Sleepy Time

Well, I think I've settled on a name. I've got a site published, but I've still got quite a bit of work to do on it. I kind of want a break from all of this blogging stuff. . .

In the meantime, I just want to share that since we visited my sister's family last weekend, bed times have in general been much easier. It was a very nice and sudden change. He doesn't even need me to sing to him most of the time.

Ethan went to bed well tonight, but then he was having a hard time falling asleep and after a while cried out for me. I finally went in to him (again) and rocked him into dreamland. It was a little frustrating at first to have to go in again when Terral was ready to help out, but Ethan just wanted me. Then as I rocked him I felt the peace of holding my child and I thought, "I am needed. I am wanted. I am loved."

I am so very blessed.

Thankful for Hair

Sorry about the absence. We decided kind of last minute to go up to a family reunion in SLC, and we've been busy enjoying the company of awesome people. But now we're back, and I get to tell you about all the fun we've had the past week. :)

But first, there is that little issue of my pictures, and the fact that we are rather sleep deprived after all our late nights talking. So for tonight, I'm just going to do a little experiment and share with you a picture of Ethan's awesome Thanksgiving morning hair.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/mama_lisitsa/8222185165/in/photostream

No Words Needed

Ultrasound Results

This morning we went to St. George for our ultrasound. We were really happy to find out last month that the ultrasound tech we went to in Vegas last time now makes trips to St. George once a month.

Everything checked out beautifully. She looked perfectly formed. Oops, did I just let slip the fact that we're having a girl? Well, we are! The feeling we had is now confirmed. :)

She was a bit of a contortionist. Look at that spine curvature! She had her feet above her head a lot of the time. She made it a little difficult to get good shots because she was moving and twisting so much.

 

 But the tech was able to find everything he needed to let us know that her growth and development are right on track.

It feels good to say "she" without qualifiers. :) We're very excited to meet this little girl and find out what her personality is like!

Ethan did pretty well during the first part of the ultrasound. He liked to point at the screen and say "baby!" But after a while he lost interest and just wanted to go play with the big exercise ball in the waiting room. Who can blame him?

After the ultrasound, we took a little walk and then went to our midwife appointment, which also went very well. Yay for good growth!

Instead of driving straight home, we stopped at the pioneer park place so we could hike around a bit. Ethan loved it!

 He saw daddy climbing,

 and he wanted to try it too!

 So he climbed,

 and climbed,

and climbed!

It was a wonderful day.

Blocks

Lately Ethan's really been enjoying playing with blocks. He likes to have his tractors "dig" them up and gather them in a pile on our laps. And of course he likes to build towers and knock them down. One day he just started lining them up on the couch and calling them a train. It's so fun to see him make connections and use his imagination!

Last week he was building a train again, and this time he called it his "Hallo" train. Since he was a train conductor for Halloween, he now associates trains with Halloween. :)

And here he is playing with blocks (that were really filler pieces for the stairs) with grandma. He was so excited about the house they built. :)

After Ethan's nap today, he and Terral went outside to play for a while. Ethan ended up playing with his outside blocks and his tractors and didn't want to come in, even when he got cold. He built another "Hallo" train and was excited to show it to me. He wasn't quite as excited by the time I got the camera, but it's still fun to hear him talk about it. :)

Then this evening I went to a Relief Society activity. When I came home, Terral showed me some pictures and told me how Ethan got out his blocks and drill (a taped piece of paper roughly in the shape of a drill) and kept saying, "House? House?" So he and Terral built a house. Ethan was the creative force, and Terral was the stabilizer. It's a pretty awesome design!

Our Blustery Day

Today was (and still is) a very blustery day indeed. I didn't even go outside because Terral offered to take care of the chickens so I wouldn't have to see the carnage that was Chris cutting up his deer. (We let him hang it in our garage since it's cooler up here.)  I thought today would be a good day to work on Ethan's costume since the weather wasn't conducive to painting, and I ended up just doing inside chores all day.

Terral met with a guy today who teaches MovNat, which is something he's been interested in for a while. He spent quite a while in the park having fun and learning some new things. Heather has become interested in it too, so she came to watch, but ended up talking quite a bit to the instructor's wife. Terral says I would have enjoyed talking with her, but alas, I had opted for costume work instead.

