As everyone should already know, I'm a HUGE Cowboys fan. Shortly after Carter was born, my parents had a layover in Dallas and bought Carter some Cowboy warm ups for him to grow into. I put the jacket on him yesterday because it was cold and rainy and he looked so cute!
We apologize for the delay in posts, but things have been crazy lately. I've been serving on a jury for the past 3 weeks and I'm hoping it will all be over tomorrow. Thankfully my mom has been able to watch Carter, so he's been having fun with her while I hang out in lovely Compton. Ryan has been extremely busy finishing up his very stressful semester. His last final is on Thursday and we're going to celebrate with a wonderful vacation to Utah to visit his family for Christmas. To top off all the stress and busy schedules, we've all been sick with some stomach bug Carter passed on to us.
Now here are several pictures we've been meaning to post:
We love In-n-Out. And we don't get to eat it very often! Pictures to commemorate the occasion last Saturday night:
Between classes at school, working 30+ hours a week at my job, a Webelos leader calling I barely have time for, just getting a call to be the Ward Financial Clerk (a calling I held for quite some time during my Singles Ward days,) and trying to spend any amount of time with Katie and Carter, I spend tons of time outside school hours working on my senior project.
The senior project is a music video I am co-producing with two of my classmates, one of whom I was partnered with on the drama we shot together in the summer. The band members we're using for the video are all friends of this co-producer, so we've gotten along really well with them and they've been really accommodating of our project's demands. But the schedule has been very taxing physically and mentally.
The project is due in just under two weeks from today after a semester of work on it, and we still have a ways to go. It's nearly completely shot, just one scene to go, but we need to put a lot of time into editing it together still.
So that's what I've been up to. We've shot almost every weekend, and gotten together one or two nights a week to log the tapes, importing footage into the computer, and otherwise working on the logistics of the project. It's kept me pretty crazy, and I thank Katie and Carter for putting up with me when I'm grouchy after coming home at 3 in the morning.
Here are some photos of the last shoot we did at a theater on campus:
I took Carter to see his pediatrician for his 9 month checkup this morning. He weighed in at 18 lbs., 1 oz. and is 2'3.5" tall. He's only in the 15th percentile for weight and the 20th percentile for height, but his pediatrician was very happy with his progress.
My boss invited Ryan and I to an Italian cooking demonstration at his yacht club on Saturday and by some miracle Ryan didn't have any shoots that day and my mom agreed to babysit Carter, so we were able to go together. I think this is probably only the second time we've gone on a date without Carter since he was born. We had such a great time learning about Italian cooking from a well trained chef and we're looking forward to cooking some of the dishes ourselves, but the best part was definitely getting to taste everything. I think we had five or six different dishes and they were all delicious!
We took our camera, but for some reason didn't take any pictures. We know who you really want to see pictures of anyway, so here's a picture we took of Carter after we got back.
Carter had an awesome first Halloween and was the cutest pumpkin ever! Our original costume plan didn't work out, but we're determined to pull it off next year. We went to Trunk or Treat on Halloween at our church and Carter was able to be in a costume parade and go trunk or treating for lots of candy. It's a good thing the weight loss competition ended Friday since we'll have to eat Carter's candy for him!
Come Friday we will reach the end of the first part of the latest weight loss competition with Katie's family. The Couples competition was between me and Katie, Katie's parents, and Katie's sister Karen and her husband Randy. It's been 3 months of staring woefully at foods sure to sabotage weekly weigh-ins, morning (mourning?) exercises, and shrinking waistlines.
We haven't updated the blog during the competition at all, and I'm sorry. We also never did before and after photos. Again, sorry.
Katie started at 144, and is hovering around 133 right now. I started at 184 and am right at 164.
Right now it looks like Katie are on track to win as a couple, and then we'll enter the second phase of the competition: keeping it off for 6 months. If we keep the weight off for 6 months (or lose more!) there's a prize incentive from Katie's parents. This, for me, will be the hardest part, because after the last competition I gained back about 30 of the 40 pounds I'd lost, which shows an embarrassing lack of self-control on my part. I jokingly blame Katie, because early in her pregnancy she couldn't eat, and I would finish all her food for her, but really I should have just kept to the program and restrained myself.
I've been so swamped lately it's not even funny. Most nights I get home from working on projects at school and Katie and Carter are already asleep. That's not a fun lifestyle. So my free time for stuff like blog posts is nil lately. I'm finally squeezing in some time this morning to finally post about the big Battlestar Galactica display we did at BrickCon in Seattle.
Besides lack of time, the other reason I haven't posted about it until now is because I've been trying to figure out how to post about it to this family audience, unlike, say at my BSG-themed Lego blog, Chief's Deck. I know the people seeing that blog are generally BSG and Lego fans, so it's easy to write to them without feeling like I'm a complete nerd.
So please bear with me, and we'll get through this post:
Day 3 was by far the busiest and best day of the whole con. Before the con, Ryan began a group called ChiefLug (he'll explain more in another post) and the members worked together on creating a Battlestar Galactica display. Well, we decided that we would dress up BSG style. Here are some pictures from our awesome day:
