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I cannot believe my baby is 3 years old already!  Time really does fly by fast, even though you think some days will never end.  We still have days like that, but we also have days where I can’t believe it’s already time for them to go to bed.  Ethan starts preschool (Preschool!  Can you believe it?!) in a few weeks.  I know he will love it and learn so much, and I’m really looking forward to some just mommy and Isaac time, but I still can’t believe he’s already going to enter the school system and start his formal (used somewhat loosely here) education.

Ethan, I wish you all the best in life.  I want you to grow strong and healthy.  Most importantly, I want you to learn who God is, who you are in him, and why you need him so desperately.   You and your daddy and brother are the most important people in my life and I want you to know who should be most important in your life.  We can’t do this life on our own, we can only do it with God and people who think otherwise are only kidding themselves.  I want you to laugh, to love, to learn, to care about other people, to experience joy, to know where to turn when you experience sorrow, and to know that you will always be my baby boy.   You have made my life so much richer, you frustrate me, challenge me, make me laugh, and provide so much joy.  You are such a sweet sweet boy and I am so much better for having you in my life.  Never lose your laugh, your beautiful smile, and your way of touching my heart.  You are forever my baby and I love you more than I ever thought possible.  Happy birthday sweetheart!

If you ask mom “what’s for dinner?”,

She will go to the refrigerator to see what’s in there.

When she checks it, she will discover she has forgotten to thaw anything.

Then she will need to go to the freezer in the garage to see what she can cook quickly.

When she opens the garage door, her toddler will want to go with her.

When they go into the garage, he will see his tricycle sitting in the corner.

He will want to ride on it.

When they get the tricycle to the bottom of the driveway,

they will discover it is too hard to pedal without wearing shoes

so he will want to go inside to get them.

When they go inside to get his sandals,

the mom will remember she needs to change his diaper.

After she changes his diaper, she will wash her hands and want to check on his brother.

Upon checking the baby monitor, she will realize the baby is awake.

She will want to go get him.

When she gets him out of his crib, she will need to change another diaper.

Once the diaper is changed, she will try to throw it away.

She will discover that the trash can is full so she will need to empty it.

After she empties the trash, they will go back to the garage to throw it away.

They will see the tricycle sitting at the end of the driveway.

They will go back inside to put shoes on.

After everyone has shoes on, they will go back outside to ride on the tricycle.

When her toddler rides the tricycle, he will want to go around the block.

And, chances are, after they go around the block and get back home,

the husband will ask the mom, “what’s for dinner?”.

Ethan started swim classes last week, his first experience with “classes”.  The first day he sat on a chair.  The whole time.  The next time I told him that he had his choice the last time and that now it was mommy’s choice and I chose that he should get into the pool.  He said “ok”, hopped right in, and had a ball!  He’s had a few more reluctant starts, but once he gets in it’s really hard to get him back out.  We went swimming yesterday with a friend, and he loved it.  He practiced kicking and even blew a few bubbles.  He did not appreciate when she took him under water, but that’s ok, at least he didn’t freak out.  Isaac did not care for the water yesterday, I had to keep loosening his death grip around my neck, but he did finally loosen up and calm down about an hour into it.  I would love to say that it helped them take good naps yesterday, but just by reading that sentence you can tell that it didn’t.

We did something else yesterday evening.  We went to a kickoff party for our area’s Leukemia and Lymphoma Society.  We are walking again this fall in honor and support of our little friend Pierce, to help them find the treatments and cures that will save him.  He is doing well, but more money is always needed in this fight.  We spent a few hours at the Butterfly Pavilion walking around and watching the butterflies, always fascinating no matter how many times you see them!  Then we were treated to dinner provided very generously by Texas Roadhouse, which we were able to enjoy since there were no peanuts involved.  It was so nice to see so many people turn out to support such a great cause.  Our walk is in September, if you wish to donate to help our team meet its goals you can do that at http://pages.lightthenight.org/rm/Flatiron10/BMelton.  Thanks!

