Books of 2009

Here is where I will keep track of the books I read this year.

• The Eyre Affair - I would reccommend this to any one who enjoys literature and/or grammar.
• The No.1 Ladies Detective Agency - Almost a collection of short stories this is a fun and easy read with a little bit of African culture mixed in.

You can keep up with what I'm currently reading by checking my "Currently Reading" shelf on Good Reads.

This apple did not fall far from the trees!

So a brief history into our childhoods.

Philip was a very orderly child. Every toy in his room had a place. His parents even joke that they would go in and move toys to see what he would do. Philip would get very upset by out of place toys and immediately set things right again. Mrs. Cindy said that growing up Craig was Philip's greatest adversary. Not just because they were brothers, but because Craig was not an orderly child and would not like to put things back in their place.

Philip also had his own special language growing up: Juice = Juey, Computer = Doodaloo, Finger = Bimmy, Philip Boudreaux = Fal-lap Boo-dough. For a while they thought he had a hearing problem, but no, he just had a better way of thinking about the world.

I, on the other hand, was a "testy" child. My parents tell stories of me disobeying them just to see what they would do. I once pushed an ashtray off of a coffee table all while my father was sitting out of reach saying, "Bridgette Marie Stelly, don't you push that ash tray off of the table." I stared him straight in the face and pushed it right off. Whew, it's a wonder I survived those years.

Well, Ethan is proving to be a mixture of us both. At 17 months of age he will clean the entire living room. Not just picking up his toys, but also putting them in the correct locations: puzzle pieces in the puzzles, hot wheels in the little plastic bucket, big cars in the big plastic bucket, blocks in the canvas container, and all other toys in the metal basket. Every toy has a place and he knows where those places are.

One of his favorite activities is lining things up: lining up cars,
or refrigerator magnets.
He recently has been aggravated by our dog Emma who leaves her two stuffed toys around the living room. Now when he finds her toys unattended he returns them to her crate. It is really cute that he is picking up after the dogs. The other day Emma busted one of her toys and before I had a chance to clean the stuffing up, Ethan was gathering up all the stuffing and making trips to the trash can.

Another thing he is orderly about is the dinner table. He does not like food to be off of his plate. If I am pushing his chair away from the table he will scream for me to stop so that he can put all of his food back on this plate.

Now for the "testy" side of him. I'm sure this will get worse but recently he has began to test his limits. The other day I told him not to touch the lime bush. He stood with his finger 1 mm from the bush until his foot slipped and he ended up touching it. Arg! Or earlier this week, he picked up a Christmas decoration that he knows he is not suppose to play with and just stared me down. "Put that back where you got it, Ethan." Blank stare. "Put it back, or you will be in trouble." Now, those are big words in our house Ethan knows that trouble is our code for you are about to get a spanking. Blank stare. So I get up out of my chair and what does he do? Yep, you guessed it, he immediately put the decoration back and ran the other way. Too bad I can still run faster than him.

On a lighter note, Danielle is coming to stay with Ethan in January and I think I should warn her that he has a list of vocabulary that do not make any sense to normal adults. For example, he calls a bagel a "Da" and (as you know from our Christmas card) he calls a ball a "gall". He can say baby so I know he can make a b sound, but he does not say ball, only gall.

Oh well, that's it for now. I'll post about Christmas soon. I hope you all had a good one.

Christmas!!

So as the presents piled up under the tree the week before Christmas we thought it would be a good idea to open a few before the big day.
Here is a present from my Nanny to Ethan. A super cool workbench from his Amazon wish list.

It is a little too old for him right now, but he'll grow into it!

With the Boudreauxs my Pawpaw sent us bags of little satsumas from his garden. While Mrs. Cindy and I were at church on Christmas Eve (the men stayed home with Ethan who had a fever) Ethan made himself busy by reorganizing them from where they were in the kitchen to his bowl on the table. When the bowl got too full he just started stacking them on the table.


The Boudreauxs came up for Christmas and Ethan loves his uncle "Keg". Here they are watching Cars (what else?).

So Christmas morning we ripped into the presents!
From Philip and I Ethan got the Elmo books seen above that go in his "My First Story Reader", his Christmas sweater and a huge box of big Legos. You can see more present opening pictures here and pictures and videos here.

