Mama's little helper

For the last couple of weeks, we've been preparing to pain our house. The first phase in this project has been to remove all of the wallpaper throughout the house - a task that the previous owners of this house made quite difficult by painting over the wallpaper. But the work went much faster with Ethan's help. He had is own tool, a spatula similar to Mom's scraper, that he would tap the wall with, copying Mom.

After we finished the walls in the hall, we attacked the bedroom, which the previous owners made even more challenging by taking off some of the wallpaper before they painted. This made our project a guessing game as to whether we were taking off wallpaper or just wall. We think we got all of the wallpaper off, as you can see below.
Ethan loves to play on the stairs. When he is playing downstairs, sometimes he will make a break for it down the hall, wanting to play on the stairs. Of course, Mom and Dad are always supervising (don't call Child Protective Service's please). His newest trick on the stairs is being able to come down the stairs instead of just going up.

The other day, Kyle got a letter in the mail that we thought was pretty funny. Click on it to see what it says in the first paragraph. We're thinking about signing up for it, just for a laugh.

Another tooth!??

The other day I was unloading the dishwasher, and as usual, Ethan was roaming the kitchen. I turned around and found he had climbed up on the door. He loves to "help" me in the kitchen. In other words, he plays with dishes in the dishwasher and pulls things out of drawers. This weekend we finally got around to installing some childproofing latches, but unfortunately it doesn't keep him from "helping" me with the dishes.
Saturday night was spaghetti night at the Morrey house, as you can see. Ethan really enjoyed it.

We found out this week that Ethan has something called a double tooth. He got his front teeth months ago, but had a small gap between one of them and the tooth you can see on the far right. We just figured he was going to have crooked baby teeth. Last weekend, we discovered a really small tooth wedging its way between the two. After doing a little research it seems that it is fairly common (perhaps 1 out of 200 kids have something like this). The front tooth on the right is actually one tooth with two crowns. I called my mom and she said my brother had one when he first got his teeth. Fortunately for him his permanent tooth came out normal. Strange stuff!
Kyle started school this week. He is taking two graduate classes, and so far he thinks they are interesting. They haven't taken up too much time yet, but they will. His work ironically is just starting to get busier too, requiring some overtime.

Jen started going to step aerobics three times a week before Christmas. It is about the only time she gets out of the house so she is really enjoying it. It has been good to help get through the January blah. She also recently started removing the wallpaper that covers some of our walls. The previous owners have taught us how not to do so many things. Word to the wise: Never paint over wallpaper!! It is becoming quite the project.

A Dirty Job

Ethan has been getting anxious to get outside again so he can play in the dirt. To keep himself sane, he has decided that the potting soil is good enough dirt for now, so he has been attempting to get into it at every chance he gets. We have been pretty good about keeping him out of it, but the other day when Ethan was helping Mamma clean the kitchen, he found the opportune moment, and went to town. Mamma was unable to resist taking a few pictures before cleaning him up (the damage had already been done anyway...why not just capture the moment to share with the world.)

Jen thought Ethan was just spreading it on the floor until we saw this incriminating evidence that he was indeed tasting it (and apparently it tastes pretty good, judging by his expression).

(Ethan is helping me type this, sor45ry i/t is a little hard to read)
In other news, kearlier this , b41e week, jjyygrfGrandma Morrey camJe (Ethan has been relieved of his duties, and is no longer helping) down to babysit Ethan and let us go on a date. We went to Enchanted, which was really enchanting. We liked it, but we especially liked going on our first date in many, many months.

Tornado at the Morrey's

Ethan has discovered how to get into the kitchen drawers and cupboards, and it's quickly becoming one of his favorite things to do.
Ethan's uncle Michael (Morrey) had a shirt that he never got to wear when he was a baby. Grandma Morrey held on to it for 21 years and gave it to Ethan when he was born. Ethan finally got big enough and wore it today for the first time. Classic 80's. You can also see his newest haircut.
Ethan got this toy for Christmas, and he loves to push it all over the house. Sometimes it gets turned sideways and won't roll, and Ethan gets frustrated. Funny stuff. We're just glad that he is enjoying his toys.

In other news, we had a pretty bad wind storm on Friday that took a few (more) shingles off of the roof, but nothing that will be too hard to fix. There were reports on the news that Tooele had 100 mph wind gusts and parts of the city were out of power for a while, but we didn't get it that bad. Everyone's OK. We didn't get much snow out of it either--only about 1/2 in.