As I mentioned some time ago, Natalie had acquired the bad habits of picking her nose and also holding onto her bottom like she had to go potty continually. (Wherever we would go, people would ask me, like I was neglecting the child's needs, "Do you need to take her to the bathroom?" No...I'd answer...) Well, the good thing is these two habits are beginning to go away. Only to be replaced with a couple other habits that aren't horrible, but they really, really get to my nerves. She's lately been making slurping sounds with her mouth, like she's forgotten how to swallow her excess spit. Drives me batty. The other bad habit she has acquired is something that most kids probably do, and only really bothers me because of personal issues of my own. Lately she doesn't listen very carefully, and in response to a question from either Phil or me (I haven't seen it in response to other people; just mom or dad), she answers, "huuuuuuuuuh???" (Long and drawn out, just like I wrote it.) It particularly bothers me because of my own speech issues; I've had to repeat myself...uh...repeatedly...for as long as I can remember.  I don't mind it every now and then because I know I talk too fast, but for whatever mentally challenged reason, many times when I'm asked to repeat myself, my brain freezes up even more and I have even more trouble spitting out the original thought. I'd rather just forget I said anything at all and move on. When other people ask me to repeat myself, it's generally asked (with one notable exception during my formative years) in a respectful way, but the "Huuuuuuuhhhh?" I've been getting from Natalie just pushes that little button inside me. Especially when I know I wasn't talking particularly fast, and she heard me but is responding that way out of habit.

Like I said, these aren't horrible things but when it goes on day in and day out, some days seemingly non-stop, it starts to grate your nerves.

Ethan may be young still, but he has definitely started in with the the toddler tantrums a lot earlier than Natalie did! He doesn't seem to quite have the desire to please, like Natalie did until she was going on three and competing with her new brother for attention. At least, I don't remember Natalie at age one throwing herself to the ground with the instant tears and drama that Ethan is already such an expert in doing. I'm also looking forward to him outgrowing a bad habit he's developed of whacking me --hard; the boy is strong -- across the chest when he's nursing. He flings his whole arm across me, thumping me right below the neck. That's when I abruptly end the nursing session and put him on the floor, bringing about more tears and insta-drama.

Another thing is his love of screeching, usually with much glee and enthusiasm, but also sometimes in anger or frustration. It is absolutely eardrum piercing. The other day I attempted to go grocery shopping with the kids. (We have issues getting to the grocery store, at least for more than a few items at a time, these days; with two kids it's about impossible with just one parent.) I was winding my way around the aisles of Wal-Mart, Natalie being relatively well-behaved, and not asking for too many treats or snacks per minute. Meanwhile Ethan was just screaming his head off, having a grand old time listening to his voice echo back from the high beam ceilings. Many people passed by our little trio and gave me looks that said volumes. They were probably thinking, "So this is the kid who I heard from the other side of the store. His mother obviously has no control over her children." Okay, so maybe they really were looks of understanding and pity, but that's not what it looked like to me! A few times I just wanted to look back at the other shoppers and say, "Just imagine how my ears feel!" Instead I just once again abandoned all hopes of getting all the groceries I needed, and headed right for the checkout. 

Two weeks ago on a Sunday right after church service, I was out in the lobby talking with some people. There was a large crowd of people around, as everyone was milling about and making their way out the door or into the nursery area to pick up children. Natalie was playing around my legs and started playing with my skirt, as usual. She then lifted it up. She lifted it ALL the way up to my waist, on my backside. I was SOOOOOooooooo embarrassed. Is it at all possible for me to overstate that? 

Yes, I have wonderful, lovely children and I thank God for them being such a blessing to my life. But there are times -- many, many times -- when I have to repeatedly remind myself that someday I really will look back on these years and miss them!

Oooh, speaking of which, Ethan is now screeching, and it's not with joy. It's time for him to take a nap!

September 28, 2005
I have a month to catch up on. So that I don't get too wordy, I'm going to do it mostly in pictures...each one is worth 1,000 words, right? That doesn't mean I won't add my own additional words, of course...

Here's Natalie on her first day of dance class, on Sept. 13. She has started tap dancing as well as tumbling. Yesterday, the third week of class, was the first parent viewing. Natalie is...well...she seems to have my natural balance abilities (note how often I fall down and go boom). She was the only one in the tumbling class where the teacher had to hold her hands to walk the balance beam. She's learning, though. She also showed her somersaults, crab walks, and log rolls in tumbling. In tap she's been practicing, everywhere, her foot-stomping "heel, STEP! heel, STEP!" She really loves tap, especially because the shoes make lots of noise. She's so cute, in her little leotard and tights, too. 

Oh, and in the above picture, you can see our new-to-us minivan! Yes, we are officially parents now. And we L-O-V-E it, it makes life so much easier. Natalie really likes the fact that it's purple, and that it locks on its own. That's what she says almost every time we go, when we hit 15 MPH and all the doors lock: "Mama, it locks on it's own!" It's a long story how we got it, but in short, it was literally an answer to prayer. I'll write more about that later.

Ethan got his hair cut for the first time last week, on Sept. 20. We got it done at Snip Buzz Bangs, where I thought we might have a chance at a pleasant experience. This is how he's reacted to anyone coming near him, ever since he had his 12 month shots recently. Here's the "before" picture. 

