I belong . . . to a gym!

I joined the gym the last week of December with the goal of going every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday and so far I'm in my 3rd week and haven't missed yet! Yeah me! I stay for about an hour and a half . . . and it helps that Becky is usually there and my Mom comes on Fridays.

The membership is only $9/month, so I would probably have tried to go 4-5 times a week, but they charge per hour for the kids center where I put Ethan. I was worried about how he would do there since he's never really been away from me, but it's a small gym so I can always see if anyone tries to walk away with him. But Ethan seems to love it in there. He's always excited to see me when I come to get him, so I know he misses me :), but I'm glad he has fun in there. I've peeked in on him each day about half way through the time and he's either playing contently in the corner or crawling after a little girl and following her.

Last week when I went to pick up Ethan, he was chewing on a plastic hamburger patty - it was kinda cute looking, but Lorelai came over and took it out of his mouth and said "No, baby Ethan, that's a choking hazard." It's funny to hear big, adult sentences come out of a 4 year old.

I do the treadmill and a bunch of the weights. I feel like a wuss when it comes to the arm machines, but I can do a lot of weight on the leg ones. I've found that there aren't a lot of machines for the abs and that's what I want to focus on the most and get rid of this pregnancy belly that is still hanging on.

The machine that I hate is the one where you sit and try to pull down with your arms and up with your legs to work on the abs. I seriously can't make it even move. But I watch this 60 year-old lady do it with no problems . . . so what's wrong with me. I'll blame it on the baby belly - I still don't really have any feeling left on the skin around my belly button, so I'll just tell myself that my muscles are numb and don't know to work yet. One day maybe my stomach will be a flat as the lady in the picture (only if that day is in the past).

Look what I made!!

So I love the magazine Family Fun . . . it has tons of craft ideas to do with kids. But I also find some that I like doing. I made these reindeer cookies for Christmas Eve - we always go to my Grandma's house with the rest of my aunts, uncles, cousins, and their kids, so I thought this would be a fun dessert there.

Merry Christmas

Here are a few Chritmas pictures - Ethan wasn't too into opening his presents :( We got a couple pictures of him grabbing the first piece to rip off then he would crawl away.

Ethan would rather eat the ribbon . . .













His first present turned into breakfast . . .













Climbing on top of his box.



















We bought Ethan a Tonka truck that he can ride like this when he's older, but for now, the seat flips up and he can push it in front of him as he walks. Right now he pushes it farther than needed and then does a frankenstien walk to catch up - hopefully soon he learns to bend his knees when walking.













My lime green super hero mom .. .













Me and Becky bought our husbands the same sweater for Christmas and then my parents gave them and Alex all hiking pants (I think Nathan got some too, but he is in Idaho, so I don't have a picture of him with them on) cause they all wear jeans when hiking and that's not hiking protocol, so they all have 'Kuhle' pants that zip off at the knee.

Snow Day!

It's been snowing the past few days here and since the roads weren't that great, Michael stayed home from work a couple days. Once there was a good deal of snow built up, we drove over to my parent's house to make a snowman and let Ethan play in the snow for his first time.

We had him bundled up pretty good; he looked like a puffy marshmallow. He wasn't really fond of me trying to make a snow angel with his arms and legs . . .

He beat his mini snowman to death . . .

And then we put him down for a nap in the house with Grandpa and made our own snowman . . . it was quite ugly. My ball picked up tons of leaves - someone should tell the landscaping guys to rake the leaves before it snows or you get ugly snowmen!

Cutting down the Christmas Tree

**NOTE - you can click on the pictures in the blog to see them larger if they're too small to really view on your screen**

We went to cut down our tree with Alex and Jasmine (it was fun with a group, plus we needed Alex's truck to get the tree home. Our car has the antenna on the top of the car above the rear window, so we found out the hard way last year and had to lay down the seats and shove the tree through the trunk . . . luckily I was still pregnant then, so we didn't have to worry about what to do with the baby car seat and the tree at the same time.)

I wore Ethan in the infant carrier and a lady told me that he was just about as big as me. I like the thought that someone thinks I'm the same size as my 20 pound son, but sadly it's not true. Trying to explain to Jasmine what a Charlie Brown Christmas tree was, and listening to her and Alex try to pick out a tree was funny. Alex said it had to be at least as tall as her, but she kept picking out ones that were about 3 feet high. It was funny watching Alex carry it out since he could hold it over his head and walk. We went for about an 8 footer which was harder to carry (not that I would know cause I carried the baby and didn't have to touch the wet and dirty tree.)

Ethan is still sorta grumpy that we have a tree in our living room - it takes away some of his play area, but he still won't really go near it. He keeps pulling out my tree skirt, so I've resigned to the fact that it won't stay pretty and only fix it every couple days or when someone comes over. We rushed to get the tree up and decorated Sunday before Church because Rick and Debbie (my in-laws) were supposed to come over for dinner, but then cancelled on us - so I rushed for nothing but on the up side, I had a really clean apartment. But since we did it so fast, Ethan was mad the rest of the day. I laid on the ground and from his angle of the floor, it really is quite daunting since it's up to the ceiling and has prickly pine needles on it.

Santa Clause came to town!