I wanted to get a picture of Ethan in his Christmas outfit in front of the tree.
Hmm...He is wearing his Christmas outfit and he is in front of the tree. I don't remember why he was so upset but he got over it quickly.

Decorating a Gingerbread House

So I bought one of those Gingerbread house kits from the store the other day because I thought it would be a great family project. The following conversation took place.

"Look Philip, I got a gingerbread house kit!"
"Cool, I love gingerbread. Are we all going to do it together?"
"Yea, I thought that would be fun and then we can use it for a decoration."
"You mean we are not going to eat it?"
"Well, I wanted to keep it as a decoration."
"But gingerbread is to eat!"
"So we are just going to decorate it all and then eat it?"
"Yep!"
Using my newly developed skills I decide not to continue the argument, but instead silently mourned my new gingerbread house. I decided to try to enjoy the activity and not worry about what was going to happen to the house after we decorated it.

So the three of us gathered around the table and:
I assembled the walls with icing (not with hot glue like originally planned).

Ethan very carefully decorated the Christmas tree and two little gingerbread people that stand in front of the house. We had to repeatedly tell him that the candy was not to eat (even though dad was sneaking candy behind his back!) We finally got out some mini M&Ms so that he could eat something while he decorated.

I iced the house while Philip and Ethan placed the candies.

I even made a walkway so Ethan could decorate without restriction!

Ethan poses with his gingerbread house:Don't you just love that smile?

Here is the finished house:
So later that night I turn to Philip and ask, "Aren't you going to eat the house now?"
"Not now!"
"What do you mean not now? I thought you wanted to make the house and then eat it!"
"I do want to eat it, after Christmas!"
"That's when I want you to eat it too!"

Philip thought I wanted to save the house for years to come and I thought Philip wanted to eat the house that night. It was one of the funny miscommunications that we could laugh about the night that it happened.

I posted all the pictures from our first family craft project on our flickr page.

Thanksgiving in Ohio

Again, imagine that it is early December when you are reading this post:

This year we will not be traveling home for the Christmas holidays. We usually stay here for Christmas day, but travel home the day after Christmas and spend about a week there. This year Philip is going to be saving all of his vacations days for our ski trip in January so that will not be possible.

My parents traveled up here before Thanksgiving, and since we wouldn't be in town for Christmas we decided to do Christmas with the Stellys early.

This is a picture of Ethan opening the puppies' new marshmallow gun! Very cool. Of course Dante is terrified of it and Emma hasn't figured out that the gun is the source of the marshmallows, she just looks around on the ground until one appears. Ethan got some great gifts that he just loved! Lightening McQueen slippers and a great big dump trunk!

Here is his reaction to the new slippers (sorry about the orientation of this video, if someone knows how to flip video you let me know!)

Opening the dump truck:

He wore the slippers all day and there are some great picture of him playing with his dump truck here.

For Thanksgiving we all traveled up to my Aunt Georgia's house in Ohio for the Quaschnick family reunion. My mom is one of five Quaschnick sisters raised in New Orleans. Now the five sisters are spread over four states and two continents!

Row 1: Brandon, Jenny, Jonathan, Sister #1: Linda, Donald, Sister #2: Janet, Madeline, Cousin Phil, Sister #4: Betty, Mike, Ethan, Philip, Me, Greg, Sister #3: Judy, Danielle Row 2: Sister #5 Georgia, Aunt Betty, Grandpa, Grandma, Aunt Lee, Brian Row 3: Abby, Patrick, Tripp, and Maggie The biologist in me also wants to make a pedigree of the people shown here, but I will restrain myself.

While in Ohio we visited the National Museum of the United States Air Force. This is the world's largest and oldest military aviation museum. Out of the whole thing Ethan probably enjoyed the one jeep there and the lights in the modern aviation hanger the best. Here are pictures of Ethan trying to figure out where the color on his skin is coming from.

The museum does have an old Air Force One plane, but we did not get signed up for the tour early enough to be able to go. We'll just have to go back to Ohio so we can do it another time! Philip did buy Ethan a die-cast F-16 and he loves it. He makes jet noises as he flies it around the house.

