Merry Christmas from Colorado!

Well, I'm finally getting around to posting about our trip to Colorado for Cade's first Christmas. We hope your Christmas and New Year were as great as ours. Here are some pictures from our trip.

Cade's an old veteran when it comes to flying now. He's wearing red corduroy overalls that I wore when I was a baby. Unfortunately we had two flights on the way out with a layover in Kansas City. He really did well, but you could tell he was tired of flying by the end of the day. It probably didn't help that he dropped a HUGE bomb in his pants about 45 minutes from the Denver airport. If it's possible, I'd like to meet the person who can change a poopy diaper in an airplane bathroom. We elected to wait and try to keep his mind off his backside as we descended into the Rockies. The lady next to us graciously suggested a change on the traytable, but we just as graciously declined. So we held our noses and bounced him around, which I think just spread the turd between his diaper and his innermost layer of clothes. This is why we always pack at least one extra change of clothes in his diaper bag.

Since we flew in on Christmas Eve, the first order of business was the traditional Gronseth Christmas Eve spaghetti dinner. After dinner we let Cade try out another new food: bananas. This turned out to be a not so great decision. More on that later.
After dinner Cade fell asleep and was awakened by a slimmed down Santa Claus. He really wasn't sure what to make of the situation. It was either because he wasn't quite awake or because Santa had an eerie resemblance to his Grandpa.
Christmas morning was fun. Cade really got into unwrapping the presents.

We eventually realized he wasn't enjoying the unwrapping for the actual presents. It was for the paper. Yum!

Unwrapping presents is tiring, especially when you're not very experienced at it yet.

All I want for Christmas is my two front teeth.....and I got 'em. We think Cade got his teeth from his mommy because they are anything but straight. They look like an inverted snowplow. Here's hoping for a reduction in the price of braces!

Christmas Day dinner was a big prime rib. Cade's lobbying for a piece due to his new teeth. He was making the case that he needed to try them out and creamy bananas and carrots weren't much of a challenge for teeth. We told him he'd end up having some processed prime rib the next day and he was ok with that.

Our big present for the year was snowshoes! So we took Cade out a couple days after Christmas. He was also showing off his new hat and gloves. He really seemed to like it. He's shown that he's comfortable in the cold (taking more after the parent that didn't grow up in Florida). :) That's a good thing, since my mom's backpack thermometer read 7 degrees when we got to our destination. It was a beautiful day and a lot of fun.

I got a backpack frame carrier for my last birthday, and this was my first chance to try it out. Cade really seemed to enjoy it. For the first part of the hike he looked all around and just watched the trees and the snow. He eventually fell asleep.

Here we are at the "falls," which ended up being a frozen creek. As we made our way down he really started crying very hard. At first we thought it was the cold, but it turned out to be the bananas he'd been eating for the past couple days. Grandpa played the hero by taking Cade and running back down the trail to the car with him. He wasn't the least bit cold, and it was hard to console him. He really had some bad stomach pains for a couple days, and when we quit feeding him bananas it went away. I guess it's good we feed him one new food at a time because then it's easy to isolate the ones that give him problems. We've since started on sweet potatoes and he's scarfed those like it's going out of style.

One really cute thing he's started doing is reaching for dogs. Here he is reaching for my sister's dog, Bella. He's also reached for my parents' dog, Maggie, our friend Alicia's dog, Gracie, and Chili. I think Cade and Chili are going to be great buddies when Cade gets mobile. Today Susie found Chili sleeping in front of Cade in his "guarding" position. I know Chili feels a little left out now that Cade is around, but it's great to see him embracing Cade as part of the family.

Cade loves to play "balancing baby." He just gets into this zen-like frame of mind and sits very still and smiles at me. Hilarious.

Smiley Cade with Nana.

My sister Amy and my mom spent some time doing a couple "photo shoots" with Cade and Susie. There are too may good pictures from that to include in this post so I'll get those up in a future post soon so stay tuned. Cade's first Christmas was a great one. We hope yours was great too.