Visits with Relatives

Some of you may recognize this strange man holding Ethan. I didn't get a good picture of his face, but this is Chris of Malott's Blog fame. Mr. E seemed to enjoy playing with Chris and I think the feeling was mutual.

Emily also thinks Chris is a pretty cool guy.



And then we visited Great-Grandma Hazel. It was hard to get a good picture of both of them, especially since you cannot get a 4 month old to look at the camera when a 5 year old big sister is in the room. Great-Grandma is 98 years young, by the way and probably healthier than about 98% of the people I know. She is quite pleased to have three great-grandchildren (finally!).

Ethan at 5 Months

Ethan:

You are now 5 months old (well, yesterday!). You are growing, but slowly. You are around 26 inches long and only 14 pounds. You're either destined to be a skinny little guy or something is going on because you used to be in the 50th% for height and weight and now you're between the 5th and 10th% for weight.

This month has been a bit bumpy. You seem to be pretty disgruntled with the world lately. We think you may have a temper! Your sleep has been downright terrible. You USED to sleep for 6-7 hours at a time. Now, you are totally unpredictable. Lately you've been up every 2-3 hours and frankly, mommy is tired.

You have your good days. You have a fantastic smile, we just don't see it nearly enough. You are ticklish all over and you can laugh, but this month hasn't been a very fun one.

You had all kinds of new experiences this month. You started eating "real" food. So far, we've gone slowly and only eaten rice cereal, oatmeal and applesauce. You make a HUGE mess, but you seem to like it. You insist on "helping" to feed yourself by grabbing the spoon and shoving it into your mouth. I think you're going to be a handful.

You have discovered sister's old play center and you really like all the lights and music and toys to use. You liked it so much you fell asleep in it!

You met Santa for the first time and you didn't seem to mind. Of course, it probably helped that Emily was there with you. You adore her. She makes you smile and laugh faster than anyone else. I believe she is your favorite person in the world.

Overall, while mommy loves you so very much, I'm glad this month is behind us and hoping that the coming month is a little less crazy and a lot more restful!

Christmas Pictures of the Kids

This week, I attempted to get both kids to take one good Christmas picture. We hadn't tried to get a "good" picture of both of them together since Ethan was one week old and too busy sleeping to care what was happening. A lot has changed since then!

We went to Portrait Innovations and waited 30 minutes or so after our scheduled appointment time before the festivities began. I had to wake Ethan up from his nap, which could have been disastrous, but thankfully, wasn't. The session went really well and both kids cooperated beautifully. We were there from 12:20 to 2:45 (it was PACKED and crazy in the studio) and no one melted down, plus we got some really good pictures. They took 87 different pictures and I narrowed it down to 6 poses plus the CD of all the pictures they took.

And so, without further ado....some Christmas pics for your viewing pleasure. I did not include my favorites since they will be going out in our Christmas card this week.

She's a bit of a ham, don't you think?

Quite the gift we got this year.

Our little man sitting up so nicely in a chair.

When did she get so big?

This picture (above) just cracks me up, because Emily looks like she's thinking "oh brother, what is he up to now?" and Ethan's just having a great time looking in the totally wrong direction.



Oh how I wish they'd both looked into the camera.

Can you tell that Ethan has found his feet? He loves holding them and trying to eat his toes.

Stuff

There will be no pictures in this post, but not because I don't have any. Au contraire! I have plenty to share, but no time to load them onto my computer or wait for them to load onto this lowly blog. So instead, I'll probably completely bore my 4.5 loyal readers and actually use words to tell you about all that we've been doing.

1. My last post mentioned that poor Miss Em has been dealing with all kinds of illness since mid-September. I think we've finally figured our what's been going on. We took her to an Ear, Nose and Throat doctor to check her hearing since she's had so many ear infections and one thing led to another...which led to allergy testing. As we suspected, she tested positive for seasonal allergies (pollens and weeds), but she also was allergic to cats, feathers and almost every mold they tested. So basically, she has year-round, indoor-outdoor allergies which most definitely require medication, likely year-round as well. Fun stuff. The ENT's recommendations (other than medications) could be summed up this way: "Live in a bubble". Don't open up windows or doors, use the air conditioning. Don't go outside and play. Don't have pets. Don't have carpet. Don't have stuffed animals. Don't be anywhere remotely humid (mold grows easier in humid places). It feels a bit overwhelming and quite frankly impossible. It also feels like we would be taking away a little girl's childhood. So for now, she's taking Nasonex and Zyrtec and we're hopeful that they will work wonders. If they help, we might be able to avoid tubes or an adnoidectomy. If not...well, I'm just hoping they will.

2. Ethan has had a rough month. He has been NO fun. I think we're headed back the right direction, but wow, I'd really prefer not to repeat any of that again. He wouldn't sleep, day or night. He would wake up 3 and 4 times a night (compared to his usual once) and he would scream for hours. It was ugly. I repeat....UGLY.

3. I officially am tired of Christmas shopping. I don't generally mind having an actual reason to shop, but this year, I'm struggling to get all the Christmas shopping done. And usually I have at least half of my gifts wrapped by now, but this year...not a single one is wrapped. Not one. I'm hoping to start tonight, but that all completely depends on Mr. E and his willingness to sleep.

4. The weather here stinks. It's 25 degrees, with a wind chill of around 10. It's snowing, sleeting and blowing so hard that I refuse to go back outside for anything short of an emergency. Oh and did I mention that the heat in our van decided to quit last week. I took it to be fixed on Monday and got it back yesterday...for a price. Let's just say we could have bought a REAL nice TV.

5. We bought a new Christmas tree this year. Last year we tried out a real tree, but I honestly don't like the mess and hassle, plus a fake one is, in the long run, cheaper. We looked for a nice full, NON-pre-lit, non-skinny, 7.5 foot tree. It didn't sound like a challenge, but it was. We finally found one that fit the bill and barely....just barely got it to fit in the van. I decided to give in to peer pressure this year and go with colored lights. I prefer white, but Andrew and Emily wanted colored, so we went on the great search for colored, twinkling mini-lights. Again, it didn't sound like a challenge. It was. After two days of extensive searching, we came home with 800 multi-colored NON-twinkling lights. We put the tree together and discovered that it was absolutely huge. Much bigger than the old one. Bigger around than the 56" tree skirt. Very, very large but lovely. Too large, by just a little bit, for 800 lights. So back to Walmart I went to buy one more box of lights. The lights I found came in packs of 400 each, so I bought one box of those and then two (100) packs, just in case we might need them next year. I went to put the first strand of the 400 set on and they wouldn't stay lit....so those will have to go back, and I ended up needed those extra 2 (100) light boxes. And yes, that does mean that our tree has 1,000 colored lights. And I like it. There will be pictures.

Hmmmm...I know we've done more, but my head hurts too much to think any more, so that'll have to do for now. When I get a few minutes, I'll add some pictures. Until then...stay warm!