Vacation Season

We were very lucky that my mom wanted to spend a little more time with the grandkids before we head off to Texas so she invited us on another cruise. To refresh your memory, we went on a cruise last year around this time and it was awful. Taylor didn't sleep at night and we spent hours pushing her around the boat all night long and we were all exhausted and crabby. I'm sure we all vowed never to travel with her again but a year has passed and we decided to give it a try again. Since 5 days were so bad last year we decided to try 7 days this time! Yes, these pictures may all look very familiar since we went on the same boat and to some of the same islands but the kids had so much fun that it was totally worth it. They were both great sleepers and so much fun to be with. And thanks to the kids playroom, mom and I even got to enjoy some peace and quiet, although Ethan seem to think that we must be doing really fun things while he was gone so we always had to bargain when it came time to ship him off to play. Of course when I came to pick him up he always asked for a few more minutes so I think he was having a good time too.

Ethan came up with the idea several weeks before we left that he wanted to try all sorts of food while we were on vacation. He even made a list. He did great and I think we made it through most of the list. You can see the thumbs up for the crab cakes. He must have gotten his love of seafood from his dad. This look was actually directed at the fact that green beans were on the plate with his shrimp, scallops, and calamari. Scallops and calamari wasn't on the original list and they won't be on any future list from Ethan's lack of enthusiam. Just FYI even though Ethan is wearing the same shirt it wasn't the same meal. His brillant mother forgot to bring one stack of his clothes so there was a lot of repeats during the week.
The lobster was his favorite. So at the end of the week we crossed off shrimp, lobster, crab, steak, and fish. He cracked me up when he looked at the steak and said "Next time I want the red steak, like daddy, not this black kind." I guess he doesn't like my well done steak any more than Abe does.

Someone doesn't want their picture taken with their mother. Oh it starts early.I was trying to convince Taylor that she didn't need to smile big (ie stick out her lower jaw and bear her teeth). So I asked for a thinking face and I got it.

These adorable children truly struggle with smiling (I'm sure they get it from me). You can see Taylor watching my mom behind me and copying what she is doing. This lovely beach was right off the boat, as you can see behind the kids. It was just perfect.

The kids had a wonderful time at the pirate themed party. Taylor couldn't wait to have her face painted though Ethan was very much against it for some reason. You have to love a party where they paint your children at 9 at night and you get to fight with a tired child to try and remove it before bed. What are these people thinking? Good thing mom was prepared with vaseline or we might still be wiping it off.

Ethan asked me to take his picture and this was his best pose. He NEVER wants his picture taken but this one cracked me up.

Half Moon Cay is an amazing island in the Bahamas. I think mom and I were just as excited as the kids to go back. We were ready for a long day this year and the kids swam and played until they were both completely exhausted.

Ethan is a great swimmer with his lifejacket on. He is so independent and would never get out of the water if it was up to him. Taylor didn't have as good of luck with her lifejacket and was very high maintenance in the water.

Our favorite part of the island was the pirate ship play area. I really think Abe needs to build of one of these in our backyard in his spare time next year :) Taylor and Ethan both are huge fans of pirates so there was a lot of "arrrr matie" going on as they ran from one area to the next or were "trapped" by the bad pirates. Their enthusiam was contagious.

Taylor was always so excited to find a towel animal in our bed. Every night she would say "it's my ____ (insert the animal of the night) and I love him." Then Ethan would promptly destroy it and she would cry "but I loved him" and find the animal on grandma's bed. And we repeated that pattern for 7 nights.

Ethan's putt putt skills have improved from last year. Both kids would have played all day long if I had let them.

Our 30 minute stop in Nassau. If there wasn't a great beach the kids weren't even interested in getting off the boat.

We are very proud of our cheap, plastic trophy for our win as "Best Twisting Family" on the boat. Since this will be the one and only dance contest we ever win, we will treasure it. The kids were so excited. Ethan thought he was a shoe-in for the "Best Boy Dancer" since he was the only boy for the first 2 minutes of the song but then came some little boy with some serious moves. He won it fair and square but Ethan didn't see it that way and he was crushed. Thankfully there was one chance to redeem ourselves with the family twisting contest. We danced as hard as we could and they had pity on us!

The kids loved the water slide but it was a lot more crowded than last year so they couldn't play in the water at the bottom and it was also a battle. I was happy to see that my kids weren't the only ones that couldn't get the concept though.

