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: