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I’m not entirely sure what defines a true blizzard, but people smarter than me have declared it to be so I guess it is.  Ethan has survived his very first blizzard, which really wasn’t that hard since we haven’t left the house, lost power, or had any problems at all.  Other than having to wash all of his bedding due to an overflowing diaper, but that’s an entirely separate story.  We do have quite a lot of snow outside, I’ve heard about14″ on the news.  Since we’ve barely had any snow at all this winter, I think this more than triples our total for the year.  It is pretty outside, especially since I have a fully stocked fridge and pantry.    And I did manage to let Ryan get some work done and never let on to Ethan that daddy was really just in the basement all day.  We may go out and play tomorrow even if Ethan does hate wearing his snowsuit and snowboots.  We haven’t yet bought a sled so we’ll have to leave that for another day.  The strange thing is, I can’t find a line in his baby book to fill in the date of his first blizzard. 

I finally did it, I went through our pictures and got a bunch more posted.  I didn’t realize it had been so long since I’d posted some, sorry about that!  There are some in a new folder under Ethan and some in the Pregnancy #2 folder.  The next time I post pictures they will probably be of our new baby boy.    Enjoy!

It seems to be all the rage these days, going green.  And I do admit to trying to do my part, but as much as you hear about it even doing my part doesn’t ever seem like enough with all the much more expensive things I could be doing too.  We switched every light bulb in the house out for compact fluorescent about the time we moved in 5 years ago, and still haven’t changed a bulb since, which is really nice due to my stature limitations.  I even bought new LED nightlights for the kids rooms, yeah they aren’t as bright as the old regular night light that was in Ethan’s room but they are also light sensitive so I’m even more environmentally conscious by not having it on all the time.  Of course, the fact that I have to now replace one of them because Ethan drowned it in his humidifier basin doesn’t help the environment much, but what can you do?    I switched us to cloth grocery bags once I was able to find ones that didn’t cost a fortune (WalMart and Safeway both have them for a dollar, along with a lot of other places now) and usually remember to take them into the store.  Now I’ve got to figure out what to do with the ones that are starting to tear.  It seems wrong somehow to throw them away, but I’m not sure I can fix them.  I’m gradually switching us to the supposedly more environmentally cleaning products as I use up the dastardly evil chemical ones.  It remains to be seen how well they work.  I even recycle as much as I can, which sounds really easy until you know that we don’t have curbside recycling so it involves sorting the recycling into bins in the garage and driving it into town as they get full, not a lot of fun but it really surprised me how much we threw away once I started sorting it.  We have a programmable thermostat, which is supposed to help save energy, but they failed to account for stay at home moms.  Ours is set at pretty much the same temperature regardless of time of day.  I keep our cell phone chargers unplugged when not in use, turn off lights when not in the room, and open the windows instead of running the air conditioner (except in the summer, that’s just silly!).  But we do still drive regular cars, not hybrids.  And we don’t have solar panels or a windmill in the backyard.  Maybe someday.

We don’t know where he gets it from, but Ethan is one stubborn boy.  I think it must be from his grandparents, because neither Ryan nor I are stubborn.    And his almost 2-year-oldness makes for an opinionated boy too.  Ethan loves cars, I’m pretty sure they are his favorite thing besides puppy and Boo (his leopard).  His new favorite kind of car is a bus, and he looks for them everywhere.  Currently everything larger than a car is a bus, whether it actually is or not.  We keep trying to convince him that semis are trucks not buses, but he insists (very loudly) that they are buses.  It’s pretty funny actually.  He’s getting much better at making up his mind about something and letting us know what that little mind is thinking, from what he wants for breakfast, to where he wants me to sit, and what he doesn’t want to do.  And have I mentioned bossy?  So far he really only has the cats to boss around because he’s figured out it doesn’t work very well with mommy or daddy, but he tells Bree and “Na” quite frequently what not to do and to get down from the counter.  So far no amount of me telling him that I will take care of the cats and he doesn’t need to worry about them has convinced him that he doesn’t need to boss them around.  He’s going to make a great big brother. 

I must admit, in some areas of being a mom I am still selfish.  For example, I have no desire to watch cartoons so Ethan doesn’t get to.  He has no idea who Elmo or the Teletubbies or any of those characters are, Pooh is the one exception (we watch that on Youtube, see previous blogs).  And I don’t really think that’s a bad thing anyway.  I also do not have any desire to have my car radio taken over by children’s songs so we don’t listen to them in the car.  He does have a few cds of kid’s songs that we can listen to in his room for all of you better moms that just gasped at my audacity.    Instead we listen to K-Love, which is a Christian radio station.  So see, all is not lost!  At least he isn’t listening to heavy metal or rap or something, not that there’s anything wrong with that.    I hoped that eventually he would start to pay attention to the lyrics and maybe learn something while listening.  My hopes were realized sooner than I expected when about a month or so ago we noticed that he would randomly say “me” while we were driving.  I was perplexed of course and it took a few times of him doing this before I realized that he was actually singing along to the radio.  There is a song called “Here I am” by Downhere that says “Here I am, Lord send me, let me live my life as an offering” and Ethan was piping in with his own “me” each time the chorus was played.  It is absolutely adorable, I do have it on video.  I learned it is actually easier to videotape while driving than to talk on the phone; yes I know, but we’ve already established that I’m a bad mom.    Now he sings “me” to a lot of other songs too, but I love that “Here I am” was his first.

It’s amazing how fast he is learning new words.  It seems like every day he says something new, and some days it seems like he talks constantly.  I still don’t understand a lot of what he’s saying, most of it is still gibberish, but he has enough words now that he can tell me what he wants most of the time.  Of course, a lot of times he’s just repeating whatever we say, but he can express some of his own opinions and desires now.  But yes, his favorite word is “no” and I do hear that quite a few times a day.  At least he’s finally learned to say mom, he actually says it two different ways which is fun, because for a long time all I heard was daddy.  I love that he’s learning to express himself and we can finally have very simple conversations. But ask me again in a few years if I like that he can talk.