Busy, Busy!

Wow, where to begin?!?

Well, Jim's work situation is still up in the air, but it's looking good right now, and we're hopeful that it will all work out for the best. My parents are in Mexico, presumably working on getting their kitchen installed. They've been gone a couple of weeks, so I'm hoping they'll be home soon...when they are in Mexico, we have no way of contacting them to see how things are going. :o(

But the BIG news is that Mo found a house and signed a lease yesterday! So she's going to be packing up her house and moving to Austin over the next couple of weeks! We've been talking about this for so long, and it's kind of hard to believe it's finally actually happening!! I'm really looking forward to Ethan getting the opportunity to grow up with at least one of his grandparents. Mike and I only saw our grandparents once or twice a year...if we were lucky. We just never really had a chance to get to know most of them. Mo will be a part of all of Ethan's milestones, and I think that is really special. We're looking forward to sharing those memories with her. I adore him, and Jim adores him, and now his Grandmommy is going to be here to love on him too...lucky little man! :o) Of course his other grandparents adore him, too, and we'll work hard to make sure they're not strangers to him like my grandparents were.

So, over the past few weeks, Ethan has just been talking up a storm! He's really cute...he just babbles and babbles. A lot of his babbles are starting to sound more like conversations, and sometimes like actual words. He says something that kind of sounds like Daisy, but the one thing he's getting pretty good at is waving his hand and saying Hi. I'm not 100% sure he's doing it on purpose, but it's still really sweet!

He's also figured out how to get off of the bed (mattress on the floor) without landing on his head. He skooches one little leg over the edge, then he finds the floor and stands up. Not rocket science, I know, but it took him quite a while to figure it out and then to do it consistently! Hey, he's a baby...it's all new to him!

Also new...yelling and hissy fits. He yells just to hear his voice sometimes. He likes that it can be loud, and he thinks it's fun so it's kind of cute sometimes. But the hissy fits are not cool. Sometimes they're because he's teething, but usually they're because he's just not happy with how things are going. He will pitch a fit if he wants Cheerios but I want to feed him chicken, that kind of thing. We're trying to not let him associate his fits with making us do what he wants us to do. But he just doesn't have the words to tell us that he wants something else, and he's still not picking up sign language yet (except for sort of waving hi), so we'll just have to deal with it for now. But I am still trying to work on signs with him. I hear that once they start mimicking your hand movements and clapping, then signing really starts to work. But he's not there yet...bummer for us!

Ethan is now fascinated with closing doors. This leads to hissy fits because once the door is closed, he's stuck in that room and he can't go anywhere. And he can't play with the door anymore because it's closed. It's driving Mommy a little nuts, but it is funny! He's also grinding his teeth and starting to take little bites out of cheerios with his front teeth, pretty cute!