Crawling and Christmas trees

So Alexander has learned to crawl!  Well, not the real up-on-his-hands-and-knees crawling, but he gets around :)  And every day he is getting faster.  This is a video from early last week:

And this is one from the end of last week:

And this video is from yesterday.  He's definitely getting faster and more coordinated.

I would say that this crawling is a good thing, and while it is cute, it hasn't been very helpful these past few days.  Alexander is teething his top front teeth, and he has been clingy for days.  Normally, even with teething, he would be good at playing with toys on his own for at least a few minutes.  Now that he can crawl, though, he is done playing after about 30 seconds and crawls over to me or Morgan crying to be held.  I suppose once the teething is done (for a bit, at least) then crawling will not be so annoying.  We will see.

In other news, it's almost Christmas!  Well you probably knew that, but I just wanted to show you our tree:

It's a real tree, and it smells so good!  The tree is between our couch, as pictured, and a heating vent in the ceiling - so if you are on the couch when the heat kicks in, you get an extra dose of Christmas tree smell.  I love it!  The tree is decorated with all the ornaments that Morgan has gotten over the years, silver sparkly ribbon, and red ornaments and star tree topper from Target.  That store has good stuff that's not too expensive, and it swallows my money :)  We also have a little tree for Alexander, with cheap plastic ornaments (also from Target) that he can play with, I mean eat.  It's to be expected, right?

I guess these are our pre-Christmas trees, since we won't be using them on Christmas itself, but hopefully they won't mind too much.  We will be home and with family, so we will have other trees to see - and protect from Alexander's crawling skills :)

Daddy's boy

Alexander and his dad are good pals.  Alexander loves to cuddle with Daddy when he is sleepy after church.

And watching Daddy play the guitar is pretty much the coolest ever.

Though brushing teeth is pretty awesome lately, too.

Daddy's cell phone is a favorite toy; attempts on its electronic life are made regularly, if Alexander has anything to say about it.  A cell phone is definitely worth lunging for - especially if Daddy is there to keep the lunge from becoming a faceplant :)

The cutest sight to see, though, is Alexander reading with Daddy.  We read a book with Alexander every night before bed, and he just loves books.  Lately he also likes to look at them on his own.

Or a read-a-thon is fun :)

Last night took the cake - while Daddy was reading his bedtime book, Alexander (who until now quietly inspects or hits the pages) decided to help him read.  So cute!

And then this morning Alexander wanted to keep reading to himself.  He learned from the best :)

Halloween!

This year, we were cows.  A (small) herd of cows.  It was awesome :)

Alexander's costume was from the store...but he made it definitely the cutest cow costume ever sold!  I added the blue ribbon and bell, so that people at the party we attended on Saturday could tell that he is a boy.  He has such a cute face that sometimes people think is a girl, haha.

And the costume's tail just made it even more cute and funny :)

Morgan and I decided to be cows too, so some cut-out felt cows spots sewn onto our shirts did the trick.  And I sewed some spots onto one of Alexander's onesies for when the store costume got too hot for him.  Luckily, he was just as cute in that as the original costume. 

The pumpkin I carved became a cow, too.

Along with the cow cuteness, we got to eat chocolate pudding, peanut butter cookie, and Kit Kat parfaits.  Plus candy - can't forget that!  Overall, the year of the Halloween cow was pretty great :)

This is how we eat our food

Alexander is entertaining, and can get very distracted, while he eats.  Sometimes he is completely focused on the spoon and when he is getting his next bite...and sometimes it's all we can do to keep his attention, since everything around the high chair is very exciting and must be looked at now.  Bet you can't guess which category Alexander fell into for this feeding:

Haha, oh the cuteness :)  Later in this feeding he decided to be a bit more food-focused:

And speaking of food...if you have to make a cake or cupcakes in the next few weeks, make it a mummy!

These mini loaf pan mummys (shown in their tasty chocolate coffins :) ) are easy - just put frosting in a bag and make short, mummy-wrapping-ish lines.  Lots of them.  I used a jagged cake decorating tip, but if your mummy lines are more smooth than jagged, I bet people will still eat them.  It's almost Halloween, after all - I'm pretty sure there is some rule that you need to eat extra sugar at this time of year.

Adventures of late

Hello again friends!  In the last month or two we have had lots of adventures:

We went apple-picking!  Fun times, and then we made bottled apple pie filling from them, so tasty times too. 

Alexander wasn't so sure about the blackberry-picking part of the outing.

He does like reading books though!  Um, excuse my finger in the corner of this picture; I obviously will not have a successful photography career :)

Alexander loves his Daddy play time.

As well as matching Daddy - stripes!

And listening to him play the guitar - Alexander gets mesmerized by it!

Eating fists - and anything else that is around - is also a favorite.

For the Labor Day weekend we took a long car ride down to Georgia to see our good friends Nicole and Jeff and their new addition Scott.

And...crashed our car when we were almost there.  Sadness!  Luckily our car just had cosmetic damage (though enough that the insurance company wouldn't fix it) and we were all okay; Alexander didn't even know anything had happened.  A Braves baseball game made us feel better.

And the World of Coca-cola was pretty fun.

Alexander especially liked hanging out there with his new friend Scott :)

That night Alexander decided to steal a taste of a frosted orange shake from The Varsity, a famous Atlanta restaurant. 

Okay well he didn't actually get a taste, but he sure wanted to!  He has an eagle eye for food that we are not sharing with him.  And we usually get a garbled talking-to about that.

All that fun stuff tired him out, though :)

A rental car got us back home, and after our beloved (not) activity of car searching we found a new car - well, new to us.  So everything worked out after all.

Alexander is eating more and more types of foods, and he loves them. Well, most of them - he refuses to eat peas (even though he had those for his first food and ate them fine then...apparently that feed-them-vegetables-first-so-they-will-eat-them advice is not infallible).  Last night he tried chicken and loved it.  He also especially likes any kind of fruit, sweet potatoes, and rice cereal.

Here he is eating strawberries from a mesh feeder.  It was a very serious job.

And on another day, getting strawberry juice all over himself!  And loving it.  Also, check out his two bottom teeth in this picture!  They came in at the end of August.  Pretty much they are the cutest teeth ever, not that we are biased.  And they are on the cutest face ever, so that helps :)

 Being so cute is tiring though :)  Alexander has been rolling around a lot in the past week, all over the rug and all over the bed or playpen, wherever he is sleeping.  It's rather adorable.

Tired of all these pictures?  Good, since this is almost done.

Alexander is obsessed lately with shadows.  They are the coolest thing ever.

 A couple days ago, he noticed the shadow of the spoon on his high chair tray, and he was more interested in the shadow than in eating the food on the spoon.  And that is saying something!