Poor Baby...or toddler...

So, we had a brunch playdate this morning. Spaz that I am, when I went to the grocery store yesterday, I forgot to get the mini-muffins I had promised to take. I had to get Ethan up, fed, and changed lightning-quick (which anyone who has a kid knows is laughable) so that I could go to HEB for the second time in as many days just to get the muffins and avoid being the "lame mom."

So, I'm dressing the squirmy kid, and I have to make a choice: t-shirt and shorts, or cute little 1 piece jumper? One piece...quicker, right? Fine, that's what he's wearing. Except, it's all baby blue with little cartoon animals all over it. But hey, he's a baby, that's what babies wear, right?

Whatever, I get him dressed, we get in the car, we get muffins, we show up on time, the world is a good place. But then I start watching Ethan playing with the other kids. He's standing up, cruising, (no walking this morning), and bouncing along to music. In a baby blue jumper with little cartoon animals all over it. He's totally a toddler, and he was wearing a baby outfit. It was just wrong! So, I still ended up feeling like the lame mom anyway.

Forgive me, Ethan...that jumper is going into the pile of clothes that Mommy will not make you wear anymore, I promise!

Look who's walking!!

Yesterday at Music class, Ethan took two steps! He was chasing a little girl (Samantha), of course. :o) He's gotten up to 4 steps at a time. Still a work in progress, but he's walking. And no, he's not a toddler yet, darnit. Not till his Momma says so! Sigh...such a big boy!

Also, he drank from a regular cup all by himself today. No spills, until he got tired of drinking and tossed the cup over the edge of the highchair. But that was on purpose. :o)

And I also taught him how to say Cheese. Not as in "Ooooh, Mom's going to take a picture!", but as in "this gooey stuff I'm squishing in my hands is cheese, and now I'm going to eat it!" Babies saying cheese is very cute!

He's so much fun!

First Mother's Day

This is a holiday I've celebrated all my life, but it's kind of cool this year because it's my turn to be celebrated, too. Being a mom is such hard work, and sometimes I miss how easy life was before Ethan came into our lives. But then I see his gooey little smile or hear him babbling away in the little language that only he can understand, and my heart is so full of love for him that it almost hurts. There is nothing in the world I would rather be doing with my life right now...being his mom is a 24/7 job, but he is worth every second.

Ethan is growing up so fast! I've been busy planning his 1st birthday party and finding all the stuff we're going to need to create a fun and safe pool party for a bunch of little bitty kiddos. It's going to be a short party since little ones get cranky pretty quickly and it'll most likely be hot outside. :o( But still, I think we've planned it all out pretty well, so everything should be ok! I know he won't remember this, but Jim and I will, and we're going to take lots of pictures! I'm also planning on taking a picture of all of our guests gathered around the birthday boy and having them sign a photo mat so we can have a nice framed photo. If this goes well, I hope to make this an annual birthday tradition! If you can think of any other b-day traditions that we could start, please let me know...I'm looking for more ideas!

Anyway, Ethan got tooth #6 (next to the top right tooth). We saw that it had come through yesterday evening, but I'm not sure exactly when it did...top teeth are hard to see and it's hard to get him to let us poke around in there! But I had checked a few days ago and it wasn't quite through yet.

His latest feat...he makes kissing noises! I say "kisses!" and make kissy faces at him. He can't pucker up his lips, but he figured out that he can make the noise by sucking on his tongue, so he sticks out his tongue and starts sucking on it when I say kisses. It's hilarious!! This all started yesterday.

He's getting better about saying Hi appropriately. Dad will come home from work and come around a corner. As soon as E sees him, he lets out a big happy Hi! Very cute! Oh! And he learned how to High 5 last week! That's pretty neat! He doesn't slap hands very well yet, but he smiles and puts his hand on the hand you're holding up. Sometimes he claps afterward if he's really excited.

A couple of stories to illustrate E's personality:
Most babies grab anything near them and stick it in their mouths, or they dig into food and make big old messes. Ethan's not like that. He likes to check stuff out, but he's very cautious and would rather observe things visually instead of just diving in. So, we went to a birthday party at a playground last weekend. I put Ethan down in the gravel by the playscape to see what he'd do. He looked at me like I was crazy for dropping him into the weird stuff, but he finally started playing with the rocks. He stared for a while, then picked one up, squeezed it in his fist, dropped it, then got another one, pinched it, held it up so he could see it better, tried to eat it (I stopped him there), and then picked up another one. Meanwhile, our neighbor plopped his son right next to Ethan. Hamzah is a week older, and he immediately grabbed two huge fistfuls of rocks and just dove right in and started digging! His dad mentioned that he'd never been in gravel before, either.

A similar thing happened on Friday at lunch. A friend and I got mashed potatoes for our little ones (her daughter is 2 weeks older than Ethan.) Vivi grabbed fistfuls of potatoes and immediately smeared them into her mouth, hair, cheeks, everywhere. It was adorable! Ethan looked at his, stuck out his pointer finger, slowly poked at the potatoes, scrunched up his eyes and nose, and just looked at me as though he were saying "this feels icky, but I want to eat it...help!" Then he opened up his mouth so I could spoon them in for him!