More posts to come!

You know you are the mom of a preschooler if.....

So today when I caught myself saying, "Don't eat the couch!" I thought to myself you know only moms of preschoolers would have a reason during the day to yell, "Don't eat the couch!"

I think it would be neat to compile a list of things probably only moms of preschoolers do or say during the day. Please leave a comment on this post with something unique that you say or do and we'll go from there. If you are a mom of a preschooler and want to see what your friends could add to this list please post it on your blog too. If you do let me know and I will add your name here on this post!

Here is the beginning of the list:

You know you are the "MOP" when you....

1. say things like: "We don't eat couches!"
2. find out that there is a hole in the back of your husband's speaker because of all the toys that have been stashed there!
3. have to explain to another human being that it is dangerous to walk around with a blanket over your head.
   

That's funny! (updated)

In the last month Ethan has taken, what I would call, leaps and bounds in development. He is really growing up! His vocabulary just grows everyday and even though all of his words are really not words (momma for muffin) it still just amazes me at his ability to imitate almost anything you say. Just today he "named" all the little wooden pieces on his door: sun, dragonfly, frog, turtle, and duck. He even pointed to his name and when I said "That's your name." he pointed to himself and said "mame". It's just crazy.

He has also started running in the last couple of weeks. When he really gets going all you see is flailing limbs and his little body just miraculously moves forward. He also falls alot more now because of it, but that's okay too.

He can now also make a kissing noise which is so cute. About a month ago he started "kissing" the dogs. Really he would just hold his hands behind his back and then lean forward with his lips slightly puckered. The dogs would have various wet spots on their backs at any one time. Well, somewhere along the way he learned to make the kiss noise and now he kisses everything! His cars, his stuffed animals... at a play date last week he even kissed the hostess's little boy. Max let him and then said, "Now my face is all wet!" That's what you get when you let a still teething boy kiss you I guess.

Lastly, he is developing his sense of humor. On Sunday Philip was sick and stayed home from church. It was really cold so I just grabbed his down coat and wore that to church. While buckling Ethan in his car seat he grabbed the sleeve of Philip's jacket and said, "Dadda?" "Yes, this is daddy's jacket." I replied. Then he busted up laughing. It was so cute! It may seem hard to believe that he grasped the irony of me wearing Daddy's jacket, but that sure was what it seemed liked.

We had a great time at Thanksgiving and that post is coming up!

Updated section: I forgot about something else he has started doing. Ethan has started coming up to us in whatever room we are in and telling us "Aye, Aye". He then will walk into another room, or around the house. A couple of days ago while I was getting ready in the morning he told me "Aye,Aye" and then closed my bedroom door. He waited in the hall about a minute and then he came back in the room all smiles. He did this over and over! Telling me bye-bye and then waiting out in the hall until he could come in and do it again.

He can also now feed himself oatmeal by himself in the morning. We have even had a few servings of soup which opens up all sorts of new menu items for me!

So, pretend it is still early November.....

Post-Halloween entry:

This Halloween was Ethan's first time trick or treating. Our church did not have their usual Trunk-o-Treat (why, I do not know) so we trick or treated in our neighborhood with our friends and neighbors David (the dad who is not pictured here), Alex (The Tennessee fan), and Abbey (Little Red Riding Hood).


Ethan was a Saints player and that evening and I followed suit by wearing my jersey and Philip wore my Saints cap (he was going to be Sean Payton and hold a piece of paper in front of his face all night but we didn't think people would really get it).

On Halloween night we had to wake Ethan up from a nap to go trick or treating and he was not hungry for dinner before we left the house...does this spell disaster to anyone else?

His cute eye "decorations" are cut and colored band-aids and they didn't last more than one or two houses. Other than losing the band-aids he did really well considering the circumstances. To collect candy I decorated a $.25 bag from Walmart with some white paint and gold glitter glue (also supplied to me by the VanderSluis family!) and spruced it up with some Halloween stickers. When Ethan wasn't carrying the bag he was holding on to the "FOOTBALL", which is the only way Ethan knows how to say football.


Our neighbors dog Dodger was even dressed for the occasion!

Stay tuned for more updates.....