Happy Birfday!

Spring has sprung! It's gorgeous outside, so I bought a bunch of seed packets and a mini-greenhouse full of peat pellets. You add water to the pellets and they get all puffy like little chocolate cakes. Then you plant the seeds in the peat pots, put the plastic lid on the greenhouse, and presto! baby plants in about a week!

I thought this would be a fantastic little project for Ethan to learn about plants, so I was kind of disappointed (but not surprised) when Ethan had absolutely NO interest in what I was doing. He just ran around the back yard, chasing Daisy and playing in puddles. He did like the little round coriander seeds, though. He got a handful and threw some of them at the peat pots yelling "little balls!" That's my boy. :o)

Anyway, I got several colored toothpicks to mark out which herbs were in which peat pots, and I stuck a few into the sides of some of the pots. Ethan wandered over, pulled the colorful toothpicks out of the sides of the pots and moved them to the tops. After he had a nice little row of toothpicks sticking straight up, he sat down and started singing: "Happy Birfday to you, Happy Birfday to you..."

They DO look like teeny little birthday cakes with colorful little toothpick candles on top!! :oD

"Tatro"

I am often amazed how much these little people can absorb. We never know how much he actually gets, until little moments like this:

Last night we were watching TV when Ethan's bedtime rolled around. We randomly do count-downs when we're going to turn things off, or move on to the next activity. This time, I did it in French to see his reaction. He looked at me funny and said "takabaf?". Michelle decided to play along and started counting in Spanish.

Mommy: "Uno, dos, tres..."

Ethan: "Tatro!"

Free Bath

In these hard economic times, even water is a luxury. Use this great penny-pinching tip to keep the kids clean and the wallet fat: introduce them to public fountains.

Updates are way overdue!

Ethan is awesome! He's a little sponge and quite the parrot. He's talking up a storm now, and it's lots of fun to have crazy little conversations with him. He sings all sorts of songs to himself, and he climbs on EVERYTHING. He's pretty much going non-stop, which is great for him but exhausting for Mommy and Daddy! He's getting better about sleeping on his own, but he's still getting up a couple of times a night. Sometimes he'll go back to sleep with his blanket and his Nemo and it's all good, but usually he'll work himself into a frenzy and start screaming if we don't go into his room to reassure him that it's ok to lie back down. He has several friends that he's always asking for. I just think it's so cute to hear him ask to see Vivi or Jannah or Eliza! He has buddies! I love that!! :o)

Anyway, I have been awful about updating this because we had some family...drama. We started trying to have a baby in January and were delighted to find out in late January that we were expecting. But in mid-February, we started experiencing problems and we had a miscarriage at the end of the month. To add insult to injury, I got horribly ill with a bad stomach flu the day after the miscarraige and I ended up in the emergency room later that week. So, we're just kind of scrubbing February 2009 from our memory. There were highlights and good things, like Ethan's big cognitive growth spurts and some really great bonding moments between me and Jim over all of the stress. Having such a cute toddler and amazing husband has really made the loss so much easier to face, and I know that we're so lucky to have the wonderful friends and family that have been so supportive through all of this.

So, we'll try again for a baby brother or sister for Ethan later this year. In the meantime, I'll try to be better about updating this blog and will try to post some pics and maybe even some video soon!