ALMOST ONE!!

I've been horrible and keeping a good log of Scott and his tricks and growth. He is still cute, still fun, and still here :) Here is a dump of pictures from the last few months:

I gave him some fruit loops while I was making dinner one night, he started to make noises like he was done so I went to give him more and he had left all the yellow ones and wouldn't eat them. Silly boy

He loves pushing the chairs around the kitchen

Just being cute

He is a great eater! (you wouldn't know it by his size) but he is also a messy eater. This morning, he dumped all of his mandarin oranges all over him and was just letting the waffle hang out on his lip

And he prefers to not waste time while eating by just putting the bowl straight to his face

More messy eating

and more

snack time, doubling up the crackers to get them in faster

This boy loves to help out while I'm in the kitchen. We were organizing one day and I think I spent more time putting things back where Scott had taken them from

And then I turned around to find him on top of the dishwasher

He loves this walker

But usually ends up against something and he doesn't know how to turn yet

He's learning how to get into more things

I found this cute outfit on clearance and yep...

He loves to join me in the drivers seat when we have lunch with Stan in his work parking lot. He loves to play with everything by the wheel and even eat the wheel

He is also starting to climb! I was playing the piano one day and he climbed up on the box next to it. Eek! He tries to climb out of the bathtub on onto the couch

I found him in this position one afternoon. I am not sure how this was comfortable enough to be asleep

Hanging out at the tire shop getting new tires

Gotta get every. last. bite.

I have some funny videos of the kid, but I'll have to post those later. He is so fun and getting more and more curious every day! He has started to share his food. He stands for just a couple seconds by himself, but not when you try to get him to do it because then he just acts scared and won't let go. He loves bath time, eating, playing with Dad, being outside, playing with things he shouldn't, and banging on things. We love our boy!

What a week!

BWell, after hampering home at 40 mph, we set out to determine what was making the car shake on Monday evening. We decided it was probably coming from the back and went to take those wheels off. We found out in the process that one of our back tire studs had been cross threaded when we got our tires changed a few weeks back and we couldn't get it off. We were also missing one of the lug nuts and the stud it was supposed to be on was stripped. Yikes! We were glad to find this out at a time when it wasn't necessary to remove the tire.

We were able to get all the mud out without removing the tire, and it was a heavy thick mud:

this was probably 20 or 30 lbs. Some of it was still wet after two days.

The car drove just fine afterward. Phew!

Well Tuesday morning I called the tire place and they took good care of us, but I didn't go get the stud fixed until Wednesday morning because of time.

Wednesday morning, Stan was on his way to work in the Explorer when it slipped out of gear. We've known the transmission was sketchy for a while and even though he was able to get it home, we didn't want to drive it for fear of having trouble somewhere and not being able to get it home. So the Explorer went out of commission. Wednesday evening we decided it was time to change the brake pads on the Corolla and found two more studs had been cross threaded by the tire company, one on each of the front tires, so Thursday morning I spent another couple hours getting that taken care of and all was well with that car, finally.

Thursday afternoon we took the Explorer to the doctor and it's been there ever since getting all happy again. $$$ :)

So that was our week with the cars. Friday evening, Stan began a fun project. Remember the TNC thing he got for his birthday? Well in order to connect it to the ham radio in our car, he need a cable with a jack on one end...and a particular type of plug on the other (you like my technical language, I obviously know what I am talking about). It would have cost $20+ to buy it and Stan decided he wanted to use his snazzy equipment. So on Wednsday night (this is when we realized we should change our brake pads), we ran to Goodwill to see if they had any old computer cables. The first one didn't, but on our last sweep of the cable section at the second store, we found one! For $2! It was perfect. Stan spliced that cord and an old headphone cord, soldered them together, and tada!

All ready to start the project at his little work station, we LOVE our garage :)

Ready to start connecting!

Checking the connections

Getting ready to heatshrink it all

The individual wires heat "shrunked" and ready for the black heatshrink to be put on

Using the heatshrink gun (thanks Jeff!)

The finished cord!

Scott was so proud of his dad!

All the equipment set up and it works great!

