Lil' Gardener

Kyle and Jen (and Ethan) have been spending a lot of time in the yard lately trying to get our garden in. It has been a long process, but we are almost there. We are making raised beds for our garden since we didn't have a lot of success with our soil last year. Kyle has been doing a lot of digging trying to extend our sprinkler system to water our new beds.

Ethan has been our little helper in the garden. For a while now he has been interested in playing with our gardening gloves, but the other day he let us know that he wanted to try them on. He absolutely loved it. We just had to grab the camera. (Funny side note: he also has taken an interest in putting video tape boxes on his hands like gloves and running around the basement.)Jen learned that it isn't safe to leave the flour bucket open with Ethan around. She turned her back for just a second and he was there scooping flour out onto the floor. When she turned back in surprise, he understood that mama wasn't happy and he tried to clean up his mess by picking up the flour and putting it back. That is what he was trying to do here. You can tell he tried to eat some first.
Here are a few pictures from our recent visit to Cache Valley. We took Ethan to First Dam to feed the ducks. He was kind of interested in the ducks, but had more fun running around. When he was given bread crumbs to feed the ducks, he just put them in his mouth.



P.S. This week our new baby is this big:

Mother's Day Surprise

We're expecting again!! We thought it would be fun to save the announcement for Mother's Day. Since Kyle's brother left on his mission shortly before Ethan was born, we thought it would be fun for him to break the news when he called home on Sunday. It was a fun surprise! His brother should be home a few days before the baby is born.

Jen's family was surprised at the news as well. It was nice that no one really noticed her growing belly, but it probably helps that we live 100 miles away and don't see each other as frequently as we used to.

Baby is due November 10 and is currently the size of a lemon (see picture below). We should find out in about a month whether it is a boy or a girl.

Jen has been feeling pretty good the last few weeks but has had strong cravings for bagels with cream cheese and cocoa puffs (not together. . .yet).

For those of you thinking, "What? Again?" (like Jen's sister's response when she heard the news) Ethan and Baby will be a little over 20 months apart and we always wanted to have our first two close. We are just grateful that Ethan will be in nursery by September. We couldn't be more excited and look forward to going through this process again knowing what we are in for (at least we hope we do).

A few of his favorite things

We get a kick out of some of the things that Ethan just adores, and we've been thinking about posting them for several weeks. Well, today we decided that since we didn't have anything else to post, we'd share.

Ethan loves to push his stroller more than ride in it. Last week, we went to the park a few blocks away from our house and he insisted on pushing the stroller all the way home himself. He also wants to push the shopping carts when we are at the grocery store. We have to be patient when he does because he cannot go too fast.

He loves kitchen utensils, especially wooden spoons.

If he ever gets a chance to get into our bathroom, he heads straight for the dental floss. He loves to carry it around the house. We have two of them and it took us a few days to locate them recently. One was under our bed, the other in one of Kyle's church shoes.


Of course you know he loves digging in the dirt with mom's little shovel. What kid doesn't love playing with a cell phone. Some know this well since Ethan has called you by accident! We can't wait until he gets better at this one, but we cannot keep the broom in its place. He is always dragging it around the house.

These are two of Ethan's favorites. He wants us to read them to him probably 10 times a day, no joke. Both Kyle and I can recite these in our sleep. "Big A little a what begins with A . . . ."
He loves to look in the oven to see what's cooking.

This is a fun one. Ethan loves his fluoride drops and gets excited when it it time to have the one drop he gets a day. He also loves to shake the bottle (it is childproof and we are careful, mom--don't worry!)
He even has his own keyboard to pound. He loves to fill his dump truck with his treasures and push them around the house.

No matter what we do we struggle keeping him out of the garbage. This is where he found his following treasure. . .

He can't help but pull these out of the garbage when he sees them.
He loves his empty yogurt container and spoon. Why buy this kid toys?
But most of all he loves his duckies. He sleeps with them every night. He loves to hug and bite them and roll around on the floor with them showing his love. So cute!!
And just for the record, today as we were going around taking pictures of everything, Jen checked the blog of some friends of ours Ryan and Michelle Guy, and just today they posted the same sort of thing. Well, we just wanted to say that we're not stealing the idea. We probably thought of it first - we've been planning on doing this for weeks - and they must have caught wind of it (even though they live in South Dakota), and stole our idea.

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!!