He's 1!

Our baby Carter is no longer a baby...yesterday he turned 1 year old!! Now he's a toddling toddler...I can hardly believe it! We've spent a lot of time reminiscing about the last year and how fast it's gone. It's crazy to think that our boy is getting so old. To celebrate we had a couple of Carter's little friends and their parents over (our apartment can't handle much more than that). It was pretty simple...snacks, cake, and presents. Carter had a really good time, though, and made out with a ton of loot! He loves all his new presents and is like a whole new child now. He was really getting tired of all his old toys, so now he's happy as could be! Here's some pictures and videos of the big day:

Carter decided to initiate walking all on his own (on his birthday!) without us even looking...naturally we were pretty excited when we noticed what he was doing and had to grab the camera ;)

This is the cake I made Carter for his birthday (with some help cutting and icing from Tyler). I was pretty darn proud of it since I have no sense of creativity whatsoever! I hope you can tell it's supposed to be a train cake.

Excited birthday boy!

Mommy with the birthday boy

Daddy with the birthday boy

Singing happy birthday and presenting the cake (he had no idea what was going on)

(Unfortunately the video of Carter eating his cake is too big to upload to blogger. Basically he stuck his finger in the icing and licked it a couple times, then got distracted smearing the icing on the balloons I'd tied to his high chair. I fed him a bit of the cake part with a fork and he seemed to like it but wanted me to feed him another bite. After that he was done. It was rather uneventful. I think he would've gone to town on it a little more if he hadn't just had dinner and some grapes.)

Opening presents!

After the first few presents Carter was really annoyed that we had to open more. He just wanted to play with the ones he'd already gotten!

Here are a couple other videos and pictures from the week or 2 before Carter's birthday:

I don't know who started this (I'm pretty sure Tyler) but Carter realized that when he did it he got a whole lot of attention, so now it's his new trick. We think it's pretty funny.

A few months ago I heard this strange sound on Carter's monitor when he was trying to go to sleep. I couldn't figure out for sure what it was, but had my suspicions that he was playing with the diaper genie next to his crib. Sure enough, I was finally able to get it on tape and see him do it in person.