Househunting in San Antonio

I can’t believe how far I have fallen behind on blogging. Last month Abe and I decided to take a trip to San Antonio to look for a place to live. I was going to go by myself since Abe doesn’t have any time off these days but the doctor he was looking for was nice enough to let him have some time off and my mom was nice enough to watch the kids so we could go. Although it was complicated to get the kids to Richmond and meet up in San Antonio, since I had already bought my ticket when Abe decided to come, it was worth it. We have such a time nice exploring the city, looking at houses and just having a kid free long weekend. When I booked the trip I had no idea that it was “Fiesta Week” in San Antonio. It’s some big cultural event in the city but it really just meant that all the nice hotels were booked, traffic and parking were horrible, and everyone was taking random days for holidays. We did find a cute bed and breakfast to stay at. It was on a very quiet end of the riverwalk until the day when they had a big Fiesta party right outside our window. It was the one day that I really wanted to take a nap and relax after looking at houses all morning. It wasn’t going to happen with the loud latin music blaring all afternoon.
I wanted to surprise Abe with a nice dinner for his birthday while we were out there but I never have good luck when I try to surprise him. He always either figures out the surprise or does something to ruin it. I should be prepared for it by now but I still try. I was going to try to surprise Abe by staying at a hotel (we were going to spend the whole trip at the house of a friend of a friend) but since Abe was arriving first and I didn’t get there until 5 hours later I couldn’t figure out a good way to work out my surprise. So the dinner was my last hope for a surprise. I thought I could get him to walk with me along the riverwalk until we came to the restaurant, an expensive steak restaurant. But of course we were running late so I had to rush him along for our reservation time and he totally caught onto my plan. I picked the restaurant based on the lovely view of the river and the romantic atomosphere. Here is what is looked like on their website.

Little did we know that because of Fiesta week they were going to put up an ugly wooden fence and have loud, bad music playing and lots of people drinking and partying right beside our table and we could barely talk over the noise. Here is the picture below from our table. It was almost funny how bad my surprises turn out. But we did enjoy our time hanging out on the riverwalk.

So while we were there we spent most of the days looking at rental properties. We thought we had a lot of options from the online searches we did before we left but we quickly learned that pictures can be very deceiving. Most of the houses had not been well taken care of, were dirty, or weren't even honest about the number of bedrooms they had. Our favorite house was the one where the formal living room consisted of piles of clothes and 3 guns laying on the floor. The living room was two camp chairs, a big screen tv, and can of dip. Abe said he counted around 15 guns just laying around the house in every room. Having noticed a car in the driveway when we came in I couldn't help but think that they could be in the house and these were not people that I wanted to surprise. I think I held my breath the whole time we were in the house. Finally on the last day Abe was there one house lowered their price and came into our price range so we went to take a look. We are excited because this house is just a few blocks from the church and walking distance to the elementary school. It is right off the interstate for Abe's job and right behind a huge shopping center with Target and Kohl's. So here are a few pictures of the house. We will have a guest room and lots of space so I hope we get lots of visits from friends and family.

The formal sitting room has a pool table that the owner has left in the house. Maybe we will have to take up pool.

We are so excited about the move, although we will really miss our great friends here. Ethan is counting down the number of Sundays left until we move. It is nice that he is so excited.

And since no post would be complete with out some pictures of the kids here are a few from Easter.

What have we been up to?

This post was started forever ago so I'm just going to finish it and then move onto the more recent past. I must be the worst blogger ever lately.

It has been forever since I have even looked at anyone's blog, much less had anything to write about. So I was trying to think of what we have done over the last month and all I can come up with is cleaning. It seems like a futile attempt to keep this house clean but I feel like cleaning is all I do from morning until night. And we aren't having any showings so it seems completely pointless. Maybe one day it will all be worth it if we can just get it sold. But we have already come to terms with possibility of renting it out if need be. (Update: House is under contract and we should close June 9th if all goes well. We only had about 6 showings so we feel very blessed that it sold relatively quickly)

I guess we have done a few other things in the last month but in my attempts to keep the house clean I seem to never have a camera when I need it. Work has finally slowed down significantly so we have had lots of togetherness. I'm still trying to decide if that is a good thing or not. Taylor and Ethan are still terribly amuzing and frustrating all at the same time.

So here is my Ethan update.... He continues to be much older than 4. He is obsessed with talking to people anywhere we go and it is pretty funny to see how people react to him. We were in a bike shop today and the salesperson comes over and asks me if I needed any help. I said we were just browsing and didn't need anything. Ethan follows him saying "excuse me, excuse me. Can you tell me how much this costs?" The guy looked completely confused and paused for a good 5 seconds before he answers Ethan that the bike costs $150. I love his willingness to ask questions without concern but it can be a little frustrating too. The other day I was at a fast food restaurant and he asked to order his lunch. He knew he was suppose to order a 4 piece chicken nugget and he looks at me with his mischievious look and then tells the lady he wants a 10 piece chicken nugget and we have a fun little battle as the clerk seems to be confused by which one of us she should listen too. Why she wouldn't just ring up the 4 pieces so we could move on I don't know.

