This Month, We...

So apparently I have become a once a month blogger. :( I'm going to review the last 5 weeks (or more?!) in no apparent order.

First of all, we have moved! We are in our new, wonderful house right now. The other house is a distant memory...except some of our stuff is still in our messy garage, we need a new kitchen floor in the old place, the guy who was supposed to paint our bathroom hasn't finished, and oh, yeah, it isn't on the market. But enough about that. Our new house is awesome!
After Ethan's first playdate in the new house. They had fun!
New Year's Even went by without us staying up late in any way. We never do! I seriously would love to go to bed at 10:00 (at the latest) every single night. Above is Ethan at "Noon Year's Eve" at the library. I tell people that I go to this party with him because he can't stay up until midnight. It's not because of him. :)

I swear the best part of our Christmas Break (way better than moving) was the time I got to spend with Mr. Ethan all day long. One day near the end of our beloved break (sniff) we drove to Bloomington to go to the children's museum there. We had never been there - So. Much. Fun! For me, as much as for him. Let's be honest, parents - aren't there a lot of things we do for our kids that we are kind of bored with? Not this museum. I honestly had as much fun as Ethan here. And I sent so many pictures back to my mom that she wants to make the trip with us next time. :)

Happy Holidays

It's been awhile.

In my blogging absence, we've gotten a few things done.

1. Thanksgiving. At our house! Fantastic. I didn't cook the turkey, but did the sides, and it was so much fun having everyone here. (Especially the parts where they all entertained Ethan while I got stuff done. Thanks, family!)
2. Prepared for Christmas. Sort of. :)
3. BOUGHT A HOUSE. Yes, that's right. We're moving! To a place a 1/2 mile away, but still. It's pretty incredible.

Now, in the next three weeks, we will be 1) closing on our "new" house, 2) moving in, 3) spending Christmas in Cincinnati, and 4) putting our house on the market. Or at least getting it ready for the market, ASAP. The fact that the real estate market is not kind to sellers right now makes us both very nervous. But I'm trying not to think about it and am instead focusing on the excitement of a move to a bigger house. Ethan's pretty jazzed about it, too.

Three Year Old Boy!

(Sniff, sniff) My little boy is growing up too fast! We have a big three year old boy now - definitely not a baby anymore, and it's hard to even call him a toddler when he looks like he's ready for kindergarten.
We had a party for him on his birthday, October 23, with four of his little friends. I have to say, it was really fun. Total chaos, but really fun. While there were lots of toys to play with, the activities that interested the kids the longest were 1) bouncing on the exercise ball, 2) chasing cats, and 3) chasing each other around our little house. At one point I stopped, sat down in a chair, and just laughed at all of them. It was a good time. We had visitors from all over, too - Auntie Anda came all the way from Santa Fe for the event, and Auntie Kim and Grammy Barbara made the trip from Ohio as well. Yeah!

And Halloween is tomorrow! Whenever well-meaning strangers ask Mr. Ethan what he is going to be for Halloween, he has answered, "A butterfly!", "A ghost!", and "I'm three." :) But he is really a dinosaur.
Ethan's school does a little Halloween parade and party - here is Ethan enjoying the snack part of the party. My favorite is the tail. :)

He looks so happy...

But really, he is very, very sad. So sad, in fact, that our kitty salt and pepper shakers are being forced to listen to shameless propaganda about how much they are going to looooovvve school, even though Mommy/the black kitty has to go away and leave them. (Note: You will probably have to turn up your volume in order to hear the salt and pepper kitty conversation, which will make my voice unbearably loud when I come in, but you can't expect high quality film from an iPhone.)

But even with the deep scars I've inflicted on Ethan's soul by taking him to daycare every day, he is still a pretty happy kid. :) He was super sick about two weeks ago, with bronchiolitis (yes, I did spell that right) - a viral infection that messes up the little tubes in his lungs. Daycare called me because they thought he was going to pass out, and he sure looked sick. Pale, couldn't stay awake in my lap or in the car, wheezing, crying. Poor baby. But after one nebulizer treatment, he felt sooo much better. Given his propensity to get long lasting coughs at this point in the year, we (even his super-conservative doctor agrees) think that he will probably be diagnosed with mild asthma as he gets older. Just mild, since the nebulizer takes care of things pretty quickly. And that's OK, though Brian still remembers what asthma was like when he was a kid. (And doesn't seem to appreciate it when I tell him that it's been many decades since he was a kid, and asthma is treated pretty easily these days. :)

But soon after he got better, we went running!
And when I say "we", I mean WE. The Women's Fitness Run was a week or so ago, and since I haven't run a 5K in awhile, I thought I'd give it a try. Best thing: They had a kids' dash right before the run, and I signed Ethan up. You can see that he needs a little help going in the right direction, but he had a great time. After this was taken, he ran that route about 7 more times before the cough came on and we quit running. :)

Again because of the audio on my phone/videocamera, you probably can't hear what Ethan is saying at the end of the race. But he is very very concerned that we broke the red finish line tape. He wants to make sure that they'll be able to fix it. :)

The Wordsmith

So as you may have noticed, Ethan's speech is no longer a concern. He is talking up a storm, and 99% of what he says makes perfect sense. I thought I'd choose some of my favorites and post them.

