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When you are a kid you often wonder if your mom has eyes in the back of her head since she seems to know everything that’s going on when she couldn’t possibly see you. Now that I’m a mom I know those eyes are actually called ears. Ryan is amazed sometimes that I know exactly what Ethan’s doing when he’s in another room. It’s really just that I know where everything in the room is, what he’s most likely playing with when he’s quiet, and exactly what all of his toys sound like. So when I hear a certain toy playing when he’s supposed to be in bed for naptime, I can pretty much guarantee that he’s broken the no getting out of bed during naptime rule even though I can’t see him.  Well, now I actually can see him since we have a video monitor, which I love by the way!, but that’s beside the point.  Of course, I do still use various tools around the house to help my eyes see what Ethan’s doing that I never really noticed before having him, like the oven door, fireplace glass, tv, and anything else shiny that will show me his reflection.  So in those cases I’m just using the eyes in the front of my head, it’s just that Ethan hasn’t figured out how I can see him.  I guess part of being a mom is using all the resources at your diposal in ways that you hadn’t thought of before to try to keep on top of things.  The fun part is not letting your kids know how you do it.

I finally figured out what the big construction project near our house is good for, aside from decreasing the flooding of the area around the creek, which is the actual point of the project.  It is fabulous for entertaining an almost 2 year old boy who is fascinated by big trucks.    We went for a walk last Thursday, and I just happened to go the opposite direction from the way we normally go because of a big truck blocking the way so we went on the main road across from the construction area.  There was construction equipment out, and one backhoe was picking up large pieces of pavement, dropping them to make them smaller, and then putting them into the back of a dump truck.  Ethan was riveted.  I thought it was pretty interesting too, but wasn’t quite as amazed as he was.  So instead of walking, he watched from the stroller and I sat on the ground and we watched the guys work.  For almost an hour.  We went back on Friday.  It was a great source of free, close entertainment.  Well, free is relative I guess since the project is actually my tax money at work and is budgeted for just over one million dollars.  But I didn’t have to take out a credit card or fill up my gas tank so that works for me!  Friday wasn’t quite as interesting so we only watched for about half an hour and then went to the park.  But on the way home we did get to see the really big backhoe (no idea if that’s actually what it was or not) pick up gigantic boulders to put them into place.  It’s a bit of a strange concept, remodeling a creek, but it does look a lot nicer and hopefully won’t flood near as often.  So as long as the big equipment is over there I will continue to take Ethan to watch it.  I’m not sure what I’ll do when they’re done, but there is always construction going on somewhere!

I think I must repeat myself by saying the saying things over and over again a lot.  Ethan has entered the language explosion common to almost 2 year olds and has started saying a lot more phrases.  His favorites (that don’t have anything to do with cars) are “big mess”, “almost”, and “too fast”.  I think I must say that he’s made a big mess about 100 times a day, and now he’s completely capable of identifying when he’s made a big mess.  Not that that stops him from making a big mess, he can just tell me about it now.  He has to help me with cleaning up his room after making said big mess by throwing his blocks into a big bin, and apparently I say “almost” a lot.  Hopefully he’ll also learn “try again”!  And now his preferred method of going down the stairs is by holding my hand and going down like a big boy, and again I must say “too fast” a lot because now he says it when he first starts going down before we’ve even gotten anywhere.  It’s funny how little I identified the common things I say until I started hearing them come out of his mouth.  Of course, he’s picked up “big truck”, “fire truck”, and “school bus” on his own too.  It’s a lot of fun hearing what he has to say, most of the time. He still does just babble sometimes and there are times when I would wish for a little more quiet, but I love being able to get a little window into his mind, even if it does just reflect back a bit of me that I never noticed before.

Last night was a bad night.  I won’t say horrible because horrible would have been if the false fire alarm had been real.  Just before midnight, we were awoken out of a sound get-sleep-when-you-can-because-you-still-have-a-newborn sleep to an extremely loud fire alarm going off in our whole house.  The alarms in the whole house are wired in together so that when one goes off, they all go off, which is fabulous except if one is going off because it’s defective and not because there is a real fire.  Freaked out would be an understatement of how I responded.  Fortunately Ryan is more level-headed in a crisis than I am because my first completely logical response was to start screaming.  Keep in mind I had just woken up and not much of anything was making sense.  He figured there probably wasn’t a real fire since there was no smoke, I just wanted the noise to stop and to get the heck out of dodge.  So we investigated and finally found the culprit in the basement after said alarm went off a second time, further scaring the crap out of me.  No, there was not a fire anywhere, Ryan checked every piece of electronic equipment in the house for any signs of smoke or anything unusual.  Ethan and Isaac?  They slept through the whole thing, oblivious to the ear-splitting alarms going off just feet above their heads.  Which is good because the last thing this freaked out mom needed was freaked out children to try to calm.  Yes, their hearing is just fine, they are keenly attuned to every little noise each one makes in the morning ensuring that once one is awake they are both awake for the duration.  We did eventually get back to sleep last night, it just took about 3 hours to do so.   So we’re a little tired today, which was fabulous since we had family pictures this morning (those are some pretty nice bags under our eyes).  I would love to say we took the offending alarm out back and beat the snot out of it, but it’s still sitting on the counter sans battery.  Also today we are going to the store to buy a bunch of 9V batteries to replace in every smoke detector in the house, because who really does that every year? I did learn that I’m not that great at responding to a crisis in the middle of the night so I hope if we ever do have a real fire that it’s in the middle of the day when I may still freak out but will at least be a little more aware while doing so.

Ethan loves music.  He loves listening to it, dancing to it, singing to it, and can’t go to sleep without it.  One of his favorite songs is “If You’re Happy and You Know It” and he knows all the motions.  We sing it every night at bedtime and in the car a lot too.  The other night we had cake after dinner (see the five years post) and while Ethan was eating he started kicking his feet and saying “happy feet”.  He also clapped his hands and patted his head, which was really funny since his hands were covered with chocolate cake.    It was really sweet; he was so excited and just wanted to show it.

The Bible says we should be more like little children in our faith, and we saw an example of that on Sunday at church.  Ethan stays in the nursery during the service, but we usually go get him in time for the last few songs.  I brought him into the service at the end so that he could sing with us, because like I said he loves music, and he was seriously rocking out.  He was dancing so much I almost dropped him!   It was really fun to see such joy worshipping God.  I know he probably doesn’t understand that that was what he was doing, but I don’t really know that that matters.  I’m glad my little guy is so happy, and very glad that he lets me know it.