I have recently been reminded that I need to watch what I say in front of him because it will be repeated... word for word. I was somewhat frustrated with someone (who will remain nameless) because of something said person had fed Ethan that had sugar in it. I was ranting to my mom and I said something like "why in the world would you feed him popcorn with sugar on it?" I was over it by the next time we saw this person but Ethan marches right up to the person (I was around the corner and could only hear the conversation) and says "why in the world would you feed me popcorn with sugar on it?" She politely responded "Well it said it had sucralose. I thought you could have that." To which Ethan replies, "No I can't have sucralose" with complete conviction. (No he doesn't know that he can't have sucralose but he's pretty good at just going with the conversation). So she replies "well I'm sorry. I will check with you next time." I guess that satisfied Ethan cause he finally let it drop. Later on when he was repeating some other comment I had made he looked over at me and says "You really need to watch what you say in front of me." Oh I love hearing myself coming out of that little mouth.

We attempted to watch conference last weekend even though it appeared that no one was getting anything out of it because of all the chaos. At one point in time Ethan was playing on the floor, paying no attention to what was going on, and Taylor was throwing a fit about wanting something. So I was a little short with her and Ethan looks up from his playing and says "Did you just hear the prophet say that you need to be kind to little children?" Ouch, how can you argue with that. Funny how that is the only thing he got out of conference and will often use it against me now.

We have decided that Ethan will most likely grow up to be a used car salesman. The other day we were playing pet shop and I was suppose to buy some of their stuff animals. I selected the ladybug and told him that I wanted to buy it. He says "well somebody else was just about to buy it but I'll sell it to you for $2." The beginning of his used car career.

I guess I should say that it he makes it to adulthood he will probably be a used car salesman. We have our doubts these days with the lack of fear that child has. We went to a pond in town the other weekend and we were walking over the stepping stones that go across the lake. The water is only about 2 or 3 inches deep where the stepping stones are on the spillway but on either side of the stones it gets much deeper. Ethan thought he was all big and bad and was jumping across the stones by himself and it was driving me crazy. I tried to convince him that it was a bad idea but I hate always being the voice of reason so I let him continue. He decided to walk along the cement divides of the spillway and somehow got the bright idea to jump from the divides to the stones which was a further distance. So when he jumped he lost his balance and tumbled right into the deep part of the pond head first. Oh it was so awful to watch it all in slow motion but be too far away to do anything. Abe grabbed him out of the water before he even took a breath of air but he was so upset. We took off his shirt and gave him my sweatshirt to keep him warm as we walked back to the car. (I thought I had made my point that maybe he should listen to mom next time she warns him about something. That lasted for a couple of hours but by dinner time he said "Boy that was pretty cool".) So we get back to the car and strip him down the rest of the way and just have him in my sweatshirt that went down to his knees. He was VERY concerned that someone in another car might see him and know that he didn't have any underwear on. He talked about it the whole way home and once we pulled in front of the house he realized that people on the street might see him and his lack of underwear. So I told him that I would just carry him in and he said "but then Will (the neighbor) will see my bottom". I was out of patience so I just told him to cover it with his hands. Then he said "but then Will will see my penis." So I again told him to just cover it with his hands. In total frustration he says "but my hands aren't big enough to cover it." I'm sure his concern was that I expected him to cover everything at once with his little hands but it sure made us laugh.

Taylor is getting bigger and more amusing each day also. She is such a girlie girl. She loves to wear a tutu and do "ballerina dances" for us. She has been known to put on 3 pairs of pants while she is suppose to be taking a nap and is constantly making request to wear dresses all the time. She isn't all sweetness. She can have it out with Ethan and she can be pretty violent when she wants to be. But even Ethan can't stay mad at her for long when her eyes fill up with alligator tears when she gets in timeout for putting him in a choke hold. I'm always impressed with Ethan for his ability to not strike back at her (even though he will get right in her face and growl at her when he gets really mad which only makes Taylor more likely to punch him). Taylor is all about compromises lately although she really doesn't understand the term. At dinner Ethan was trying to negotiate dessert or no bath or something he wanted and Abe joking said "Here's compromise, do what your told or get a spanking". Taylor quickly chimes in, with her hand in a fist, "how 'bout I spank you daddy? that be a compromise" with such a sassy tone.