1. My personal favorite, at dinner the other night, Ethan is dissatisfied with the food that I served up. His statement, "I want another...anything else." (FB friends, I know you've seen this one before, but I think it's worth reposting. :)
2. I'm picking Ethan up at school the other day. One of his little friends is crying. I say to Ethan, "Oh, is he a little sad?" Ethan replies, "No, he's a big sad."
3. Mr. Ethan is going through a phase where he doesn't want anyone to leave. No one. So one of my favorite/sad statements of his lately has been, "I sad to see Daddy go!" But then the other night at dinner, we reminded Ethan that it was Daddy's turn to do bath. For some reason, it's always Mama's turn, so we prep him when it is most definitely NOT Mama's turn. His reply: "I sad to see Daddy!"
4. I was snuggling on the couch the other morning with him. He got squirmy and I held him tighter. "Mama, I need my space!" Already?!

A Real Blog Post

Updates! Fun! Pics of a cute little boy! Now that's a real blog post.

Isn't he the most adorable thing you've ever seen?! I know I'm not supposed to say that (according to my mother, who has told me this over and over), and I have a few friends with seriously cute sons, but still. I may be biased, but I think he's pretty darn gorgeous.

Part of it, I will say, has to be the photographer - my boss, Kathy - who joined us at Prairie Farm with her adorable daughter Katelyn that day. Katelyn was trying her best to tell Ethan all she knew (which was considerable!) about the animals at the farm, but all Ethan wanted to do was dance around the cow, goats, and donkey. Oh, and look at their butts. I had to keep ushering him away from the hind ends of the animals lest he be in firing range.
The cow getting friendly with Ethan is named Storm (I know this because of Katelyn!), so of course I encouraged Ethan to go home and tell Daddy the cow's name. "Ethan, do you remember what the cow's name was?" "Ummmm....cow was brown." Good enough.Ethan also wanted to hug each and every goat there. I'm not sure they appreciated his affection.

Our trip to the farm was actually a couple of weekends ago. Bad blogger, I know. Most recently, we all went to one of Urbana's favorite end-of-summer activities, the Sweetcorn Festival. We told Ethan it was the "corn party" and he was pretty happy to join us for anything with the word party in it. We ate everything that is bad for you, listened to some really loud music (which Ethan was mesmerized by), and let Ethan throw himself around the bounce houses until I (literally) had to pull him out screaming. Very, very fun.
Above is the "before" picture. Below is post corn, post ice cream, pre-bounce house:
I mentioned that we ate everything that is bad for you. Yep. Ice cream, corn dripping in butter, and my meal Saturday was: a hotdog with pulled pork and mac & cheese on it. Needless to say, I've taken a step back from that. Hence my blog post from yesterday. The 100 Days of Real Food website caught my attention a couple of weeks ago when I saw it on Kim's FB page. After reading it over a few times, I thought, "We could do that! At least for 10 days, anyway." But whoa, it has taken way more planning than I thought it would. I never quite realized how much I depend on the quick fix when I'm hungry - a frozen meal here, vending machine snack there, pancakes when all else fails... But I'm getting the feeling more and more that I want to know what's in my food, where it came from, and I want to have as few ingredients as possible in what I buy. So we (I use the term "we" loosely, as I expect Brian will be making daily trips to Einstein Bro's for bagels or Dairy Queen for Blizzards) are two days in, and so far doing pretty well.

While eating "real" is harder than I thought (and disappointingly, more expensive), I'm having kind of a great time getting Ethan involved. I do love a bowl of cereal in the evenings, and all of the cereals I like have a ton of crap in them. So Ethan and I made our own granola tonight! Oats, honey, soy butter, pumpkin seeds (soooo much tasting before putting it in the oven) - and it turned out GREAT. Ethan ate more cereal for dinner than what I had actually prepared, which was fine with me. So far, so good! But two days out of ten isn't much. We'll see how far we get with this.

Real Food: Day 1

It's all Brian's sister's fault. She liked this site on Facebook, which forced me to look at it, which hooked me into planning a 10 day stretch of only real food. When I mentioned it to Brian, he was dubious. I think he said, "I don't want to eat nothing but sprouts for 10 days." :)

So I didn't force him into a full 10 days. I usually pack breakfast and lunch and take it to work, so that's easy enough for me to eat real on my own. However, everything I cook at night will be "real," so he'll get 1/3 of the effects of it.

This morning, blueberry banana pancakes. That was kind of a cheat, since I used non-real syrup and white flour. So I may have to add an extra real breakfast to this week to make up for that. But those pancakes were darned good. Even Ethan ate one! Lunch was a sandwich from our health food store, and dinner was farmer's market stir fry. Not bad!

I have to say, though, that I am dying for a Diet Coke. This is going to be harder than I thought! I like chemicals in my food. :)