Battle Wounds

Now that Ethan has become more confident walking and running, he has been getting more bumps and bruises over the last few weeks than ever before. Yesterday, was definitely the worst though. He was holding a wooden spoon when he fell down. His eye started swelling a bit, but it didn't last long. It got more red over time, but probably looked the worst when it first happened. Poor kid! It broke our hearts to see his cute little face like that and imagining how it hurt. He is a tough kid and only cried for a short time. He probably cries more when we put him down for a nap than when he is injured.
Then, today at church he slipped and scraped his chin on a chair in Sunday School. It made his chin bleed a little. We know that this is only the beginning of things to come!

Do you find that as you finish a big project another one comes at you from nowhere? Yeah, us too. Due to a water valve that accidentally was left dripping, we get to tear out and replace a bunch of sheet rock and insulation in our basement. It has been a week now and our family room is inaccessible to Ethan. It was one of his favorite places to play. We hope that we can fix it all quickly, but of course it had to happen at the end of Kyle's semester while he is busy with final projects and preparing for finals. Yuck!

On a happier note, school is going to be over in a week or so (at least until it starts again in June).

Gettin' Dirty

The last few weekends we have spent lots of time doing yard work. Ethan has absolutely loved it, though I couldn't get a smile from him for a picture. He just didn't want to be disturbed from his work. We spent all of Friday outside laying sod and preparing to lay it. It took much longer than we anticipated because Kyle accidentally broke a sprinkler pipe in the process. It was probably a good thing though because we added an extra sprinkler to ensure better coverage of the area we sodded.

Ethan roamed all over the yard but spent lots of time digging in the dirt. You can only imagine how dirty he was at the end of the day. Unfortunately, the day wasn't free of accidents. We have a fairly steep driveway which has led to several falls.
Here is the result of his latest fall on the driveway. :( Here are the before and after shots of our project. We heard from neighbors that the woman who originally created this rock circle said it represented the world and she would have plants shaped like each of the continents. We have had lots of comments of how we have made the neighborhood look better.
Ethan climbed into his dump truck the other day and I couldn't resist snapping a photo.Lastly, for all of you still waiting for your trees to bud. Eat your heart out!! (This was taken this afternoon)

Early Riser

Ethan has always been a really good sleeper. However, the other day he decided to wake up at 5:30 am. (Kyle didn't care because that is about when he gets up for work anyway.) We brought him into bed and let him play with Kyle's phone. For the first time he put it up to his face and pretended to talk. Whenever Jen would say "talk to grandma," Ethan would put the phone behind his head instead of up to his ear. It was hard to get a good picture or video but we managed to snap a few. Please forgive the lighting; again it was only 5:30 and our eyes weren't ready to turn on many lights.

Here is the video of that morning.

And here is a photo we just threw in for Ethan's grandmas.Ethan was really funny at church today. Some of you may have heard about Ethan's church girlfriend. He loves to be around her. Today during Sunday School she came over to visit him and he kept trying to impress her by giving her some of his toys. He tried several times to give her his ducky (which is his very favorite thing in the world). She just sat there and didn't take it and he suddenly out of the blue burst into tears. Rejected!! Its too bad that the heartache and disappointment is starting so early in his life! Poor kid!!

36 Trees Disappear

Rather than continue to cut down the annoying willow trees lining our yard ourselves and risking our own safety, we hired some licensed professionals do the job for us. It took two guys guys with chainsaws and a cherry picker and Kyle running the chipper nearly 8 hours on Wednesday. Below you can see the before and after pics.


Jen's uncle Mike came on Saturday to haul away most of the wood. We figured that if we only count the wood from the trees cut this week, and not the truck loads from the fall, we had about 8 truckloads. Mike took about 7 of them. We also have about 5 or 6 loads of wood chips left over to use in our yard.

The day after the trees were cut down, Kyle went out to uncover the compost pile we've been working on for the last few months. When Ethan saw that his daddy was playing in the wood chips, he just had to come over and play too.

About an hour after finishing his day working in the yard, Kyle volunteered to be a clown for Cub Scouts (which just ended up being a guy in a wig since the person who was supposed to bring the costume forgot to bring it). Some of you might not know that he is very talented at tying balloon animals. The kids and adults were very impressed. The favorite request of the night was a motorcycle. Kyle was very exhausted and a bit sunburned.
Now with our trees gone, we need to figure out how to deal with all our stumps. Renting a stump grinder runs over $250 a day and we estimate we would need about 3 days to do the job. Yuck!! We aren't sure what we are going to do yet, but we are so glad that we don't have to clean up after our trees anymore!!