Poor Taylor has so many cute things she says and does but they are usually quick, one liners or things that just don't come across being written. Hopefully she won't feel bad down the road when we don't have great records of all the adorable things she did when she was 2. She is so different than Ethan in some ways and I'm not sure if its boy vs. girl differences or just personality. She gets so frustrated with Ethan's constant chatter and noise, we both would like it a little quieter from time to time. Ethan's pictures have always been full of scribble and cover the whole page. Taylor does neat little pages full of small, delicate circles, usually the same size all over the page. She may be my little perfectionist.

I better finish this post before I head off for vacations. I promise more updates to come when I get back. After a trip to San Antonio and Easter I finally have things to blog about.

Potty Humor

I will preface this post by saying all may not find the humor in this post so you have been warned!

The other week both kids were sick and it was AWFUL for everyone. It was so strange because they were both sick in completely different ways but they were both miserable. I guess it is better to have them both sick at once since Abe and I had to take turns missing work to take care of them.

So day 1 of being sick Ethan had terrible diarrhea and was miserable. The attempts to make it to the bathroom didn't always work so it was frustrating and upsetting to everyone involved. I think Ethan got over the initial horror of it pretty quickly though. By mid-morning he says "Uh, mom, I thought it was just a toot.... but it wasn't". By dinner that evening he was even more non-chalant about the whole thing. He is sitting eating his dinner and he says "I'm totally going to run out of underwear." He doesn't move from the table, he doesn't even pause from eating. So I'm thinking he is just speaking in general so I gave him a rundown on how I would do laundry tonight and then it hit me "Did you just poop in your pants?" He answers "Yep."


Good times at the Fish house.

Where did January go?

It seems like it has been a long time since we posted something but the pictures in our last post are from Christmas and that was just a few days ago, right? Maybe its just me but January was a complete blur. Abe had his second round of radiation and was able to get lots of things done around the house during is forced exile. Work has been incredibly busy and I'm counting down the weeks until I can be done. I actually did the math the other day and realized that technically I could take the next 5 months off and still get paid based on all the overtime I have been working lately. Unfortunately there is too much to do and HR doesn't seem to like my plan too much.

Other than work, getting the house ready to put on the market has been the most time consuming task lately. Abe did an amazing job of redoing the front and back porches. They were in pretty bad shape and now look great. We enjoyed hours of patching, painting, cleaning, organizing, and staging. But now the house is officially on the market. So bring on the offers. I thought this would be a good time to do a little comparison of what the house look liked when we moved in.

The living room before. Note the lovely blinds.The living room after.

The kitchen before. I do not miss that tile.
The new and improved kitchen.

The dining room. Sorry the light fixture went to goodwill.
Abe did such a great job on this floor!

Our bedroom.

The master bath. Ethan and Taylor's room.
The kids continue to do wonderful and are very excited about our move. Ethan has gotten into the packing process. We were loading some stuff to put in storage and he wanted to know what we were doing. We explained how we wanted the house to look cleaner by getting the clutter out. He said "so stuff is going to the attic like in Toy Story". We said yes that was pretty much it. Then he grabs a box and starts loading his toys in. He told Taylor "come on, we are going to sell this stuff at a yard sale and get some money." He is always thinking. The other day he was watching me as I was getting ready for work. I put on a pair of hose only to realize that they had a run in them so I took them off. Ethan wanted to know what I was doing and I explained about the hole and how I couldn't wear them. So he say "So I guess you're going commando today?" Thanks Abe for teaching that concept to Ethan. Tonight as we were trying to leave the house I was trying my best to convince a stubborn Taylor to go to the bathroom and she wasn't having it. I finally told her that Ethan and Dad were going to leave without us if she didn't go. Ethan's eye got wide and his face got very serious. He said "Hold on here. I am not going ANYWHERE without my sister." I love the moments when they love each other so much.

So last Saturday was Taylor's 2nd birthday. I can't believe another year has passed by. Taylor is so much fun and such a handful at the same time. While playing teaparty today Ethan was making a lot of noise while "drinking" his tea. Taylor said "Ethan that isn't very good manners." Just what I was thinking, she is like a mini me some days. Since I am completely overworked and lazy we decided to go to Chuck E. Cheese for her birthday. Ethan and Taylor had a great time. I'm worried that this picture is a flash forward 14 years.No worries, it's just Abe, not some creepy mountain man trying to abduct Taylor. Abe thinks he is trying to get in as much time with a beard as possible before the army regulations kick in June 7th.



All day long on Taylor's birthday Ethan was letting Taylor pick everything. She got to decide what they watched on tv. He let her go first at everything. And this was all his own idea. So Sunday, the day after her birthday, she said something that she wanted to play with. Ethan took the toy from her and said very matter of factly "Taylor, its not your birthday any more."