Isaac had his one year appointment yesterday, and he’s still a peanut.  Big surprise.  He now weighs a whopping 17# and is 29″ tall.  By the way, that weight included a dry diaper.  So  it doesn’t look like we’re going to get to the 20# any time soon to be able to turn him around in his car seat, good thing they recommend to wait until 2 years anyway.  He’s still in his infant seat, the one I had to stop using with Ethan at 5 months because I couldn’t carry him in it anymore!  But he’s just about the cutest, happiest little peanut that there is.  I’ve noticed I use peanut a lot with him, even though I should pick a  different variety of food to compare him to since he’s allergic to that particular comparison.

Speaking of peanuts, we were saddened to realize this evening that we can no longer go to my favorite steakhouse, Texas Roadhouse, because of the piles of peanuts and shells all over the place.  So we went to Lone Star instead and walked in the door to discover, you guessed it, piles of peanuts all over the place.   Sigh.  We ended up at Fazoli’s after finding an hour wait at Outback, the only nearby steakhouse without piles of legumes waiting to induce hives in our, well, munchkin.

Today we also went to find new chairs for the kitchen.  We’ve had bar stools at our island since we moved in here almost 6 years ago, and decided that they had to go after the boys have knocked them down more than once hurting the stools, the floor, and themselves.  So we went chair shopping, which is slightly different than table shopping because you don’t care what the matching table looks like.  Our chair shopping consisted of us finding chairs that we liked and then having Ethan see if he could climb up on them, which is how he gets into the chair to eat, and also testing to see if he and Isaac could knock them over.  It was a more unusual method of looking for furniture, but we needed to see if they would pass our tests for kitchen usefulness and safety.  We got two nice looking chairs that will look even nicer once we replace the floor next year to get rid of the abundance of scratches from our aforementioned old chairs.

And while I’m here, I want to say Happy Mother’s Day to my mom, Ryan’s mom, Ryan’s mom’s mom, all my mom friends, all my soon to be mom friends, and all my friends who want to be moms.  Tomorrow is for you, enjoy it!  And remind your husbands that they get to pick the restaurant for Father’s Day, not Mother’s Day. 

Isaac is finally brave enough to let go of the furniture.  In truth, it took a lot longer than we thought it would because he is such an on-the-go baby, but it has happened.  A friend told me I was now the parent of a toddler, but I thought I already was.  I’m not sure when Ethan ceased being a toddler.  He hasn’t started preschool so he isn’t really a preschooler yet, is he?  Maybe he’s just a two year old instead of a toddler.  He is most definitely a two year old, in all it’s glory, though it’s really not as bad as it could be.  Many people have told me to just wait until he’s 3 but I’m hoping that his sweet nature will allow for him to not be that bad.  But I truly know that anyone who thinks we are all inherently good had never had little kids.  I digress, a lot actually.  Isaac has finally started letting go of the furniture to walk away.  Sometimes he only makes it a step, but he made it about 10 steps last night before he finally plopped on his bottom.  He likes to walk around holding our hands, but he also likes to turn in circles that way.  He tries to go too many directions at once and his poor feet can’t keep up with his brain!  He is going to have so much fun chasing Ethan around once he has this skill mastered, and I’m going to have a whole new set of challenges present themselves.  Bring it on!

A few weeks ago we took Isaac to a specialist in Denver because he’s been wheezing ever since his first croup episode in January.  We wanted to be sure he didn’t have asthma or something else that needed to be treated.  He had been on a steroid nebulizer for a while because he was wheezing and we needed to open up his airways so that he could breathe easier.  But please don’t think that his wheezing slowed him down at all!  He was still just as active as ever, until he caught a stomach bug that laid him out for a while.  Anyway, he went to see a pediatric pulmonologist and had a few xrays done and a small allergy panel.  His xrays looked pretty good, his lungs look great but his trachea is a little “floppy”.  Basically, the muscles around it just haven’t gotten strong enough to fully support it yet, which is fairly common but usually doesn’t cause a problem.  As he gets bigger and stronger those muscles should strengthen too and the wheezing will stop.  For now, he is on an inhaler to help reduce any inflammation he may have to help prevent any scarring.  It is really hard to test a child his age for asthma though so he will continue on medication for at least a year to get through another cold and flu season, and we’ll reevaluate him again next year.  The allergy test showed that he is allergic to peanuts so our house is now a nut-free zone.  I was very sad to have to get rid of my peanut m&ms!  But I can’t take the chance that I could eat one, give Isaac a kiss, and cause him to go into anaphylactic shock.  I’m learning to read labels even more, since his doctor wants us to avoid all nuts entirely because many people will cross react and it’s very hard to predict which nuts he may react to.  We had started eating sunbutter (peanut butter made out of sunflower seeds instead of peanuts) a while ago and I’m glad we’re used to it now.  I have to watch cereals and all sorts of things to make sure there aren’t any forms of nuts in them.  I can’t avoid all products made in facilities that process nuts, it seems like all of them are, but I can do what I can to make sure we don’t have anything in our house that truly contain them.  We do have an epipen, but I pray that we’ll never have to use it.  We have a trainer that came with it so we also get the privilege of teaching anyone who takes care of him how to use it.  He has finally gotten over whatever stomach bug he picked up and is starting to eat well again, though I think he lost a lot of weight he couldn’t afford to lose so he weighs about the same as he did a month ago.   Hopefully we can start getting some weight on him!  Though now he’s really starting to walk more so I doubt it.  If only he would take some of my extra…

