Butterflies in Bloom!

This weekend, we visited Dow Gardens for the Butterflies in Bloom Exhibit. For those blog followers from a year ago, you might remember that I went there with Caden while on maternity leave about 37 times. He was asleep for about 36 of those visits. :-)

He stayed awake during this trip, and had a lot of fun! Stacie, Brian, Taylor and Bek joined us as well.


High Five! We love butterflies!


Do you see the butterfly in the tree?


Caden trying to touch the butterfly in the feeder.



Caden and Taylor at the birdcage



One landed on Stacie's finger!



Walking on the path!

I'm Walking! I fell and hurt my eye!

Yes, Caden is WALKING! He has been taking a few steps for a while, but he finally strung them together to walk across the room this weekend. Around the same time, he got his first boo-boo. On one of his cross-room trips, he went straight for the fireplace...and you can guess what happened from there.

However, only three days later, and it is nearly gone, so it's not as serious as we (really, I) first thought.








Here is a fun video of Caden falling asleep at night....

New videos!

Here's some videos of Caden's latest adventures!

Caden goes Ice Skating

Caden can't quite walk on his own yet, but that didn't stop us from taking him ice skating for the first time today! Matt carried him around the ice and he loved every minute of it! I was on picture taking duty because I am by no means good enough on skates to skate and carry Caden. We left that to the hockey player. :-)

Our friends Wendy, Dale, Christi, Jacob and Henry joined us as well and we all had a blast! Here are the pictures and videos!

Caden's First Haircut

Yesterday, Caden got his first haircut! (It took dad 2 months to convince mom that it was finally time to cut his hair.)

We took him to Dave's Barber Shop in Midland. It took longer to get Caden out of the car than it did to cut his hair, but it went very well! It happened so fast that Caden didn't have time to be upset - just very surprised and confused - especially when the electric shaver came out. Here are the pictures we got of the event!

Caden Cam - One Year Old

We have lots of videos of Caden's newest tricks! He's one year old now and seems to be learning, talking, and moving more every day. Here's some our latest favorite videos:

Caden eats A LOT. We were trying to teach him to feed himself from a spoon. In this video, he thought that was going too slow and decided to take matters into his own hands:

He LOVES bathtime! Here is Caden waiting for the bath to be ready:

He is getting pretty good at feeding himself:

Here's a video of Caden's favorite trick - popping his lips:

Here's a picture from tonight when Caden fell asleep watching the Pens game.

Birthday Boy!

Caden had a birthday party yesterday! We had all of our friends over to first celebrate Caden's birthday, and then to celebrate New Year's after the kids went to bed! :-)

We had a great time, and did all the typical one year birthday things...we ate fun kid's foods (Chicken Fingers, Fries, applesauce, and Pizza), opened presents from our wonderful friends, and then had cake. Boy, did Caden enjoy his cake! He enjoyed it so much that he needed a bath afterwards.

Alana and Taylor helped Caden open presents:

Here's the whole gang of kiddos!

Yummy blue icing!

We even got a video of the event!

This was after he had all of his cake....too much sugar!


Family picture after Caden's bathtime...

Group picture at midnight!

Birthday Memories

We have been remembering the days of Caden's birth all week. I realized that I never posted the videos from Caden's birthday last year. The nurses took our camera to get pictures of Caden when he was just born. What we realized later was that the camera was on the video setting, not the picture setting. This turned out to be one of the greatest things about that day, because now we have short videos of Caden's first moments in the world. Enjoy some of our favorites...

I love this first video...Matt's face says it all, this was when they first gave him to us...

This video of when he was first weighed, you can see the 8 lbs, 4 oz on the scale. He had quite the set of lungs even at birth!

This last video is of the nurses cleaning him up after birth.

Caden's First Christmas!

Caden had a wonderful First Christmas! We traveled home to PA to visit with family and friends and stayed for the long weekend.

Caden was sometimes more interested in the tags, paper and boxes, but we think he liked his gifts too.

He got new PSU outfits!!

Cadens first Tricycle! He can't reach the pedals, but he loved it when we pushed him around on the trike! He'll be riding on it sooner than we know it!

Visiting with Erin, Amy, Brady Paul, Megan and Cameron!

Caden meets the Gasperini's for the first time! It was so nice to see them!

Opening presents with Grandpa!

He had so much fun, he fell asleep on the couch....Life is good. :-)

There's more pictures to come!!!

It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas....

We had a fun filled Christmas week! Caden started off the week inviting all of his friends over to his house for our December playdate! The kids made ornaments, exchanged gifts and played with every toy in the house...here are some pictures!!

The Playroom was packed full!

A picture of Caden and Penelope. They took the same picture about a year ago when Caden was one day old, and they both fit in Caden's hospital bassinette! They are a little bigger now!

The whole gang!

On Tuesday, we went to the Santa House in Midland where Caden met Santa for the first time! He didn't cry at all - he was more stunned and wouldn't stop looking around at all the bright lights and toys. He had a very serious expression on his face the whole time. :-)

Merry Christmas!!