Meltdown Madness

Ethan's stomach flu only lasted a day or so, then he was pretty much back to normal. Unfortunately, Jen caught the same thing a few days later and was up vomiting all Monday night/ Tuesday morning. It just doesn't seem fair moms get sick with all they have on their plates! It took a few days until she felt like she had much of an appetite again . . . not even ice cream sounded good for a few days.


Ethan has been very emotional for the last week. It has been so difficult to deal with. For example, today decided to save time to put Ethan's socks and shoes on in the car when we got to church since we were running late. Ethan was very upset that we disrupted the order of things and demanded that we return home to put his shoes on. He was wailing in the foyer of the church for about 15 minutes before we finally figured out how to calm him down. We hope this phase ends quickly.


Anyway, we managed to snap a few pictures of the kids this week.


Brooklyn loves Ethan's toothbrush. We think she is just envious that he has teeth.



The other day, Brooklyn saw some of Ethan's "big boy" underwear in the laundry basket. Ethan saw her reaching for a pair and threw himself into the laundry basket to prevent her from touching his property. I couldn't help but laugh and had to grab the camera.

We worked in the garden this weekend digging up some ugly shrubs and rose bushes we inherited with the house and replacing them with plants we like. While clearing out the area, we picked our pumpkins. This spring, we had numerous volunteer plants pop up in our compost heap. We saved a few to see what they might become. To our surprise one plant that we thought would be a squash turned out to be a pumpkin plant! Ethan is excited about them.

Ethan and Brooklyn helped dig in the dirt. Ethan thought it was funny to put dirt in his ears, head, tummy, etc. Brooklyn just wanted to eat it. She wasn't very happy when we would wash her off, move her from the dirt, or when it was time to come inside.

Puke

The other day we were having dinner a family in our ward, and we were telling them how Ethan rarely gets sick. We must have really jinxed ourselves, because that night Ethan woke up at about 10:30 pm. We went in to see what was wrong and found puke covering everything in his bed. Poor kid. We cleaned everything up and Kyle slept with Ethan to keep him comforted. Ethan threw up three more times that night and once the next morning, but has been himself ever since. Thank goodness.

Other than that this has been a pretty dull week. Shiver me timbers! We didn't even get a chance to really celebrate National Talk Like a Pirate Day on Saturday.

We need to get better at taking pictures of things.

We're pretty stoked about the Heroes premier tomorrow.

September Harvest

How can September be almost half over already?!

Brooklyn is now 10 months old. She has been especially cute and sweet lately. Here are a few things she has started doing lately:

• She is now crawling really well on her knees. It probably took her a little longer to get it down than Ethan because of all the dresses she wears. We didn't realize how much harder it is to crawl when wearing a dress.
• She loves to clap her hands and pull herself up to her feet holding on to anything she can find. This has caused quite a few spills and tumbles lately since not everything is as sturdy as she thinks it is. She has pulled the garbage can down on herself a time or two.
• She also loves to cuddle. She loves to lay her head on our shoulders and say, "Ahhhh."
• For a while now she has loved dancing with Mom and Dad. It is probably her favorite thing to do. It is failproof for cheering her up and making her laugh and chuckle. Even when she is sobbing one minute, within a few seconds of dancing her mood will change completely.
  

Ethan's potty training has been going really well. He has been diaper-free for over two weeks and has only had a few accidents, and only one at night. We were away from home all day yesterday and he had no trouble.

When Ethan's food is too hot, he asks us to blow on it for him. The other day when his carseat was too hot as we were getting into the car he asked us to blow on that for him too.

He has lately been obsessed with "Toy Story." When he picked out underwear a few weeks ago, we got him a pack that included an assortment featuring several Pixar movies. He hadn't seen the movie then, but has since and loves to fly his Buzz Lightyear and Woody toys (thanks Grandma Morrey) around the house saying, "To infini'ee ba'ond!"

Yesterday, Kyle's work had an open house at their office/campus. They only open their doors to non-employees once every few years because of the nature of the work they do. It was fun to see some of what he does and to actually see his desk. Ethan was excited to get to go to his work and Kyle's parents even joined us. Jen has two uncles that work there too, so it was fun surprise to bump into family while there (Uncles Dave, Jim, Randy, Russell, their families and even her Grandpa Nelson). Due to security restrictions, however, we unfortunately couldn't take our camera so we don't have any pictures.

We have been so busy harvesting from our garden lately. Over the last few weeks we've been canning like crazy and still have so much more we want to do. We've canned stewed tomatoes, a few batches of plain tomatoes, salsa, spaghetti sauce, green beans, and applesauce. We've also blanched and frozen our corn. We still plan on doing at least two more batches of salsa, apple pie filling, apple slices, and more applesauce. Maybe it will be a blessing when our garden freezes. We are grateful for all we've been able to add to our food storage.

Hurray for the premier of "The Office" this week!!