Wait for Mama!

Our trip to Chicago - two nights, taking advantage of a little time when Brian isn't teaching - was great. Not relaxing, really, but so so fun! Here are Ethan and Brian looking at the big, big buildings from our hotel room:
After the Pack & Play trial, we had the hotel reserve us a crib. Unfortunately, it was smaller than the Pack & Play, and way easier to get out of! I had visions of Ethan climbing out of it in the middle of the night, unlocking our hotel room door (which he can do), and heading down the hall to the elevator (which he loves). So we super-locked the door, put a chair under the knob, and yelled at Ethan every time he tried to get out of the crib when we were getting our room set up. (Not really yelled, but let's say "strongly discouraged".) And it was absolutely fine. No headers out of the thing, no missing baby in the hotel, and everyone slept just great. Whew.

And here is my hotel review: Families, if you need a place to stay downtown, I highly recommend the Omni. Not terribly expensive if you stay Sunday to Tuesday, and it is sooooo kid friendly. The snazzy hotel restaurant has homemade baby food, they gave Ethan a little paper backpack with some fun toys when we checked in, there were cookies and milk in a bag the morning after our first night there, and the doormen and women greeted Ethan with smiles every time we came in and out of the hotel. So fantastic! And being directly across the street from the Apple Store didn't hurt, either. I tried to get Ethan excited about a Dora computer game, but again, all he wanted to do was climb the cool stairs. "Going Apple Store" became a favorite refrain of his.

But we spent a lot of time elsewhere - the Chicago Children's Museum, which had Ethan twitching with overstimulation after about 30 minutes, a jog out to Navy Pier that afternoon, and lots of riding the escalator and elevators at Water Tower Place before the stores opened. All were big hits. At the end of the Pier, there was this gigantic anchor from the U.S.S. Chicago, and Ethan was happy to pose for us:

When we left this morning, we were tempted to head to the Aquarium, that having been a favorite place of mine when I was a kid. But we all woke up early and were a tad cranky, so when we saw the crazy price tag on entry to the Aquarium, we decided to wait until Ethan was a little older and we could really take advantage of a whole day there. We did pack in a lot in a short time, so I didn't feel badly about heading home a few hours earlier than planned and making sure that all of us got a little nap. :)

The funnest and most frightening thing about Ethan in Chicago was his temptation to just take off. He fussed and cried every time we came back to the hotel room, and took off running at full speed every time we left the place. I did lose sight of him once in the museum, and Brian and I decided that we really needed to do a better job of making sure he obeys us when we stay, "Stop!" Right now, he thinks it's a game and wants to be chased. (And since when he runs, we do chase him, I don't think we are correcting that assumption of his!)

Back to Blogging

Sorry for the long absence, everyone! (All 3 of you who read this, anyway...:) I can't believe how fast March has gone. And my last post didn't even include any cute pictures of Ethan, so let's take care of that right now.

(Can you believe this haircut??? He really needed one, but I didn't have any idea that she was going after ALL of his hair until it was too late to stop her. We are not getting it cut ever ever again.)

I have to say that while Ethan is a perfectly normal 2 year old (with all that goes with that age), Brian and I are really seeing his personality develop, and it's so nice to see that he is a nice boy. From what we observe when we're with him, and hear from a variety of people (including strangers at the library!), he plays really well with other kids. He'll be assertive when he needs to, believe me - I recently heard him to tell a girl to "move" when "go, go, go" wasn't making her go go go away from where he wanted to take his train...(That was corrected to "move please" soon afterwards, Mom, don't worry. :) I do sort of cringe when he gets bitten or hit at daycare, because he is always on the receiving end of that rather than the giving, but I guess if I have to choose between the two, I don't want him being the aggressive kid.

We're doing some pretending games lately, and he has done one of the cutest things ever. I pretend to go to sleep in the living room, and he goes to get the blanket and stuffed animals out of his crib...covers me up and puts all of the animals down next to me. I love it! Sometimes now he'll lie down on top of me so we are going "night night together," and that's even better. I usually only get to "sleep" for about 9 seconds, but it's totally worth it.

He is getting so big now, though! He is not our little baby boy anymore, which makes us both proud and nostalgic. I'm so glad when my work friend Kathy talks about her teenage son and how much fun the two of them have together, because I'm so afraid that he's going to get older and want nothing to do with us! In preparing for our trip, we tried out Ethan's Pack & Play, which is the wonderful portable crib that we have used forever, and you can see that this era of travel is over:

You can see that he is appropriately contrite. (Sigh.) I guess it's better that we found this out now rather than in the middle of the night sometime somewhere, but I loved that Pack & Play!

New Conversations

As a sequel to an earlier post, here are the latest fun conversations that Ethan is coming up with lately.