Speaking of which, I did get a good amount done on it. Ethan is going to be a train engineer for Halloween, and today I worked on his cap. I'm really excited with the way it's turning out! Tomorrow I'll try it on him and finish putting it together.

Today was the first day I've used my new craft table. It was given to me by a friend recently. It's really nice for laying things out and cutting. :) And if I need to, I can pull out another leaf and make it nearly twice as long.

And just for cutness/random's sake, here's a picture of Ethan from a walk we took the other day. His toy tractors are pretty much extensions of his arms these days. And it isn't infrequent that he has to have his tractor, wrecking ball, and backhoe all together (and he does know the names of them all). You can't tell right away, but he is carrying all three in this picture.

In other Ethan news, I've been meaning to write for a while a couple of things about the way he is currently. He definitely knows his mind and will tell you "no" if he doesn't want something, but most of the time he will answer any question with "yeah!" in a variety of inflections. It's pretty amazing how he will match his affirmative answer to the occasion. 

He is also rather particular sometimes about things being just so. He'll straighten the rug, close doors, put toys away on his own (when it strikes his fancy), and is usually very eager to help me clean things up. Apparently Terral was the same way when he was little.

2012 Family Pictures

A couple weeks ago we had some family pictures taken in our yard. For the first time, we actually had another photographer do it for us. We got a really good deal though. She's a friend of Terral's in her very last class before graduation, and she needed some models for a project. As a thank you, she offered to take our pictures for free.

We just took them in our yard, and I was really pleased at the background our house could provide. It was a fun and different experience to have another photographer there.

I of course had a hard time choosing between pictures, so I've loaded quite a few of them. One of the nice things about having someone else take pictures instead of doing it ourselves is that it's a lot easier to get a variety of shots.

Enjoy!

 

 

Fall Mountain

I'm finally getting around to posting pictures from our little outing to the mountains.

We'd really been feeling the need to get out and up for quite some time, but just never found an opportunity to do so. And of course not having a car complicated matters. But with both opportunity and means, we took a drive on Sunday afternoon.

Someone told us that the leaves were already gone on the top of the mountain, so we were worried we'd lost our opportunity, but we saw lots of pretty colors!

 We took a little hike which started out on this dirt road that had some pretty gnarly grooves in it. Every time Ethan went down one, he would say, "Whoa!" He had such fun! It really made me want to give him more opportunities like this.

 Terral couldn't resist climbing this trunk and jumping off.

 And of course Ethan had to follow his daddy's footsteps. He wasn't willing to relinquish his apple though. :) And he insisted on wearing his backpack on our hike.

 We took pictures in front of this big fallen tree. The sun was in our faces, but our camera-conscious boy tried so hard to look the right way in spite of the glare.

  

Gorgeous glow!

 And this is apparently the face Ethan makes when he says cheese.

 Airplane!

 Playing helicopter along another dirt road.

Ethan's been learning about letters, numbers, and colors lately, and he started singing the alphabet song when we got to Crystal Springs. There's a really good echo there, so he got to learn about that too. :)

I had to take a picture of our faithful volvo which is again in the business of taking us on adventures. :)

 We left when the descending sun left the air too cold for me, but we couldn't resist making one more stop before home. We didn't stay long, but the boys did get to throw some rocks in the water. :D

 Oh, it was so nice to get a recharge from nature! I think that there are pieces of the human soul that can only be fed by being among Heavenly Father's creations.

Messy job

This is Terral posting tonight...
Mary was gone to a Relief Society activity tonight and I was on the computer while Ethan was playing. He brought a drywall mud knife over to me that Mary's dad left for us to use. He calls it "bblablam tool" or Grampa's tool. He also had a little toy spatula that is "Etan tool". It is his version of the mud knife! He kept saying this over and over while pointing to the wall. We are working on smoothing out the awful texturing job in the kitchen. He apparently wanted to work on it with me. So why not? We opened the bucket of mud and went to work!

Ethan at work. Next time I'm just going to give him a smallish putty knife because he seems to do a pretty good job :) 

He thought it was pretty cool to get all messy!

By the way if you didn't notice Ethan is feeling MUCH better. By the end of the day yesterday he was up and playing around and today he acted as if he had never been sick. 

**edit by Mary** I just wanted to remember that Ethan said his first prayer today. It was a very proud moment for his earthly—and I'm sure his Heavenly—parents. :)