The Christmas season was very eventful for Team Carter. Earlier this month, we visited Jen’s grandfather’s family gathering in Eastover, SC. We stayed in Rock Hill and Christmas Eve-Eve we celebrated with David’s mom’s family. Christmas Eve we went to Ikea to look around just for fun and we went to church with Emily’s family.  Christmas Day included the family coming over for Christmas dinner; however it was unfortunate that Miriam was sick. Nothing serious, just the dreaded cold virus going around. Then I caught it and for four to five days felt like death and then it disappeared. Luckily, Miriam isn’t old enough to care about Santa Claus and such things, so she was happy to just be held/cuddled for a few days. We are doing much better now and David and I were able to spend a day in Asheville, NC at the Biltmore estate. (Thanks Santa for our tickets…it was great!) We really would like to go back and check out the other stuff to do there, but after the house tour, you become a bit overwhelmed by all the lavish details of the place. We ate at Tupelo Honey Cafe (thanks for the recommendation Plavnicks and Bates’) and had the best chicken and gravy biscuits ever! We also met up with Nicole and Nate Plavnick and lost ourselves in a glorious double date amidst books and obscure nooks in Battery Park Book Exchange and Champagne. Probably the biggest Christmas present we could give ourselves was paying off one of our student loans!! Hooray God for allowing us to steward what we have so we can avoid a monthly payment on that!! Also, many thanks to David’s parents for allowing us to live with them for a year so that this could be possible. (We joked that if we lived with them for another 3 years, we could pay off the other loan too….to which everyone laughs because we won’t put them out for 3 more years…) Sure, we’ve made lots of sacrifices this year to not spend so that we could pay off that loan, and it feels SO GOOD to not have it on our plate anymore 🙂 Praise God. Perseverance pays off. In other news, we rang in the New Year’s Celebration at 9:30pm (funny how that works with a kid…) complete with sparkly hats and steak. Miriam liked her steak, but mostly she held it in her mouth, not swallowing it. She does the same thing with pasta. She is really developing her personality. If you leave the room and she didn’t give you permission to leave, she curls her hands up and throws a fit until you come back…then she’s perfectly fine. She was given a lot of new friends (stuffed animals) by family members for Christmas and she holds long conversations with them. She has finally decideed that it’s time to roll over and she usually will do so after reaching for an object while sitting. She loves to practice standing up and holding onto things. Yesterday, she stood alone, while holding onto my leg for about 30 seconds. She also throws herself backwards to be upside down. She also loves to flirt with herself in a mirror = making silly faces, sticking her tongue out and waving. She still has no desire to crawl (just raises her arms and legs off the floor as if Superman, and hopes that will scoot her around) so we are anticipating her to skip the whole crawling milestone and go straight to walking. She wants to be mobile SO bad 🙂 Month 9: Miriam is such a joy! She continues to improve her vocabulary: “bwee”, “ooooo”, “wow”, “woo-dee”, ect. She has her night time routine down and likes to be in bed by 9pm. Her favorite book is “Pat the Bunny”. She is beginning to understand some basic signs and knows “milk”, “more”, “all done” and “good”. She cut her 1st tooth and tooth #2 is also about to come in! (she hasn’t bitten Mommy yet and this is a very good thing). She has mastered the sippy cup. She can almost pull herself up to stand and is getting better at moving herself from a sitting position to crawling stance. She would much rather eat what we’re eating than pureed food. Thus her palette ranges from Indian, Mexican, Chinese, American, ect. Her breakfast go-to is scrambled eggs and sausage and or grits. Miriam went on her first missions trip to Elberton, GA and took part in worship (our girl loves to sing!) and showered lots of people with baby love. She also tried BBQ and loved it! On Saturdays, she likes to putter around the house with Daddy and watch movies and have wrestling matches with him. It’s the cutest!