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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!

It never really occurred to me before kids, and truly not until they were around for a while, that there are things that kids aren’t born with.  Like knowing how to blow your nose, jump, or even having an imagination.  Ethan has had two stuffed animals close to his side for a long time now, ever since I stopped worrying about SIDS enough to allow him to have them in his crib.  We started with just a small leopard, inexplicably named Boo, but I made the mistake of throwing him through the washer one day and not getting him dry in time for nap time, necessitating the introduction of a stuffed husky dog, more obviously named Puppy.  Ethan still carries both of them around all the time, but Puppy has the more favored status and can be found with Ethan almost all day.  I have managed to convince him that Puppy needs to stay home when we go out (except for Bible study, which was the original reason for giving him a comfort object in the first place) so that he doesn’t get lost.  One of my great fears is that we will somehow somewhere lose Puppy and cause a major breakdown.  Anyway, back to my original point.  Ethan has started developing his imagination more lately, causing me to realize that he hadn’t had one prior to this.  He’s started using things in ways that weren’t their original purpose and using various animals to act out scenarios around him.  It gives you new eyes for yourself when your child calls a dinosaur momma, but I digress again.  Since he so often has Puppy with him, Puppy gets a lot of his imagination and a lot of his conversations.  This morning when Ryan got him out of bed, he said something about Puppy being a dog, to which Ethan promptly replied, “Puppy is not a dog, he’s a person.”  Well, duh.  It was really sweet and explains a lot about how he acts around Puppy.  He was giving Puppy rides around the family room just a little while ago, I have a feeling Puppy will be a part of our lives for a long while to come.  It will be a sad day indeed when he’s no longer required.

Ethan can be very profound sometimes.  At dinner tonight he told us, “dessert not all the time, it’s dessert”.  I would do well to remember his words more often!  Dessert is just for some of the time, not all of the time.  That’s what makes it special, well, that and the chocolate. 

But not really.  Isaac finally drank out of a sippy cup on his own today, hooray!  He wouldn’t take them for a long time, probably because he hasn’t been using bottles.  So we’ve been giving him bottles of juice during snack time hoping he’d get used to them enough to be able switch over to the cups.  He still doesn’t like using a cup as much as a bottle, but he will take it.  Chalk one up for small victories!

We filled out the paperwork for Ethan’s preschool next year today, yikes!  I still can’t believe he’ll be ready to start school this fall.  His first day is the 23rd, just a week after his birthday.  That promises to be a tough one for mommy!  It will be good for him, but it will be an adjustment for all of us.  It does promise to make life a little crazier though as we have to get up and out the door earlier than we do now, something I don’t think any of us will enjoy.

I’ve listened to a presentation on Family Time a few times at Mops and bought a couple of the books the last time I heard it.  We finally used one tonight.    I finally decided that Ethan’s old enough to start understanding some of the lessons in there based on his increased understanding of what’s going on around him and ability to remember conversations and events for longer periods of time.  Basically, the lessons give you ideas for presenting Bible stories in a way that kids can understand and remember.  So tonight we read the story of Noah and built an ark out of a cardboard box, which sounds kind of obvious, but wasn’t necessarily something I’d think of!  Ethan loved it.  We stuffed the box full of animals, and it took some doing to get him out of there.    We rocked the boat with waves and both of them just loved it.  I have a feeling the ark will be a fun toy for a long time to come.  It’s our goal to keep having family time each week and use the stories in the book to help us teach the boys Bible stories and about the character of God.

We can finally, officially, say that Ethan is 2 1/2 as of a week ago.  It’s kind of nice for me since people would look at me a little weird when I would say that Ethan was 2 and Isaac is 9 months.  They really are about 2 years apart!    A few changes have come about with the extra half year tacked on.  Ethan’s started talking back a little more and became even more bossy, if that was even possible.   He told me this morning that the tv was “too loud tb momma” and actually told Ryan “don’t freak out” after he bit him on the neck.  Not sure where he learned that one!  And he now says “stop talking momma” when he doesn’t want to hear whatever it is I’m saying.  All these things are so funny and so hard not to laugh at, but he has gotten in trouble for them.    We’ve put a hold on potty training for now, he was getting frustrated with me asking if he needed to go and I was getting sick of  going through 3-4 pairs of pants a day.  So I’ll take him if he asks to go but otherwise we’re going to wait until we get back from a trip next month to really resume it and we’ll see how it goes with another month of maturity under his belt.  He actually did ask to go this morning at church when he was in the nursery, which was a little surprising since neither Ryan or I were there.

Isaac is doing well too, he’ll be 10 months old at the end of the week!  He hasn’t fulfilled Ryan’s prediction of walking within three weeks, though to be fair he still has a week left.  He is still hesitant to let go of things to stand on his own, but he has been tricked into standing on his own briefly.  I have a feeling once he learns how to really let go that he won’t stay just standing for long.  He still adores his big brother and they holler back and forth quite regularly.   It makes dinner time pretty loud around here.

