Wednesday, January 28, 2009

Helping Daddy


Dad is busy installing baby locks on our cabinet doors. Benjamin was glad to help! I guess he hasn't realized that this will limit his under-cupboard explorations!

Saturday, January 24, 2009

Friday, January 23, 2009

Going to Arizona! (Again)

Ben's great grandmother Caldwell passed away on January 9th, after a prolonged struggle with dementia. Benjamin and I were able to make the trip to Arizona for her funeral. This was a wonderful opportunity to get together with family on my mother's side, many of whom I have not seen for years. Of the 18 grandchildren, 15 were able to be present. It was a wonderful service in which many special things were said of my grandmother. She will be missed!

Unfortunately I did not take the camera, so no pictures of family. But here is a photo we took when we visited my grandparents on the way to Asheville. We are so grateful that we visited then and Benjamin at least got to meet his great grandmother. I haven't posted this picture before because I knew my grandmother would hate having her picture up without looking her best (she didn't really want the pictures taken at all, especially with her in bed!), but I thought that some of my family might appreciate seeing this. Grandma will just have to put up with it!

Christmas in Raleigh

We actually got to have Christmas several times this year. Here are some photos from Grandmama and Granddaddy's:


The pacifier you see in all of these photos is my bright idea for keeping the wrapping paper out of Benjamin's mouth (and therefore minimizing the frustration level). As you can see, by his third time opening presents Ben has got this thing pretty figured out:He's still not sure what to do with the things inside, though!

Monday, January 12, 2009

Christmas in Arizona

As promised, the Christmas pictures! Benjamin figured out pretty quickly that the point of Christmas was tearing paper off packages. He loved to rip and stick it in his mouth. Of course, no interest in what was inside! He just wanted to eat the pretty paper. So our present-opening routine looked like this. Benjamin tears off some paper and starts eating it:

Mama takes the paper away so he has to pull another piece off. This is repeated until the present is unwrapped, at which point he gets to play with the paper until it looks like he will actually ingest it.
When he gets another present we do this again. After some forgotten number of presents, Ben got too tired and frustrated to continue, so we left a few of his presents for later.

He really likes his Hawaiian fish blanket, thanks go to Aunt Ellen, Jamie, and Mom!
Cousin Brandon spent quite a bit of time with us. He was very interested in Ben, so he was always standing around watching what Ben was doing. But Brandon didn't quite know what to do with Ben, so he only ever watched:
Here is Brandon showing off his new machines to his aunt. Brandon loves all kinds of trucks and machines. Guess he gets it from his daddy (and grandpa, and great-grandpa!)Here he is using the loader to put a car in his dump truck:
We really enjoyed our time in Arizona. My entire family was there for Christmas, so Ben loved being the center of attention. He'll have to enjoy it while it lasts, since he'll have a new little cousin soon!

Wednesday, January 7, 2009

Crawling!

Benjamin has finally figured out how to make his arms move in the right direction! And at the end of the video you will notice the inevitable result...

Thursday, January 1, 2009

Happy New Year!

We have been spending our Christmas vacation with family, first in Raleigh and then in Chino Valley. We took a lot of pictures, here are a few to enjoy.

Our budding TrailWalker just returned from a hike:
Benjamin almost learned to crawl while we were in Arizona! Here is a picture of him crawling- but he hasn't repeated the feat yet.
More Christmas pictures to follow...