Young Party of Four

Dear William, You have officially hit 10 months Little Man! Double Digits! That also means that you are just 2 short months away from one-year-old. Sniff. Sniff. I almost hesitate sometimes to call you my "baby" because you have gotten so big, you are a far cry from that little tiny baby we brought home 10 months ago. You continue to grow and grow. As usual, height and weight are taken by me (and Daddy), so keep that in mind. You are about 20.5 lbs and 29.5 inches (According to the WHO charts, that means you are still hanging around 57%ile in weight and 75% in height... so close to what you were last month.) You are wearing mostly 18 month clothes at this point. We just started switching your sleepers to 18 months even. Usually, those are the things we switch out last because they need to fit really well and I don't like them to be too big whereas you can usually grow into other clothes. It was time though because your 12 month sleepers were getting a bit tight ...

As it turns out, Sunday Grilling has sort of been replaced in the Young house. We have started up a new tradition (though we still grill) of Smokin' Sundays around here. If you haven't heard, a few weeks ago we purchased an electric smoker. We (read: Steven) have been looking a while and finally decided to pull the plug and purchase a smoker. We elected to go with an electric smoker due to ease of cooking and price was reasonable. Today we smoked our second chicken. A friend advised that we should start with chicken because it is the easiest to smoke and would ease us into our new roles as smoke-masters. We figured today we would document the process. That's definitely what true smoking is... a process. This starts the night before but it is well worth the time and effort. Last night we made the brine for the chicken. It needs to cool completely and be chilled before putting the chicken in it, so we make it the night before so we can refrigerate it over night. Unfortuna...

Things around here have been going pretty well lately. We have quite a bit to celebrate. If you haven't heard.... congratulations are in order. Steven got a much deserved promotion at work! All his hard word has paid off and he earned the title of Level 3 Engineer. He puts in a lot of long hours and works really hard so it was very exciting to see all of that recognized. Then, this Saturday we were all set to go to Honeymoon Island and meet up with Steven's parents, Julie, Eric, and "Baby" Evie. Unfortunately, getting to Honeymoon Island at this moment might require an ark due to all the rain they had over that way earlier this week. I even heard a rumor that all the animals in the area were seen lining up two-by-two. Needless to say, none of us got the memo to start building an ark (plus I think our HOA would have had something negative to say about us trying that) so that plan had to be nixed. We were pretty sad that we were having trouble coordinating someth...