Isaac had his 9 month appointment yesterday, as if we hadn’t been to the doctor enough lately, and it went just fine.  He’s still recovered from his pneumonia, provided he didn’t pick anything up while we were there.  He now is 28 1/2 inches tall, which puts him in about the 60th percentile, and weighs 15 lbs 7.5 ounces, which dropped him off the bottom of the weight chart.  Yep, that’s right, he’s not even on the curve.  I’m not entirely sure how I ended up with tall skinny kids, it certainly wasn’t from me.  His doctor isn’t that worried, especially since he was just sick and we know he dropped some weight then, and because his activity level is really high.  And I mean really high.  He’s just a very high energy kid.  So where some people’s calories may have a chance to sit around and turn into some weight, his calories don’t have a chance to do anything but let him move.

In Ethan news, we’ve started potty training.  So far so good, but it’s only been two days.  I know some people think I’m starting late, but he’s not even two and a half yet, which is about when you want to start with boys.  We all know boys mature slower than girls and potty training is no exception.  I still don’t know that he’s entirely ready because he could care less when he’s dirty, but he likes going on the potty.  We got two little froggy potties for up and downstairs and he really likes them, especially since they are green.  And we got some cool big kid underwear that he got to wear for a little while today.  We’ll see how it goes, I’ll keep you updated. 

Before having Isaac, I didn’t really believe moms who said they had trouble getting their kids to sit still to change their diapers.  I figured it was somehow their failing to get the child to be still.  I mean, how could a little 15# kid best a full grown adult?  Well, I admit it.  I was wrong.  I never had a problem with Ethan, yeah he squirmed sometimes but overall he sat pretty still for that and I could control him.  Isaac is an entirely different child.  He is just about the squirmiest kid I have ever seen in my life!  He rarely sits still for more than a few seconds at a time, and since he has recently started pulling himself up on furniture and cruising around it, he sits even less than before.  So he makes diaper changing time, let’s just say it’s more interesting.  I usually can keep him still long enough to undo his diaper and get it partway off before he starts flipping himself over, not fun when most diapers contain at least some #2 (he also does this more than most kids I’ve ever met!).  The kid only weighs just over 15# (he actually lost about half a pound while he was sick last week, not the best for an already small peanut) but he has the strength of, well, almost of me.  I feel like I’m going to wrench his poor little hip out of socket while I’m trying to keep his legs still to wipe him down!  And of course any sort of restraint just infuriates him.  He doesn’t get it yet that if he would just hold still for a few seconds he would be done and could get down in about half the time.  Instead we spend twice as long trying to hold him still enough to get the job done.  Of course, we knew his squirminess would be an issue from the moment I first felt him move, a full month before his brother, and the intensity of the kicks.   It is fun to watch him get around though, he started crawling around 6 months and has only gotten faster since.  Ryan predicts he’ll be walking within the next 3 weeks, we’ll see!  His health is doing much better now, the final diagnosis was pneumonia.  And he actually did really well for all the nebulizer treatments.  I didn’t think he would sit still for those since they took about 20 minutes each, but he sat still the whole time.  And it wasn’t because he wasn’t feeling well, because except for his cough you couldn’t even tell he was sick!  But now, 6 visits to the pediatrician later, he has been declared well.  Until he picks up another virus, probably tomorrow.

Well, about this time last year Ethan ended up at Children’s overnight with croup and we were back today, this time with Isaac.  Fortunately, his case was not nearly as severe, and we were able to go home after he received a dose of steroids.   Hopefully that will work it’s magic to open up his tiny airways and help him to breathe again.

Otherwise the boys are both doing well.  They both have had colds since we got back from our trip over Christmas, and I’m guessing they’ll have colds off and on until about April.  But we were commenting earlier today that we’re pretty lucky that neither one of them has ever had an ear infection so I’ll take a cold.

Isaac wants so badly to be able to chase his big brother around.  He is already pulling up on the furniture (he’ll be 9 months old on Tuesday) and standing anywhere he can.  He’s trying to stand up in the middle of the room too, but has been unsuccessful so far.  Anyway, one of the things he tries to pull up on is a stack of three bins we have in the family room that are full of cars.  Well, the bottom bin is full of Isaac’s toys so he can pull them out when he wants them, and the top two bins are full of lots and lots of cars.  Have I mentioned before that Ethan is obsessed with cars?  The bins themselves are just plastic and don’t weigh much at all and the cars are mostly small so they don’t weigh much either, and combined they still don’t weigh much.  Certainly not enough to support a small child as he tries to climb it.  And being the bad parents we are, we didn’t think to anchor it to the wall.  Until Isaac pulled it over on himself that is.  Three times.  Don’t worry, it didn’t hurt him at all, like I said nothing in there weighed much of anything and pulling a bin of matchbox cars on top of yourself doesn’t really hurt all that much, but still we decided we should probably be a little more responsible and anchor the bins to the wall.  So Ryan just screwed it in.  Wasn’t what I would have done, but hey, it worked!  I would have gone for something a little less noticeable, a little less destructive, and probably more girlie, but whatever.  And he said as soon as he was done, Ethan went to get his “screwdriber” to help screw it in.  (He has a little problem with “v”s but I think he’ll outgrow it.)  Ethan is very helpful and wanted to make sure Isaac didn’t fall over again.  Though I think his real reason was he was tired of cleaning up all the cars that he hadn’t gotten out himself.