(Scene: A gorgeous 40 degree day...Ethan is dying to go outside.)
Alexis: Ethan, we're going to head home to see Sarah.
Ethan: Sarah. Outside?
Alexis: No, honey, Sarah is going to be inside. We'll play inside with Sarah!
Ethan: Sarah. Mama. Outside?
Alexis: Um, no, baby. Sarah and Mama will be inside with Ethan. We'll play inside!
Ethan: Sarah. Mama. Inside. Ethan - outside.
Alexis: (sighs)
-----------------------------
Alexis: Ethan, it's time to go home from the park and make dinner. We're going to leave when I count to five, OK?
Ethan: OK.
Alexis: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. OK, time to go home!
Ethan: Nooooooooooooo!
Alexis: Ethan, should I carry you or do you want to walk?
Ethan: Nooooooooooooo!
Alexis: OK, carry you!
Ethan: No. No carry you! No dinner! No way, Mama!
----------------------------
He is so fun right now! (No, really. These conversations aren't the only ones we have, just the most amusing.) He is interested in so much, and has strong opinions on everything. Naptime? No way! Fruit snacks? Yes! Finger paint? No way, Mama. But paintbrushes...

"Hug!"

We have a snuggly boy on our hands. I will never ever want that to change. Lately, he's been even more snuggly, and since his vocabulary is increasing, we are having even more fun with him.

Because we are a moderately touchy-feely couple, Ethan is becoming a touchy-feely boy. He knows several emotion words now - sad, happy, and mad, and can usually name them to the appropriate situation. (If he hears a baby crying in the store, he'll pay close attention and say, "Sad baby." And lots of pictures of characters in the books we read are "Happy" - especially the mommies of the babies who are using the potty - we are choosing a lot of those books these days. :)

His favorite word lately is "Hug!" This so sweet, though I am just beginning to realize that he is using the hugs to often times avoid things that he doesn't want to do - like get his shoes on, get his diaper changed, get his face wiped after a meal...But it is really hard to resist. We give him about a million hugs right before bed, and he is still holding his arms out for more as we leave the room - who can resist that? Here he is soon before bed (hence the half-clothed look) getting some much-needed cuddling and saying hi to Papa (Grampa) while mowing the kitchen floor:

Happy Birthday to Me!

Quiz: Think of a two digit number where the two digits add to 12, it's a multiple of 3, and the ones digit is three times the tens digit. If you worked through the math, congratulations, you know how old I am. If you didn't have the energy or simply didn't care, thank you. :)

Great weekend, though! My folks came over for waffles and bacon (yum) and brought my gift - an apple pie (yum) and Brian unveiled my birthday cake (yum!). So it's been good eatin' at the Jones-Jewett household for a few days here.
And Valentine's Day isn't a bad way to start a week, either. I was a little surprised when Ethan's teacher handed me a list of names on Friday - isn't the 2 year old room a little young for Valentine's cards??? But apparently they had made containers (fingerpainted on bags - kind of cute) for some treats, so I had to do something. Enter the crafty blogosphere, and an hour and a half later, Ethan's class had some cute little bags for fruit snacks! I've been wanting to pull out my sewing machine for awhile now, and this gave me just the perfect excuse. So easy and so fun.
(It's good that I'm doing this now when Ethan has 9 classmates as opposed to someday when he has 25 of them. :)

Digital Boy

SNOW DAY! Actually, that should be plural...we had two snow days this week, with the big huge winter storm that we got here in the Midwest. I was kind of looking forward to the 12-24 inches of snow that my husband promised me, but the atmosphere didn't deliver such joy...it was more like 7 inches of mix that was near impossible to shovel. Oh, well. Two days off in the middle of the week - I'm not complaining!

So Ethan and I stayed home together, and had an absolute blast. He is finally healthy, besides a little cough, so he is full of energy and ready for just about anything. (Brian and I shoveled out my car this morning, and put the little boy in the car - didn't turn it on or anything, just let him climb around turning on the hazard lights, finding stuff in my glove compartment, pulling out all the toys that I had just cleaned up in the car...he was happy for at least a half hour. Amazing.) One of his latest interests is my iPhone ("Upon"), and he can easily find an Elmo video to watch if I let him hold it by himself. He also loves the iPad, and you can see that he found a willing partner today (my dad loves his iPad) to play games with:
The problem is that if we let him play with gadgets all day long, I'm afraid he won't take a nap. And there is something required about a nap on snow days, so we are also trying to keep him as physically active as possible, within the confines of our small (but heated) house. Lately he has taken to "dancing", which for him is basically jumping up and down, though it does resemble Flashdance a little bit...(And what he is saying is "Eda, Eda, Eda's dance" - Ethan's dance. :)

Sick Again?!

Yep. The sweet cheerful boy is sick again. I hear that this is "normal" and "very typical" for a two year old who goes to daycare, but in my opinion, this just stinks. We are robbing Ethan of prime sledding and snowman-building weather since he has had a runny nose/watery eyes/cough/stomach bug for the last 10 days to 2 weeks. Brian and I have shared Ethan's joyful bug(s), putting all of us in just super duper moods. (Actually, as usual, Ethan has a better attitude about being sick than the rest of us...)



We've tried to stay creative in the midst of being a little homebound. The above video was the way we tried to help the little boy get used to his brand new sled. When he was healthy for a day, we tried to get him out in our backyard to ride on it, and he refused about a million times. Apparently he didn't have enough friends on the sled riding with him. :)