We had our Christmas party at churh this morning. Ethan didn't really know what to think of Santa. He was kinda grumpy to begin with and then seemed mad that we sat him in the lap of some white bearded stranger. We took the pictures quick before he belted out a scream.













Then we added him in the picture with Emma and Lorelai (his cousins). Lorelai isn't too fond of Santa either . . . she never really has liked him.

Now, if I could have everyone's attention - take a look at Ethan's cute sweater. It is my favorite piece of clothing I have for him and this will be the only month he can wear it, so he may just end up wearing it several days in a row so that more people can enjoy it. I bought it when I was still pregnant with him last Christmas at Old Navy and I just had to buy it cause they never have the same thing there the next year/season.

Dorodango

We were watching MythBusters last night and they were trying to see if you could polish animal poo (gross, I know) without adding wax or polish stuff. So they had a guest come on who makes Dorodango - a shiny, Japanese dirt ball. Just adding water to make it muddy, they squeeze it to a ball and after a long, long amount of time, the water is all squeezed and evaporated or something and you have a shiny dirt ball. Michael really wants to try this, so we are going to steal some dirt from my parents back yard tonight when we go over for dinner (since we live in an apartment, we don't have dirt).

But until we succeed and get pictures of it, here is the link to go to and see what I'm talking about. http://www.dorodango.com/

1st Tooth

Ethan's first tooth didn't seem to bother him as it was surfacing. But he now has a 2nd tooth coming in next to the 1st one, and this tooth is making him cranky. He is calm if I'm holding him while I'm standing. But if I sit down or put him down to do something, more than half the time he screams at me.

He's lucky he's so cute and smiles all the time or he would be making me cranky. I don't have anyone to hold me 24/7 when I'm grumpy . . . life's not fair.

Double the Trick-or-Treat!

My mom made a lion costume for my niece Emma for her first Halloween and then Lorelai used it next, so it's getting passed down to each of her grandchildren. But we had a church "trunk-or-treat" on the 30th; since most of that party would be indoors, I decided to have a different costume for Ethan at the church party and use the lion costume on Halloween.

So for the church party, he was Charlie Brown. I figured I would embrace the fact that my child has pretty much no hair. There is some of it there, but it's bright blonde right now, so you can't see it. It was so hard to find a yellow shirt for him to use, so I ended up cutting the bottom off one of his 0-3 month size yellow onesies and hemmed it and then sewed on the black zig-zag stripe. I didn't want to buy such a small amount of black fabric, so since I'm so short, I cut off a few inches from one of my black pajama pants (and there are still several inches to spare).

All of the pictures I could find of Charlie Brown had him wearing brown shoes with the black shorts -- which sooooo doesn't match -- but we did it anyway. I used my black eyeliner to draw the swirl on top of his head.

For Halloween, we went to my Grandma's house as we've done for as long as I can remember (except when we were old enough to trick-or-treat on our own and wanted to hit a ton more houses (plus we lived in Nebraska then :) so that would have been quite the drive to Grandma's. Michael carried Ethan around to the houses with the other kids. I didn't want to carry him up there cause I knew people would say "I know who this candy is really for" and I didn't want to feel embarrassed. But Michael doesn't embarrass easily, so he didn't mind.

Ethan was quite the trick-or-treater. He never cried and stayed alert and was interested in everything around him the whole time. But it was another story once we were done and got him in his car seat. It was past his bedtime and he let us know it!

Tagged by Jen

So Jen tagged me to answer this questionnaire-thingy . . .

8 favorite TV shows:
1. 90210 (the new one - and don't make fun of me . . . i know it's a teenager show, but i like it)
2. Chuck
3. America's Next Top Model
4. Amazing Race
5. So You Think You Can Dance
6. Desperate Housewives (just started watching this one - i'm on season 3 from the library)
7. Survivor
8. CSI (all 3, but mostly the original series)

8 things I did yesterday:
1. finished preparing the craft supplies for Super Saturday for the class i was teaching
2. took my son trick-or-treating
3. RAN ERRANDS (this one was big cause Michael's motorcycle is in the shop, so he's been using my car for 2 weeks, and I've been stranded at home and couldn't do any of my errands . . . so i made him skip work to let me use the car - he's his own boss, so no worries)
4. took Ethan to visit my mother-in-law at her work so she could see his costume
5. fixed my hair (more than just the quick straightening)
6. wore something other than sweats or jeans and a sweatshirt
7. got to leave the house
8. didn't clean

8 things i look forward to:
1. buying a house
2. having a yard
3. buying a house
4. having a yard
5. having another baby . . . don't know when, but i liked being pregnant - a baby is fun too :)
6. staying perpetually 22 years old for a few more years, then moving it to 24 for a while
7. getting skinny again
8. fitting into my skinny clothes from before i got pregnant

8 favorite restaurants:
1. Desert Fire
2. Fat Burger
3. Subway
4. Chili's
5. the mongolion grill by my Grandma's house
6. New York Burrito
7. The pizza place i went to yesterday with my hubby
8. Red Robin

8 people i tag:
1. Kari
2. Tami
3. Minnette
4. Alex
5. Jasmine
6. Nathan (probably won't happen cause he hasn't updated his blog since about June . . . )
7. You :)
8. Them :)