Merry Christmas!!

hello everyone! hope your december is going great - ours is and we are all very ready for christmas!! i'm so excited to see lots of relatives, as we start traveling tomorrow to see mimsie and grandpa and then on friday we fly to indiana to see beamee and grampee and SELT and AGG - yahooooooooo!! it's fun to celebrate baby jesus's birthday with family and friends!! and - lucky for me - i got to start celebrating a bit early this year and got to open a present from beamee and grampee last saturday - a new grill of my very own!!

i love playing with it and pretending to be just like daddy as i grill steak, chicken, veggies, and really anything else lying around the house... i will give beamee and grampee a huge thank you hug in person on friday when we see them!!

and here's a leftover picture from when i "opened my grill" - i forget why i was making this face, but i'm sure it was silly...

here's a picture from "ben tv" (which is what momma and daddy watch while i'm sleeping - or trying to be) - momma took it to show how silly i sleep sometimes - see how one leg is crossed over the other?

otherwise, i have to pass along a message from momma, which is that the reason she has not posted many pictures in the last several months is that she has a much harder time catching me without a cheesy, fake smile on my face (like the one of me next to my grill a few pics above, and the one directly below) because i am now very used to the camera and am not nearly as "au naturale" as i used to be... in any case, i told her that we can't let all our faithful blog readers down, and so she decided to whip out the camera yesterday and take pictures for a while and see what came out of it. here is the silliness that ensued...

i will update again after our trips (hopefully with at least a few good pictures!!), and in the meantime, Merry Christmas to everyone!! looking forward to seeing a lot of you very soon!!! :)

lots of visitors!!

hi again! i'm back with some updates and more pictures. first i have to tell a bit about our visit from "aunt" holly several weeks ago. that was such a great weekend and i had a wonderful time hanging out with her! holly is a lot of fun - she can come back to visit anytime (and i hope she does!). the picture above is me trying on her sunglasses - fun! and here we are playing on the floor...

devastatingly, there are no more pictures of her visit (although she did take a few that my mommy needs to get from her!), except for this one below, which is me eating something - i forget what but it's relevant because there was a lot of eating going on that weekend! :)

back in the real world, i'm just getting bigger and more grown up every day. here i am drinking out of the water fountain at church, which i LOVE to do!!

and last month i took my first ride on a carousel!! it was so much fun - i loved it!! the pictures are not very good because we were going so fast, but you can tell that momma and i both had a great time (even though i'm not smiling in the last picture, it's only because the ride was over!)...

around the house, i love to put on clothes all by myself, even if i'm already wearing clothes! i can keep myself occupied with this for a while, trying to put on pants, shirts, or even my swim clothes from the summer!

here is a random picture of me in the carseat, which momma always seems to take because she thinks i'm so cute. we were driving on a long-ish trip, which is why i'm snuggling with my blankie, and of course we love the Big 12 Champion Longhorns, so i'm sporting daddy's hat (backwards, even!)...

i also love to do things just like momma and daddy, and lately i've been playing with empty bottles of daddy's hair gel, after-shave, and cologne. this is one of my most favorite things to do around the house upstairs, and i make sure that all my animal friends have the proper gels and cologne sprayed on them each day, multiple times a day. momma always thinks it's hilarious because i make a little "poof" sound when i'm pretending to spray something/someone and she tried to catch me in action the other day...

this is me right before a "poof!"

we also put up the christmas tree right after thanksgiving and are definitely getting in the holiday mood! i really like the ornaments and lights (pictures to come). then we had some second visitors - beamee and grampee!! it was so great to have them here for a long weekend and i warmed up to them super fast. we'll be heading to their house on Christmas day, which will be a lot of fun, so i'm looking forward to that. one crazy thing that happened while they were here was that we go another type of visitor - SNOW!! yes, it's true - snow in Austin, Texas!! weather forecasters actually predicted a lot more snow than we got, but it was still fun to see the flakes coming down - my first experience with snow!! yahoo! i hope we have a LOT of snow in indiana at Christmas...

sorry i don't have any pictures from beamee and grampee's visit - we were too busy playing (and getting drinks from sonic!). and i guess that about wraps up this blog...

here are some obligatory cute pictures to close out... see you next time!!