The Birthday Boy!!

Wow!! I can't believe my little Charlie is already 1 year old!! How crazy is that? It feels like he has always been apart of our family. I haven't become "baby hungry" yet because I can still remember every little detail about my pregnancy/birth/the first six months of Charlie's life when he was Mr Grumpy Pants. But who knows, maybe in a few years I will forget and Charlie will have a sister or brother someday :)

Charlie was loving life this past week -- not only did he get new toys on his birthday but a week later all the fun started over again with Christmas. I bet he's thinking he'll be getting new toys once a week now. . . maybe I'll just hide old toys and bring them out again and shout "Surprise!" and see if he still thinks it's cool :) He really had no idea what was going on when we kept giving him wrapped little boxes but he sure loved playing with his new toys (for about two seconds and then he proceeded to want to play with Mommy's car keys. . . why did I buy him new toys again? :) His favorite Christmas toy from us were the 88 cent alphabet magnets I got him -- go figure. But he sure got a lot of cute clothes and fun toys from his Grandparents and cousins.

And now for the pictures!

I ended up being lazy about the whole cake thing so I made a Mickey Mouse shaped cake out of cupcakes instead. It turned out pretty ugly but what are you going to do?



















"Do you seriously want me to eat this??" (ya, he was pretty tired when we tried to get him to eat his cake so he wasn't amused :)













His new Lightning McQueen car walker! From his Peterson grandparents -- he doesn't walk with it yet but he loves all the fun buttons and crazy noises



















Sorting through Grandma and Grandpa Hodges' gifts













"Are all these presents for me grandma?"













The whole family (with the addition of Charlie's new cellphone toy)

Better late than never. . .

So I've been waiting to get the Halloween pictures of Charlie before my next post and it took longer than anticipated so I didn't blog for many, many moons. But here is my sweet penguin Charlie with Agent Mulder and Agent Scully (if you haven't seen the X-files then just think of us as FBI agents who chase extra terrestrial penguins :)

Oh, and just to make this post a little bit longer I have a story. So a couple of days ago I'm letting Oscar inside after being outside for a long time and I notice he has something in his mouth and he brings it in and drops it on the floor right beside the door. So I bend down to pick it up because sometimes Oscar will bring in sticks from outside and I look. . .and it's a DEAD MOUSE!!!!! I screamed so loud that both Charlie and Oscar just looked up at me in surprise and I immediately said "Oscar get it! Oscar get it!!! Come on get it!!!" because I wasn't about to touch it. So he picks it back up and I open the door for him to go back outside but he was planning on taking it into his cage!!!! So I scream "NOOO Oscar outside!!!" and he gets scared and drops it back on the floor and refuses to touch it again (even though I'm frantically running circles around the mouse saying "Oscar get it! Get it Oscar!" because though live mice don't bother me in the least dead one's look so diseased I can't go near them even with gloves on!) So finally I just give up, get a dust pan and somehow manage to get the mouse on it without touching it and I go outside to fling it behind our fence into the horse pasture but of course I miss and it goes "plop" straight into my flowerbed. . .where it remains to this day. It was so gross!! But I guess it's good I have a dog who kills mice but does he have to bring his work home with him????

When there is nothing to blog about. . .

Just put up a sweet picture of Charlie! I mean, look at that cute smile? What's not to love? Though he is being a bit of a pill lately -- what with having four teeth coming in at the same time. Poor little boy. He's started waking up in the middle of the night again (though he does go back to sleep if he gets a little drink, he must need more food to grow those little teeth because he will suck down a bottle in no time flat and go right back to sleep) but I do hope he goes back to sleeping through the night because it takes me at least an hour and half to fall back asleep when woken up.

In other news, we are renting our house instead of selling it now. Just until the market is done collapsing and gets a little bit better so people won't be afraid of buying houses. We found some great renters who are actually related to the people that are renting next door to us and they are siked to be living by them so I bet they'll stay for a while. It's just a young couple without kids yet so I guess we won't have to worry about too much destruction happening to the house. So we could possibly be moving into our dream house in the next two to three weeks. We are so excited!!!! To see pictures of the cute home (the outside isn't too exciting but the inside makes up for it :) see this link http://www.ksl.com/index.php?nid=475&ad=4269982&cat=279&lpid= (if the link doesn't work I apologize).

Well that's what's new! Ta ta!

Oh and one more cute picture of Charlie in his new Halloween outfit!! (40% off at Old Navy! Woot!)

Disappointments and Craziness

Well I might as well get the disappointing news out of the way so I can cheer us all up with the craziness afterward. Our house is no longer under contract. While the house inspectors were inspecting the house they found mold behind our bathroom shower (where the pipes are) and it scared our little first time home buyers away :( We had no idea it was back there, honestly! We got it taken care of right away but they still aren't interested in buying (I think the closer it got to closing on the deal the more scared they were so they looked for any excuse to back out). And if that wasn't fun enough, right after we got the mold taken care of Jaren noticed there was water leaking in the crawl space and so we called some plumbers and it turns out our main sewer pipe was backed up and also broken. Ya, that was fun news. What's next? The kitchen is going to overflow with mice??? So ya, one thing kept leading to another and now I just wish our house would collapse on itself and we could move away and never come back. I don't think we have a prayer of selling the house now.