That's our kiddo! He's just very cautious and he likes what he likes. Squishy things are just not cool in his mind...not yet, anyway! He will hold and eat a banana until he's squeezed it so much that it's become soft, and then he'll get mad at it and I'll have to feed him the rest with a spoon. He really is a funny little guy! But he's a lot like his dad, and I love seeing those similarities unfold. He looks a lot like a Garza, but he's definitely Jim's little boy!! It makes this Mommy's heart happy to see her two favorite boys playing together. :o)

What we've been up to!

Well, things are still crazy here, but I think things will start settling down soon....I hope!
Let's see, Ethan got tooth #5 on Saturday the 19th. It's the tooth next to the front bottom right tooth. He'll be ready for steak soon! :o)

I turned 30 on the 21st, the same day that the movers packed up Mo's house in Houston. She showed up in Austin later that evening, so we all went out to dinner at the Olive Garden. We ended up sitting right next to a couple that had just found out that they are a few weeks pregnant. The guy kept asking questions like "How old it that?" and "Can it walk?" with a deer-in-the-headlights look on his face. At least Ethan was a sweet baby during dinner, but he just kept staring at them. I think the girl was amused, but the guy was a little freaked out. Quite funny!

The movers came and dropped Mo's stuff off all day Tuesday, and she went back to Houston that night to finish cleaning up the old house. They closed on the sale of her house, and she came HOME to Austin on Friday afternoon. YAY!

Friday, I caught Ethan clapping while I was folding laundry. I got all excited so I started encouraging him. He's clapping a lot now, and he gets SO excited!

My parents came for a quick visit on Saturday. They loved on him and enjoyed watching him show off his crawling, cruising, standing, talking, and clapping skills. We went to dinner at Rudy's BBQ with Mo. We brought Ethan home and gave him a bath. He learned how to splash last night. He was cracking himself up!! There is nothing in this world more yummy than his little laugh!

So, stuff on the horizon...Mo's still got to get settled in to her new house. Jim will probably not be employed after May 1st (so we think, but probably.) We're still hopeful that things will get straightened out soonish, but ugh. And my dad is having knee surgery on May 8th. He needs both knees done, but they'll only do one at a time. Ethan is getting really good at standing on his own and balancing, so we kind of think his first steps will come any day now.

Jim mentioned that it's been a really odd time because everything is so up in the air. The economy, the election, Mo's move, my parents' situation, and Jim's job. Maybe I should be more concerned, but we're happy and life is good, even thought it's been stressful.

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!

Catching up

It's been a while since the last blog because Ethan and I both got really bad colds. But we're all better and finally getting back into the swing of things!

Ethan was having issues with his appetite while he was sick, but now he's eating almost anything we put in front of him! He's eating chunks of cheddar cheese all by himself. While I was still sick, we made chicken and veggie soup and a beef pot roast, and he had bits of both meals. We went to Chuy's with Mo on Easter Sunday and Ethan ate some of our beans, rice, guac, and cheese. We had chinese food and he ate some of my chicken and soft veggies. At a birthday party on Friday, he chowed down on bits of my hot dog. He got upset when it was all gone, so I ended up getting a second one so we could share it, too! We went to the County Line last night and he ate some brisket, chicken, smoked turkey, beans, and a taste of potato salad. I gave him some cottage cheese and pineapple that I had for breakfast recently, but he was not happy about that snack. But kiddo is an eating machine, which is great because he burns SO MUCH energy playing!

Ethan is cruising like a champ, and he's starting to let go of whatever he's supporting himself on to see how long he can stand on his own. So far, he's still pretty bad at it, but he does stand a little longer each time he tries! :o) He's also got this hippo toy that he can pull up on and push around. It's so funny to watch this teeny little baby walking behind a big blue hippo! But he's really good at walking as long as he has something to hold on to. He even runs sometimes if he's excited and gets in a hurry...like when he's chasing Daisy!

He's also talking a lot now...sort of. He's been saying something that sounds kind of like "Daisy" when he sees her, but it's not really consistent yet. He's also been saying "Hi", but we can't tell yet if he realizes what he's doing, or if he's just making noises. It kind of seems like he knows he's saying Hi, though, because he says it when looking right at us, and he waved a couple of times while saying it...? Hmmm, I guess we'll know for sure soon enough!

Tomorrow we are going to start his Music Together classes, and we're really excited about that. Ethan looooves it when Jim plays Ukulele, keyboard, or guitar for him, and I'm always singing to him or playing CDs. He also "plays" his toy piano and xylophone all the time. He seemed to really enjoy the free sample class we went to last month, so I think he's going to really enjoy it.

Other than Ethan stuff, we've got a lot of crazy stuff going on over here with Jim's work, my parents' whole drama, and Mo's sale of her home and upcoming move to Austin. There is a lot of change and upheaval in the air right now, so we're just trying to take everything one step at a time and just have faith that everything will work out the way it is supposed to. Please keep our family in your thoughts and prayers as we muddle our way through these crazy times!

Oh yeah!

Oh, and as of today, Ethan is no longer a vegetarian. He had chicken and sweet potatoes for dinner. Mmmm, meat! He also had a bit of cookie at the wedding....mmmm, sugar! :o)