Almost 9 months!

King of the Castle

I can't believe my precious little guy is already 8 months old (almost 9 months)! It's true what they say, they really do grow up so fast! I guess I just never realized how fast until I blinked and my baby boy is 8 months old. I will say I have enjoyed watching him grow and learn new skills and discover new things. He's at that fun age now where he's starting to be more mobile and sturdy which makes him fun to wrestle with.

Here's some fun facts about our sweet boy:

This boy is a full time crawler now! It seemed like one day he just decided to crawl and never looked back. He can't sit still for more than a second! Plus he's a fast little crawler!

 He's even faster when food is dangled in front of his face

He is standing all the time and every where he can! Like I said this kid does not like to sit still, he's either crawling and getting into everything or standing on everything. It makes him seem so big now that he's standing. It's so cute seeing the little guy pull his cute chunky body to a standing position.

This cool little toy from grandpa Taylor has been such a fun toy for him. He's spent many a minutes standing at this toy building some muscle in those chunky legs.

This is how I find him after every nap, just standing and talking to himself

he looks so darn cute in this jean jacket! :)

He sure loves to stand!

He has the cutest bum and chunky legs.  :)

He's not going to like that I posted this when he's older  :)

He looks adorable in any hat.

His hair is finally long enough to put in a tiny little mohawk. However his hair is so thin and light in color you can barely see it in these pictures, but it's there. :)

getting his hair done while playing with his pearl necklace, lets just say Dad wasn't a fan of this activity :)

the cutest little Mohawk on the cutest little boy

He's saying mama and crawls to me when he wants me. (sometimes while saying mama which just melts my heart). This is the part of motherhood that I love, having this sweet little boy know I'm his mom who loves him and will take care of him.

He loves to be thrown in the air.

He loves our lap tops or anything electronic and will fight tooth and nail to try and touch, suck on, or chew on them.

He loves to talk! It's really just a lot of grunting sounds but still adorable. What makes it so cute is sometimes he'll tense up his whole body when he talks.

He also recognizes when the camera is turned on him because he'll just start laughing and talking. No matter what he's doing or what mood he's in once I face the camera towards him he goes into cute, talkative camera baby mode. I'm loving it but we'll see how long it lasts. :)

He loves the vacuum! I don't know what it is but he loves to look at the vacuum, to touch the vacuum and he gets really excited when the vacuum is on. I would think, especially when the vacuums turned on, it would scare a baby, not my boy Nixon. Hopefully this love for the vacuum will lead to loving to actually do the vacuuming when he's older.

He loves to chew on everything! I realize he's teething ( he has 4 teeth with 2 on the way!) but I guess I never realized how much babies chew when they teeth. The funny thing is he loves to chew on everything but his teething toys. For example:

This is an empty formula bottle with the scoop left inside so that it will make noise when you shake it. Well Nixon would rather chew on it than shake it.

He loves getting into (and chewing on) any wire that's within his reach

Of all things this kid loves to chew on shoes! which to me is probably one of the grossest things he could chew on.

Anytime he sits in a shopping chart his mouth goes straight to the handle bar! Yuck! This is probably a close second on the grossest things he could chew.

He also loves chomping on his bed post. He does it so often that he's chewed off bits of paper from the warning label.

He'll even chew on your expensive watch

He doesn't really like the feel of grass quite yet, and he's getting the nice Utah grass. Not the hard, coarse Arizona grass that I grew up playing on.

We've introduced him to those baby puff crackers as well as a sippy cup. He was a little uncordinated at first but he's starting to get the hang of it day by day.

He's still trying to learn how to get the juice out. Instead of sucking he just bits the lid till juice comes out

I love his cute little tongue sticking out

Casually eating a puff

And he's enjoying his baby food more and more.

He's starting to enjoy Sesame Street. He only makes it about 5-10 minutes before he loses interest and wants to do something else.

I've said it before, our little angel is NOT a cuddly baby. This kid will not sit still for nothing and no one. Even when he's drinking his bottle he has to be moving and kicking his legs. I have to strap him in his bouncer so he doesn't roll off of it. Or this will happen every time:

I have a feeling this kid is going to keep me on my toes (and in shape) with how much he likes to move around!

He loves to clap his hands. I love how excited he gets when he claps.