Isaac finally took his first real steps on his own today.    You should have heard all the clapping and yelling!  He got so distracted it took him a while to be able to do it again.  He was just playing with Ryan in the family room and for some reason took a few steps after he actually allowed Ryan to get him balanced.  Usually, when we try to get Isaac to hold still long enough to balance himself, he fights us and throws himself on the floor.  Ryan yelled for us to watch and Ethan and I came running down from upstairs (where he was helping me vacuum) to watch him take a few more steps.  I ran for the camera and was able to record it, yeah!  If I can figure out how, I will post the video to my facebook page so that you can see it and hear all the excited mommy, daddy, and big brother yelling in the background.    We’ve all been working on this for a while now, and it was so exciting to see him finally get the confidence (and the balance) to do what we knew he could.  Go Isaac! 

I sorted a bunch of photos from earlier this year and just now got them posted, enjoy! They are in the spring 2010 folder.

So it’s taken me a while to get back here to let you know how the rest of our vacation went.  After the Wild Animal Park, we went to Legoland, a somewhat silly name for a very fun amusement park.  I actually enjoyed it more than Disneyland, and I think Ethan did too.   Poor Isaac didn’t enjoy a lot of the trip since he was stuck in his stroller most of the time, but it’s a little bit his own fault since he’s too stubborn to let go and just walk.    Anyway, Legoland is perfect for kids from about Ethan’s age up to about 13 or so, especially for boys.  There are millions of legos all over the park made into people, characters, boats, buildings, and all sorts of fun things.  I loved that they have lego tables next to the waiting areas for a lot of the rides with longer lines so that the kids can play and then just hop back into line with their parents once they get closer to the front.  We rode in helicopters, cars, boats, a fire truck, pedal car, trains, and on another roller coaster.  It was much less crowded than Disney, had much more space, and offered a lot more for Ethan to do.  He’s just barely 36″ tall now, but that is the cutoff height for a lot of their rides so he was measured a lot, but passed every time and got to do a lot of fun things.  He really enjoyed riding in the planes and steering a boat.  I think my favorite was riding the fire truck.  We had to pump the truck down to the other end while in competition with 3 other families, pump to get water through our hoses, aim at a “window” to put out a fire, and then jump back in the truck, and pump our way back to the end.  We got 2nd place, pretty good considering Lora had to run off to chase down Ethan when we got off to put out the fire and John and I had to pump and aim at the same time, which is considerably harder than it sounds.  It was really fun, and harder work than we expected!  I had a great time getting to hang out with Ethan and spend time just playing.  Ryan didn’t get to experience all of the park because he left early to take Isaac home for a nap, which was very considerate of him, but we did miss him.  If you ever do go, you HAVE to go to the Granny Apple stand up at the top of the park for their apple fries, they are fabulous!  They taste kind of  like apple pie and I’m going to have to figure out how to make them myself. 

On Friday we went back down to San Diego to the USS Midway.  It is an aircraft carrier that was decommissioned in the early 90’s after seeing almost 50 years of service.  It was really interesting walking around.  It seemed smaller in some ways than I imagined, and bigger in others.  I think it was mostly that the planes that were on it were smaller than the planes I’m used to flying on, but the ship held a huge number of them.  I can’t imagine how long it took people to get used to finding anything on there, all the hallways looked the same and it was just one door after another.  It seemed like we were walking in circles, yet we didn’t see the same thing twice.  At least, I don’t think we did!    Ethan loved looking at all the planes.  We spent part of the evening walking on the dock near the house we were staying in and got a fabulous dinner.  It was a great way to end a really fun week.

