Our sweet angel, Carter Scott!

It's hard to believe it's already been a year since our second child was born.  We are so thankful for our special little boy and we have some precious, sweet memories that we wouldn't trade for the world!  

I remember how soft his skin was, softer than any baby I've ever felt before!  He had the most beautiful reddish-blonde curls that of course made me so excited!  He loved to snuggle, especially with momma!  We did a lot of kangaroo snuggling, or skin to skin, to try to help maintain his body temperature, and of course I just ate up every single second of that!!!!  He seemed to enjoy it too!

He was so tiny and cute!  He made the sweetest little noises and we just cherished every single one of them.  He loved to eat and would fall asleep soundly after his meals.  Despite his cleft, he really liked his paci, especially if we put a little sugar water on it!

Evan didn't get to spend a ton of time with us at the hospital.  Needless to say, a young 2 year old doesn't really have a great attention span for being couped up in a small room with lots of people, cords and buttons he wasn't allowed to touch, and no toys...  But he did give Carter some good kisses and also gave him a special monkey that we made at Build a Bear (that I still sleep with most nights.)

It's hard to explain, but most of the time when we think about Carter we aren't sad.  We were just so in love, and so happy and blessed during those two days we had with him.  When I think of him I feel the peace and joy that I had during those two days.  We weren't sad while he was here and being sad isn't going to bring him back.  And he really was a very peaceful baby. The biggest blessing of all was that he didn't suffer.  He wasn't in pain or discomfort and seemed very content the whole time (except when he got hungry, which is normal for any newborn!)

We just try to thank God that he brought this little gift into our life.  I would do ANYTHING to have him here with us, but that just wasn't the way it was meant to be and we don't have a choice but to accept that and continue to live our life to the fullest.  We might not ever know why God chose us to go through the experience of losing a child.  But we can choose to either be sad over his loss which won't change anything or we can just be happy that our experience was so beautiful and special!

And thank you to all of our friends and family who made Carter's birth special and who thought about him and us on his birthday!  We appreciate it more than you could know. 

Some fun facts about Evan:

Evan is 3 years and 3 months old.  He's growing like a weed and getting smarter every single day.  He is just the most amazing thing and brings so much joy and happiness to our family!  

His favorite fruits are strawberries, mandarin oranges and apples!  As you can see here he must be eating a genetically enhanced strawberry, it is almost the size of an apple!  His favorite foods are mac and cheese and pancakes.  He's also a fan of the ham sandwich, thank goodness!  He tolerates vegetables so we can get a little bit of those in him from time to time which is good.  He's not a picky eater, but not very adventurous either...  Oh, and he's a chocolate and cookie addict just like his dad...

He can run really fast and is losing most of his baby fat (except still has a little chub on his face to go with that super cute dimple!)

He has 7 freckles on his body. Sorry Evan, you have freckly genetics...  2 on his right knee and 3 on his right shin and ankle area.  1 on his left shoulder and 1 on the inside of his right pinky finger!  What odd little places for freckles but they are oh so cute and sweet :)  

He is very coordinated for a 3 year old with sporty things like dribbling and kicking a soccer ball and hitting a baseball.  Also he's getting really good riding his bike.  He also loves to run and race but he's very competitive.  We have a little game of "racing" down the hall to his bedroom at night and he gets soooo mad if he doesn't win.  We are still working on the good sportsmanship thing...  He's very high energy and full of spunk!  He definitely keeps us on our toes, that's for sure.  

He says some of the cutest, funniest things and has also become very affectionate in between his bouts of rough-housing!  We just melt when he tells us he loves us and gives us those huge kisses and bear hugs!  

He loves to sing!  I am amazed at how many songs he knows.  And he learns so many new ones from school and will come home singing new songs all the time.  He also likes to make up songs about anything and everything under the sun.  It's pretty darn cute.  I hope to catch one of his made up ones on video one of these days!  

Maybe this will be easier for me to keep up with?

Well, I actually doubt this will be that much easier for me to keep up with this blog than my mac website, but at least I can post a few pictures here and there as we go about our days.  Plus I had a lot of feedback that our mac website is slow to upload.  If I have a bunch of pictures to post, then I will probably still do it on the mac and post a link here.  And for those of you who love our mac website don't worry, that website isn't going anywhere at least not anytime soon!  Thanks for checking in on us and please leave us comments letting us know you stopped by!  We appreciate it!