He does this thing when he's around unfamiliar people, he tilts his head to the side. It's the funniest thing!
 Sometimes he'll just do it randomly.

This sweet little boy is a big flirt! He'll stare people down and smile at them until they look at him.

I love watching him play in his crib when he wakes up from his naps. He's pretty good about playing in his bed in the morning and letting us sleep an extra 20-30 min before he really starts yelling for us to get him.

Photos from his 7 month photo shoot

He was just learning how to stand so I had to be quick with the picture before he fell over

Photo's from his 8 month old photo shoot. He loves being outside and the weather was quite nice so we decided to use my mother-in-laws front and back yard for the back drop.

look at those chubby cheeks!!

We sure love our cute, sweet, energetic little man.

I hate car accidents

It was a normal rainy Friday (the 13th)  afternoon. I had run my morning errands and was making my way back home to relax when a surprise accident caused the rest of my Friday to be anything but relaxing. 

The story goes: I was getting off the freeway and noticed the cars in front of me had were stopped. I too came to a stop when not even 5 seconds later a car slammed into me from behind causing my car to hit the car in front of me. It took me completely by surprise because I was looking straight in front of me and not looking in my rear view mirror to see the car coming. I'm glad I didn't see the car coming because that would've been a horrible sight to see the car heading straight for us.

After the hit I tried quickly to get out of my seat to get to Nixon who was screaming in the back. That was an awful feeling to have, hearing my baby screaming and hoping that he didn't get hurt in the crash. 

our car is the black one in the middle

I got Nixon out of his car seat and looked him over making sure he was ok, thank goodness he was. Once he was out of the car seat and able to move around he was happy as could be.

After I made sure Nixon was ok I called up Lance to tell him the news. Right when he said hello the shock of it all hit me and I started crying. I have been in 2 small fender bender type accidents in my life so this accident was pretty big (and kind of scary) for me. 

Lance immediately left work and came to our rescue. He took pictures of the accident and talked with the police officer and the girl who hit me, making sure we had all the information we needed. So glad I'm married to this wonderful man.

The girl that hit me claims she was picking up her purse from the floor to put on the passenger seat and when she noticed I was stopped she tried to stop but her car didn't stop fast enough because of how wet and rainy it was. To be honest, Lance and I feel she was probably texting or something when she hit me.

I may be smiling but I wasn't very happy at that moment. The accident had hurt my back pretty bad and I am currently going to a Chiropractor to fix it.

The worst part was there was ice cream in the car

The car that hit me

From the force of the hit and the damage to her car and mine we think she was going anywhere from 30-40 mph possibly faster.

The car that I hit. The only damage was the back bumper fell off. This was the only car that was able to drive away, The other girls and mine had to be towed. 

The car was in pretty bad shape and we were hoping it was totaled. Lance had a friend who got in a wreck with probably more damage then our car and his wasn't considered total. He had it fixed but the car was never the same. We didn't want to deal with car problems for the remanding years we had it. 

Lance was right on top of things with calling the insurance and calling the girls insurance to get us a rental car right away so we didn't have to wait all weekend without a car. We have another car, it's a 1997 Honda Accord with about 197,000 miles and we never know when that car might give out on us. Plus Lance has to go to school and work making it a challenge to have just one car. So we wanted to make sure we had a rental car.

A few days later (on Tuesday) an insurance agent (from the girl that hit me) went to the auto body shop to see what the damage would be.  It just so happened the car was pronounced totaled. That was the good news, the not so good news (more like stressful news) was we would only have the rental car for 3 more days and would need to find a new car by then or rely on our Accord till we found one. 

Lance was diligently looking online trying to find the kind of car we wanted in the price range we wanted. Saturday came and we had to return the rental car or pay for it out of our pocket. Needless to say we were hoping to find our new car that day. Lance's brother Ross and sister-in-law Megan were kind enough to watch Nixon as we set out to find our car. 

We were looking into Toyota Rav4's and Lance found some at a car dealership up in North Salt Lake so we headed up that way. We test drove a few and out of those few we found the one we wanted! Lance could've gone for a different color and a V6 engine but he loves the car we got. :)

We are now proud owners of a 2010 Toyota Rav4 and we love it! We do wish we came to buy the car under different circumstances but I'm just glad Nixon didn't get hurt and it wasn't any worse.

Accidents are no fun and I hope to never get in one again!