Merry Christmas!

Ethan loves St. George and cousins!

We visited St. George for Thanksgiving and had so much fun. Ethan's favorite parts were......throwing rocks/jumping in puddles. He could spend all day doing that and would have had I not lugged his screaming body back inside every once in a while.

... hanging with cousins, especially Chase. Ethan would beg for Chase and try to play with him. But when it was the other way around, when Chase showed interest in playing with Ethan, he would run to me, terrified of Chase. This, of course, diminished as the trip wore on and I think Ethan finally got used to his awesome cousin, Chase.

... riding scooters. There was this paved little hill between condos that he loved speeding down. I will attribute this to his new obsession with Caden, his 12-year-old cousin, who hauled down that hill as fast as he possibly could (by himself, of course). Ethan still asks for Caden.

...playing on the rocks, though it was more like tripping on the rocks. At one point, someone said, "Whose child is that?" and I looked up the hill to see two little feet sticking straight up in the air. Aunt Robin went up and found Ethan laying at the bottom of a pile of rocks.

I can't stop thinking about this awesome trip. A big thanks to Ken and Judi for the awesome condos and to the entire Roe family for the great company!

Somebody got a haircut

Fun times with Grandma Roe

Ryan's mom came to visit this month. We had so much fun with her! Ethan still looks for her around the house and asks for "Gamma." Fortunately, we will see her again on Tuesday!

Our little puppy

We were outside the Washington D.C. Temple visitor's center eating lunch when Ethan dropped his peanut butter and honey sandwich on the concrete, fell to his hands and knees and ate the food off the ground like an animal.

I would have stopped him but...

I couldn't put my camera down.

What do a cowboy, a cat and a man with two heads have in common?

I know, my costume isn't the most creative, but Ryan's more than makes up for that, I think.The two-headed man a la Michael Scott... sort of. Ryan made his twin head by himself with balloons, paper mache and paint. He won the "funniest costume" award.Ethan bull-leggedly stomped around all evening, like a true cowboy. We have no idea how or why he decided to walk this way but it fit his costume well.

Meganopia

I started my very own blog. I was getting sick of posting about myself on Ethan's blog. Click the image on the right sidebar to view it.

Hooray for fall walks

There is no better time for site-seeing, discovering and crunching things under your feet.

Learned this one the painful way

Ethan doesn't wake up in the middle of the night often, but when he does I become a super grumpy mom. I try to be civil, so I enter his dark room and lift him out of his crib, lay him on the bed nearby and lie down next to him. My mood transforms as he reaches around my neck with his stubby arms and pulls my face to his. He places my cheek to his cheek and we lie there, breathing in each other's hair.

We were locked in this embrace a couple of mornings ago and when Ethan finally let go of my neck, I noticed that my cheek was wet. In the dark I traced around his face with my fingers and noticed that his ear was also damp. I imagined that tears had fallen into his ear as he was crying when he first woke up.

Ethan talked and sang but never fell back asleep, so after a couple of hours I finally decided to get up for the day. When I reached for my son I noticed his ear was still wet. I picked him up, turned on the light and felt my stomach twist.

Out of my son's ear and reaching across his cheek was one of those humongous worm boogers that hang out of kids noses while they are playing outside in the dead of winter. Only this was no snot, and when I gently pushed on the outside of his ear, more of the gooey stuff flowed out.

I immediately knew I had failed my child. Earlier that week, I had decided that at 20 months he had already reached the terrible twos and that would explain his extremely whiny behavior. I remember thinking he must just be really tired when he was grabbing at his ears. I had wondered why, during his recent baths, he had freaked out when we laid his head down in the water. And after who knows how many days of my ignorance and inaction, Ethan's eardrum - under the extreme pressure of infection - had finally ruptured.

I thought he would be deaf and angry with me for the rest of his life. But the doctor acted like it was no big deal. We just need to give Ethan some antibiotics for a couple of weeks and his ear will heal!

The bad news: there is still puss oozing out of his ear and getting all over everything. More good news: without the earache, my kid is pretty happy now so I think we still have a few months until the terrible twos.

Bodily functions one-oh-one

Yesterday afternoon Ethan belched. After a few seconds he looked at me like he'd just discovered America and began to yell, "Fot, fot, fot!"

"Close Ethan! But that's a burp, not a fart."

Fall on the farm

We harassed the chickens,
drank freshly-pressed apple cider,
conducted a large wooden train,
conquered our fear of tunnels -
and of animals our size -and picked out a "punkin." Check those off our list of fall activities.

Down at Fraggle Rock...

Today we visited the Jim Henson exhibit on the National Mall and viewed many of his creations, including Kermit the frog and Burt and Ernie. Oh, and we saw our friends from Fraggle Rock, which not only transported me back to the days when I loved that show, but also reminded me of the time in 9th grade when my friend Jory took my fragile adolescent self esteem and sat on it by telling me that I "look just like those little workers on Fraggle Rock!"
Can you see the resemblance?

My kid loved the exhibit, as well as the awesome little play area at the end of it. Unfortunately, I couldn't document that because no photos were allowed. So here are some photos we took at lunch:

Found some literary gold at Goodwill today...

Drinking, video games, flashing...

Recently, two people have let me know that my kid looks like a frat boy. Yeah, probably not the look I was going for. But he's beginning to show the early signs...




And don't worry, I may have thought it, but I didn't tell them that their child looks like a balding pentagenarian.

Mmmm

My mouth waters for this fabric.


I long to clothe all my furniture in these organic prints by New Zealand-based artist Leanne Culy. The warm gold and cool blue hues would harmonize well with my ugly brown couch (and maybe make it look not-so-ugly).

Too bad this lamp shade costs more than a week's worth of groceries...


...and these fabulous fabrics cost anywhere from 85 to 122 American dollars PER METER!Maybe we could go hungry for a few weeks.
Or maybe I'll just dream about them for now.

Introducing

Arlington's
newest
CPA!

In memory

Seven years ago, I gaped at the television monitor in my high school classroom in Utah and watched this unfold.

I was roughly 1,920 miles away. I was in one of the safest places on the planet. I felt violated.
Today I live just a couple of blocks away. It's a constant reminder of the lives lost on this day.