A Muddy Adventure with My Valentine

I don't know that most people would find our experiences this Valentine's day as romantic I did, but I loved every minute. We wanted to investigate a homestead ruin outside of Cuba, NM. Our plan was to drive up there, go down a dirt road a little ways, hike about three miles there, check it out, hike back a little different route but still about three miles, drive home, clean up, pick up the babysitter, and have a romantic date at El Pinto. Sounds like a perfect day right? We thought so too and here's how it went down:

We started off the day right with heart shaped pancakes and buttermilk syrup

When we got to the turn off, it looked like this:

A little muddy right? We thought we could easily navigate around the muddiest parts to the parking spot, we just wanted to get the car away from the highway view. Well, we should have looked a little closer because it really was REALLY muddy:

These are our tracks

And so are these

Stan standing at the fateful spot where our little Corolla could go no farther through the muck.

Lucky for us, Stan is really strong, and we were on a peak of a hill, and the Lord loves us, because we were able to get out! And this is the aftermath:

We got all packed up:

Check out Scott's happy smile

 And headed out:

Stan navigating the way

He has started smiling whenever he sees a camera come out :)

As we were hiking along, we found this fallen over corral, or something. If you look close, you can see the wire that was holding these poles together.

We were definitely the only ones around for a quite a while. Sometimes I feel like we might be somewhere that no one has been for a long time, but whenever I have that thought I look down and inevitably see a beer can :/

We saw lots of interesting rock formations: 

The rocks sticking out at the top are much harder to erode than the ones they are being held in.

This was an interesting bar

Break time!

 We finally reached the site where we knew the cabin/house/homestead was, and we had to search around, but I finally found it from this viewpoint:

As we got closer, we found interesting things:

An enormous nail

"Hanging out at the corral" (I wasn't really leaning on it...it probably would have fallen over

There were LOTS of fallen beams. Would have been amazing to see this place in its heyday.

This beam was barely still hanging up

Evidence of another storage/house/who knows?

This board was big and thick and had nails on the far side. Amazing to think they cut this without a modern saw.

The main house

We could tell there were two main rooms

They had this corner with a lot of brick and mortar between it, but most of it was wood with mortar.

A fallen window

We found their construction quite unique and innovative. They cut a V in the top beam and put a point at the end of the ones standing up. Fit it together like a puzzle and plastered the wall up...but most of the plaster, and the majority of the beams, have fallen :)

Purple glass

Their chimney

More of the walls

Plaster between the wood

A couple lone roof boards

This wall had the best plaster still remaining

 Stan went and wandered around a little:

Looks like another corral/house/something

Their fence. On Google maps you could see the whole fenced off area, pretty crazy it is still there.

This must have been another structure that is totally fallen.

And Scott and I hung out and ate snacks while Dad was walking around

A shoe! I wanted to dig it up, but we didn't...

Having had our curiosity satisfied, we headed back home another way:

More interesting rock structure:

This was an old old old old road...Our car definitely would not have made it :)

There was a ton of snow the whole day. Sometimes we walked through spots that were up to our knees!

And lots of mud too, as you can see by my pants and shoes. Stan caught a picture of me doing a little dance...I don't normally walk like this :)

And we still had smiles by the end of the hike.  Check out the water and mud behind us. We were literally slipping into home plate as we walked back to the car.

Scott was SUCH a good boy the whole day. Totally happy and laughing at random times. Probably because he was thinking how crazy his parents are.

Well...when we got back to the car, we decided to get a little mud off by driving around a little. Some came off, but not tons. We headed on the highway and any time we got over 40 mph, the car started to shake a lot. We tried a pressure washer, a shovel, and kicking it and the mud stayed. So this is what our drive home looked like:

40 mph on a 70 mph road.

 Our hour and a half drive turned into three :( We pulled in to the house at 7:45, hurry and got ready and left Scott with sitter to go enjoy our way late dinner:

We look nice but we might not have smelled super great... :)

It was a wonderful day and we were SO exhausted. We felt very blessed and protected as we drove home. There was a moment when a car was unaware that he was approaching us and I felt prompted to honk at him. He quickly swerved into the other lane and we know that we were being watched after.

It was definitely a Valentine's Day for the books and I have the BEST Valentine :)