretty sure his perfect day would involve pulling everything out of every kitchen drawer/cupboard he can access (which he does on a daily basis) then pulling all of the clothes out of his dresser, emptying the diaper bag, and of course, the bathroom cupboards, unrolling the toilet paper and paper towel rolls, and all the while he'd be eating graham crackers. Lol, I wish I could say I'm exaggerating, but he does a number of these things each day within a matter of minutes. Perhaps we just need to be better at baby proofing :) He is one busy boy.

He is walking all over the place these days. It's probably 50/50 between walking and crawling. He's so cute when he stands right up and starts walking around. He gets so excited for himself each time he does it, too. He dances to the music his toys play and loves when we dance along with him. He repeats things we say a lot, especially things like "yay", "uh oh" and "uh uh uh". He'll hold our phones and his toy phone to his ear and he tries to brush his hair. He will "sing along" when we sing to him. He loves to throw things on the floor over and over again, and thinks it's hilarious if we ever drop things. Some of his favorite things are playing outside, looking at books and Tim chasing him around.

Apparently being a great eater was only temporary. He is back to being a bit of a picky eater, especially when he's grumpy. He'll often love something one day and then refuse it the next. However, he is down to 2 bottles a day and almost off of formula completely, thank heavens. He is really liking milk but I'm worried it may be a little hard on his tummy so we're trying to take it slow. He has 5 teeth and likes to eat like a big boy. Sometimes he'll refuse food when I break it up for him but he'll eat it if he can hold it himself and take bites. A little while ago my mom bought him some of these squeezable pouches that have apple sauce and other pureed fruits and veggies and he LOVES them. He grins every time I pull one out and always wants more.

He is doing pretty well with new people these days unless it's a big group of people, then he gets overwhelmed easily. He's a little reserved when others are around and needs a few minutes to warm up when he go new places. Funny how he's already like Tim and I in that way.

As much as I wish Asher could stay little forever, we love to watch him grow. It's the best feeling when we see him learn something new, or when he's so proud of himself for accomplishing something. We love you so much Asher boy and can't wait to see what the next year brings!

Love that cute smile!

"Talking" on the phone :)