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Ryan lets me sleep in a little bit on Sundays and gets Ethan up for me.  This past Sunday, as I lay in bed, I enjoyed listening to the two of them “chat”.  Ethan, so far, does take after his mom and is a pretty good sleeper so Ryan had to wake him up.  He fortunately wakes up better than his mom though!  Ryan makes up funny songs for him all the time, usually based on some tune he knows, and changes the words to reflect whatever’s going on.  So he sang to him about something silly, I don’t even know what, and Ethan just loved it.  Then of course you have the tickle session while getting him dressed.  I don’t think there is any better sound in the world than your child’s belly laugh.  Ethan also “talks” (read babbles) a lot too, from the time he gets up to the time he goes to sleep.  There were the sounds of both of them brushing Ethan’s teeth, and then a few cries as he suffered the indignity of getting his face washed.  It was marvelous.  It’s not too often I get to just sit and listen to the sounds around me, it was beautiful.  And I think it was the best part of sleepng in.

It’s hard to be a mom, and I doubt I mean what you think I mean.  As people, we are all pretty much egocentric, that’s just the way it is for the large majority of us.  It’s hard to ever think of our parents as people until we’re older, and still hard even then.  I mean, I can’t really see my parents as kids of 6 or 13 or even 22.  I didn’t know them then and I’ve only ever known them as my parents.  But we all know that before we were parents we were someone’s child.  I know Ethan won’t really understand this either.  It’s hard to see when you are a kid that your parents have already been there, done that and maybe have something to teach you.  Some kids will learn from that, most won’t.  I watch Ethan now and can see that he’s headed for some certain heartaches, ones that are common to us all.  We went to the park yesterday and let Ethan play on the playground for a little while.  He just loves bigger kids and looked up at this boy on the playground with such obvious (to me at least) admiration on his face.  I just know that one of these days that admiration will hurt him as some bigger kid hurts him in some way, probably not physically though that may happen, but probably emotionally and that can often hurt worse.  He’s just so open to the world right now that it almost breaks my heart.  I know it’s the cynic in me probably coming out, but all of us get hurt, that’s one of those commonalities.  I don’t want to be a “helicopter parent”, I don’t want to shelter him from the world, but I don’t want him to get hurt, I don’t want to see pain on that little face that I love so dearly.  I guess I just have to love him as much as I can, be there for him when he gets hurt, and teach him to rely on the One who loves him even more than I do when I can’t be there.  It’s so hard to be a mom.

Ethan is finally getting his signs down.  We’ve worked on these a lot for a very long time now and I do find them to be quite useful.  I’m going to have to learn more, but for now the signing and pointing are working just fine.  He can sign change when we change his diaper – I’ve still gotta figure out how to teach him to do that when his diaper’s dirty, not just when I’m already changing him.  He’s been able to sign milk for a long time, but somehow forgot how once he learned how to sign eat and would just sign eat and point to his cup.  After much diligence on his dad’s and my part over the past week, he can now do both though he still points to what he wants too.  Maybe he just thinks we’re dense and uses that to really get his point across.  I swear his friend Evan is teaching him signs on the sly too.  He came home from Amy’s house last week knowing how to sign please, which we’d hardly worked on but now he does really well.  And today he signed more when he wanted more food and we really haven’t worked on that.  He also did a sign we don’t recognize so I can only hope Evan is not leading him astray.    It’s really nice for him to be able to communicate with us a bit more.  It hasn’t prevented too many fits though since he usually throws a fit when he’s tired or hungry (signs do not prevent this) or when something doesn’t go his way (signs also do not prevent mean mommys).  And we’ve had plenty of fights over getting him to use his signs when all he really wants to do is drink his milk.    But it’s really quite impressive to watch him communicate his desires, especially tonight at dinner when he kept signing eat and pointing to the empty spot on his plate where his pizza should have been.