Dinner with Old Friends

A couple of weeks ago, Matt Tolbert was in town. He was one of my closest friends during high school. We went to dinner with him, Chrystal and Erik and my parents. It was fun!

Matt's Surgery

 Matt had three pins put into his left hand last week to help the bone heal correctly.

 The surgery went well, Matt has a follow up appointment for x-rays this afternoon!


 He has an awesome ice pack machine that helps keep his hand nice and cold!


Belton LOVES his Daddy!

Belton: Thirteen (and a half) Months

Life has been pretty crazy around here lately. Between Matt's car accident, breaking his hand, totaling his car, all three of us coming down with stomach viruses, Matt's unexpected hand surgery, and buying a "new" car, Belton's 13 month blog post just never happened! 

Anyway, we sure do love our little guy! His personality is just exploding every day! He loves reading books and often goes over to the baskets of books and says "eh eh eh eh" until someone helps him get them out.

He often brings books over to us so that we'll read them to him. I love that he's a little reader!

  He still has 7 teeth. He naps twice and sleeps from about 9 pm to 8 am. He is completely off of the bottle and formula. But he LOVES his cup of milk and would probably drink milk all day (forget the food!) if I would let him.

I pulled out the camera to take a picture of him and he flashed me that grin!

Belton LOVES going outside! He often goes over to the door and does this while either saying "eh eh eh" (his way of communicating that he want something) or "buh buh" (bye bye). He always points to our neighbor's wreath when we walk outside. He  knows that cars and trucks go "roooom" (vroom), dogs say "ruff" and lions say "roaaar".

He loves looking at himself on the iPad.

He's our little parrot. He repeats lots of words we say to him back to us. This week he said his first two multi-syllable words: elbow and highchair. He has a current fascination with talking about my elbow while I change his diaper!

Books, books more books!

Lately he likes getting in and out of things. Case in point, this basket.

 And this wagon!

He loves making hats out of everything!

And he's still my sweet, cuddly baby boy!

Belton also LOVES Jesus. He looks at pictures of him in books, on the walls, on the walls at church and on his bedside table and says: "Jeez" or "Jeessss" for Jesus.

Family Pictures

 I took some family pictures for Jennifer's whole family last weekend. It was fun! 

I was glad that Megan took this one of our little family!

 And I love this sweet one of Lillian and Grandmom!

Trick or Treat!

Belton was a pretty happy guy in his little puppy costume. It was a little chilly outside, so the costume was perfect! 

Matt had made us some puppy ears so we were a little family of puppies!

 And Aunt Abbi was a hot dog!

 Belton's first trick or treat! He had a death grip on that little pumpkin.

 By the second time around, he started looking in the pumpkin for the candy he was receiving!

 Our third house was G-Mom and G-Dad's house. We had a great time trick or treating! :-)

Halloween

Halloween was an eventful day in our family this year! 

I was on my way home to meet Matt and take him to Richardson so that we could go trick or treating with his parents and Abbi when I got a text and a call from him that he had been in an accident. He said he was fine, but his car wasn't. I drove past our apartment and on to pick up Matt. 

I'll let him tell you what happened! 

  "I was heading home from work at our Dallas office. I was going north on 35 when trouble occurred. The front-most red rectangle represents a cop car and the black rectangle represents my car. The cop car was responding to another wreck in the shoulder indicated by the two blue rectangles. When the cop hit his breaks to get to the shoulder, he caused the two cars in front of me to hit their breaks. And in turn, I slammed on my breaks, to no avail."

 While we were waiting for everything to be squared away with the tow truck and the car, Matt told me that his left hand was hurting quite a bit. He said he didn't tell the police because he didn't want to deal with an ambulance. We took him to the smallest, weirdest ER ever (accidentally) and got great care from very attentive doctors and nurses. 

As you can see on these x-rays, Matt's hand is broken. Technically, it's a fracture of the left third metacarpal.

 

While we were at the crash site and the hospital, Belton was VERY concerned about Matt. Obviously, he wanted Matt to pick him up. But even beyond that, when the nurse was taking Matt's blood pressure and the doctor was checking his breathing and his hand, Belton was anxious and trying to get out of my grip to get to Matt. He was so worried about his Daddy and just didn't understand what was going on. He's a sweet boy who was very relieved to finally be in his Daddy's arms again!

At this point, Matt is healing. We are waiting to see how well when we got back to the doctor next week for follow up x-rays. And we're also waiting to hear back about the car. But it's probably going to be a total loss. Anyone selling a reliable, cheap car? :-)