But in the fun crazy news, while Jaren was cleaning out the crawl space (people have been leaving stuff down there for the past50 years so it had a lot of interesting things down there) he found a huge tin barrel that said "propellant explosive" on the side . . . and it wasn't empty! So we asked our neighbor who has lived here forever if we should open it and he casually mentioned that one of the former owners used to work for the Browning company, the people that make gun powder so then we thought hmmm... maybe we shouldn't open it after all. So we decided to call the Kaysville Police station to ask them what we should do. And they said, don't touch it!!! We will send some one over right away. Well, they didn't just send someONE they sent a fire truck, an ambulance, a policemen and a bomb squad member. My goodness! It was our own little block party! I was feeding Charlie some lunch at the time and they said just to be safe that we should leave the house. So I took Charlie up to my parents while Jaren stayed to watch the action. Everyone waited out front (including some curious neighbors) while the bomb squad guy walked back to open up the barrel And then the unthinkable happened. . .the entire house exploded!! Just kidding :) It would have been nice to get rid of the "crap house" as I like to call it now but no, we aren't that lucky. Instead the "explosives" were nothing more than well preserved wheat. That's right, wheat. Apparently gun powder barrels can also double for food storage containers. But of course the person who filled it with wheat didn't bother to paint over the label so it wouldn't be mistaken for something dangerous. (but this is pretty old wheat so who knows what could have happened.) So it was a pretty funny experience and we felt really bad for getting so many people involved (they told us we did the right thing by calling just in case it was something bad). But we still felt pretty stupid :) But it made for a very fun and adventurous afternoon, let me tell ya! So now we can say we have had the bomb squad come visit our house -- who wouldn't want to buy it now??

And now for something completely different, cute pictures of my sweet Charlie!

We were playing peek-a-boo and this is the sweet face I found under the blanket :)

Charlie's favorite thing to do after a bath is to be wrapped up in a towel with a duckie in his mouth -- works for me!



















"You talkin' to me?"

Ouch! Annie Bit me!! And it really hurt!

Poor little Charlie. You would think pulling on Annie's tail, chasing her around the house and trying to take her toys would make Annie want to bite Charlie . . . but no, it wasn't until he was minding his own business crawling towards his mom that Annie pounced on him. It was so unexpected and the first time I've seen Charlie bleed (it was only a tiny bit of blood but it is so shocking to see blood coming out of your little guy that any amount is traumatic!) she didn't bite him hard (luckily) but it was so strange that she did it when she's been so good around him so far. So after calming my mom down about not getting Annie taken straight away to the vet to be shot we decided to never let Annie get closer than an Oscar dog away from Charlie when we're over there. But Charlie is a little trooper and still chases after Annie -- I guess it wasn't too scary for him :)

In other more fun events, Jaren and I have finally started using our fire pit! What's that you say? You didn't know we had a fire pit? Well, you need to come over more often :) Actually, what happened was we used to have an above ground pool (a really ugly one) and when we started trying to sell our house people thought it looked like an eye sore in our backyard so we decided to take it down. Unfortunately we had put a ton sand underneath it so when we removed the pool we were left with a huge ring of sand with no grass underneath and we thought -- man, we don't want to re-sod this whole area (it was a 12' wide pool people!) so we decided to make it look like we intentionally put a bunch of sand in our yard by setting up a fire pit in it (well, a ring of bricks that look like a fire pit). We even put two camp chairs by it just to make it look convincing. And there it sat for three months without so much as a twig burned in it. Well last week we had a big storm and all these huge branches fell out of our tree and we got this idea -- instead of hauling them away let's have a few campfires in our fire pit and get rid of the wood that way! Well, we have had a fire every night for the past week and we absolutely LOVE it! It is so fun to go out and relax by a fire every night after a long day. So now we are actually going to miss something about this house when we move. Fire pits rock!















Now that's a fire pit!

My sister is the coolest!

Just in case anyone thought it was my creative genius that made my blog look so dang cute then you would be right! Just kidding!!!!! Of course it wasn't me -- I can't even scrapbook a cute page let alone make a cute blog. It was my lovely sister Emily and I can't thank her enough. I'm almost as cute as she is now (almost). Thanks for making my blog fun instead of boring and thanks for coming to visit. Me and Charlie had so much fun!!! He loves his cousins :) I'm going to get Charlie's passport paperwork going so we can come visit in October.

I'll post some pictures soon! Here's an oldie but a goody when Charlie was one month old (he loves his Oscar dog!)















P.S. Man, isn't my blog the cutest now?? It's so ridiculously good looking I can't even stand it! :)

Only read if you are desperately bored!

I can't believe it's been two weeks since my last post and I STILL have nothing to blog about. Is my life really that dull and uneventful?? How sad! Nothing really hilarious happens to me like Emily's friend Emily. Nothing interesting and exciting is happening at my house like Emily's new fence. I just have nothing to say! Now everyone knows the truth -- I have no life. And it's all my own fault! I just try to get through the day without Charlie crying too much :) (which means we go visit grandma a lot because he likes her toys, her classical baby show and her grass -- oh and of course he LOVES to see his grandma and grandpa if time permits). Jaren has been pretty busy at work lately so it's pretty much just me, Charlie and the dog most of the time. We go on walks together (though I don't bring Oscar because he's a crazy walker so one person usually has to push Charlie while the other holds Oscar's leash), we play outside, we run errands, we clean the house (well, I clean while Charlie crawls around the house looking for me -- how cute is he??) and then we usually end the day in tears (okay, just Oscar and Charlie but sometimes I have to cry with them.)

Okay, my life isn't that bad. I actually enjoy it. While Charlie takes his first nap I get time to exercise and shower. Then during his second nap I get to relax and read a book or scrapbook or buy things on e-bay :) and then during his last nap (yes, he still takes three!) I usually get to chat with Jaren online while he's at work. I should probably try and get more hobbies so I don't seem like a boring person. And maybe if we ever sell this house and move I can find a friend to go visit every once in a while.

Well, I'll stop being long and boring. I can't wait for my sister and her family to come visit! Wahoo!





















"Dude, it's all good!"