We had a good flight back, all three of my guys slept most of the way home and I actually got to read on the plane, which is almost unheard of!  We got home to much colder weather than what we’d been used to, but we’re readjusting to the alternating snowy and warm days.  We had a great trip and have definitely put San Diego on our list of places we want to go back to!  A big thanks to Gramma and Papa for a wonderful vacation!  I have gone through some pictures, now we just need to get them posted, soon I promise!

We’re just over halfway through our vacation in beautiful, sunny, even warmer than we thought it would be glad we didn’t pack long sleeves Southern California.   We have been busy!  We went to Sea World on the first day, which was so much fun.  We got there just in time to see the killer whale show, which Ethan absolutely loved.  We saw so many different fish, sea mammals, whales, dolphins, all sorts of animals.  I think it’s one of my new favorite zoos.

We spent the next day around the house, going to the beach which is only 3 blocks from here, and walking on the pier.  Isaac got to stick his feet in the ocean for the first time and seemed to enjoy it.    He loves watching the waves come in, he just kept giggling while he watched.  He also liked playing in the sand, though he did not appreciate it when I wouldn’t let him eat said sand.  Ryan and John saw a whale just off the dock, and actually have a picture to prove it!  Ethan got to run around in the sand, play with some buckets, look for shells and run from the water.  We kind of messed up the first time we went to the water by trying to make sure he stayed out of it with the end result being that he’s now afraid of the water.  Oops.  So, we’ll have to work on that.

We went to Disneyland yesterday.    I’ve only been to Disney World once, and it was about 20 years ago so my memory isn’t exactly the best.  It seemed smaller than I thought it would be, but I think it is quite a bit smaller than the Florida one.  We did have fun!  Ethan got to ride on his very first roller coaster, I was surprised that he took it so well, though he did pronounce it “scary” after it was all over.    There are quite a few rides that he can’t go on yet because he’s just too little, but he was able to drive the cars with a little help from daddy.  He had a great time with that!  We also went through It’s a Small World (one of few rides I actually remembered), the Storybook Canal, watched some Jedis in training, met Mickey Mouse, and got stuck in the Pirates of the Caribbean between two gunfighting pirates while the ride had to be rebooted.  Ahh, the memories.    Ethan and Isaac finally took a little nap for a while and hung out with Gramma and Papa while Ryan, Lora, and I got to go on a few rides by ourselves.  We rode on Big Thunder Railroad, which was a lot of fun, and went through the Haunted Mansion, still one of my very favorites and one of the only other things I remembered.  We considered Splash Mountain and Indiana Jones, until we saw the lines and then reconsidered.  The boys had a good time, it was just a really long day for two little guys.

Today we went to the Wild Animal Park just north of San Diego, it was awesome!  That’s my kind of park.  It was set much more naturally than most zoos, largely due to the sheer immensity of the land they have.  We walked through a lot and took a tram through more, where we saw a very new antelope (I don’t remember the species) that had literally just been born between the tram before us and ours so we were the very first people to see it.    That was really awesome!  If you’ve never been to this park and you are in the area, you have to go.  It is a little expensive, but well worth it to see the park and help support their conservation effort.

We are staying in a house in Oceanside that is really nice.  It’s so nice to be in a full house with 3 bedrooms, a full kitchen, laundry room, and just a lot of space.  Way more than we’d have in a hotel.  The boys are staying in with us, sort of.  We’re in the master room and Ethan’s in a study just off the side while Isaac’s in the huge walk-in closet that’s more than big enough for his pack n’ play three times over.  Like I said, we’re only 3 blocks from the beach so we’ve been down there almost every day.  It’s such a nice location, we’re really enjoying it.  Isaac loves having room to crawl around and get into trouble, and Ethan loves that we are only 2 blocks from the commuter train tracks.  He loves hearing the trains go by, which are close enough to hear but not enough to be annoying.  He talks to Puppy quite frequently about the trains, and absolutely loves it when we get to see them go by.

So that’s our week so far, tune in later for more updates!