And here's the after, when he realized the lady with the scissors really wasn't out to maim him:

No, it's not too much different, it's just trimmed up and looking neater. I wanted to get it done before Nan's wedding, which is coming up in a week and half. (Natalie is the flower girl, but Ethan has to look dapper in his little mini-tux too.) His hair was hitting his shoulders in the back. Now it looks very nice.

Speaking of hair cuts, Phil got his cut this weekend. I mean, cut. Short. He had it cut to 3/8 of an inch, all over. So long, hair line. It looks really good. The kids and I went with him to get it cut, so they didn't react badly to it; I was a little worried about that because he does look different. Natalie keeps telling him that he got a nice haircut.  It doesn't look all that different, with his hair being so blond before anyway, but you definitely see his head shape now instead of hair. His hair that remains is so light blond, that it looks almost white.

Ethan is working on his first molar right now. Today his gum on the lower right side is really swollen, and he's been wanting to chomp down on anything and everything lately, so it isn't far away.

The last thing I wanted to mention today is about Ethan's -ahem- strides in learning to walk. He's still not walking, shows very little interest. He likes to walk holding onto us, or cruising around the furniture, but he refuses to even take one step on his own. It doesn't bother me that he's not walking yet, because he's a very good, fast crawler, and I know from experience not to really encourage greater mobility -- it will happen on its own time, and once it does you have many more things to watch out for. The thing is that I know he really could walk if he just was motivated too. He just doesn't want to. It is cute though, whenever he decides he does want to walk, holding onto us. He says "step step step" the whole time he's walking. It's more like, "teh! teh! teh!" but we know what he's saying! The other day Natalie was sitting in her dolly stroller (not really meant for kids to sit in, I know, but whatever), and Ethan decided to push her around the kitchen in it. It was really cute. I took a series of three pictures when they were "walking"; they're down below in the POTD area.

September 6, 2005
Ever wonder just how much I've written on this journal over the years? I've been wondering too. Now I know that I am indeed wordy. I finally went back through all the journal archives and saved my journal onto a Word file, on disk. Lately I've been worried that suddenly I would have a computer crash and I'd lose everything. I could always retrieve it off the Internet again, but I want to have it in a form that I can...someday...print off, too. I just don't know when I'll ever do that, because I just add more to it every week, so how do I determine when it's "done" enough to print? I guess I'll just start printing sometime, and then keep adding to it periodically. Anyway, up until today's entry, I've written 241 pages of text, Arial point 10, single spacing. That doesn't include any of the photos I've posted on the journal from time to time -- that's just the words. 213,871 words. 1093 paragraphs. And still I keep going. (So for everyone who has continued to read this over the years, just think of all the time you've wasted!)

Just as an aside, in pulling together all my old entries, I finally found some missing entries from the last month of my pregnancy with Natalie. If you've visited the Journal Archive page within the last year and a half, at least, there was a note on there in the middle of the December entries that everything up until Natalie's birth story had gone "MIA". Well, I was so happy to have found them today! So, finally, after all this time, all my links are fixed.

There is one thing that I forgot to mention last time concerning our trip to Old Man's Cave this weekend. Every time we drove up and down and around the hilly roads in the area, she would say (sometimes scream at the top of her lungs) "Whee-ha!" At one point I started correcting her, saying, "It's yee-haw", but then I thought about it, and why not Whee-ha? It does make more sense, actually.

September 5, 2005
Where was I when last I wrote? Oh yes, I was keeping very busy because I had a wedding that weekend. It went very well, if you forget the fact that it started an hour late...as the bride said, though -- they were all African -- "it's a cultural thing; time is relative". Indeed that was true. The FIRST guest didn't show up until 10 minutes after it was supposed to start (not the prelude -- the actual start of the ceremony), and the family representatives (no actual family because they are all in Tanzania) and musicians showed up 40 minutes late. I was pretty much freaking out. But, as long as the bride and groom were okay with it!  It was really cool -- as the bridesmaids were walking out to the sanctuary with Julie, the bride, and then also after the pronouncement, all the ladies started doing that that ...trilling sound... thing as they made their way back up the aisle, then everyone started chanting something in their language that was really beautiful. It was obviously the same thing over and over again, and after the bride and groom made their way out to the limo, a bunch of people made a circle around them and the car and started marching around, saying the chant the whole time. After awhile of this, I asked one of the groomsmen what they were singing. He said, rather sheepishly, "In our language, it's not directly translated, but basically "Julie and Metty are shining, Julie and Metty are blessed by the Lord, Julie and Metty are full of beauty." Over and over again it went, for about 20 minutes. It brought tears to my eyes because it was so beautiful. It was definitely the most unique wedding I've ever done. I learned a lot about being flexible, though! As I kept telling myself, there is good reason why I always schedule in a "buffer" time between ceremony and reception...typically that's for extra-long post-ceremony photography, but in this case it was for the ceremony time being just a suggestion!

So then, of course, this week (on August 29) Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast, and what can you possibly say about that? Words cannot begin to describe all the emotion of this week, and the total devastation and loss of human life is beyond words. Much has been said about it from all over, but what just upsets me so much is the ineptitude on so many levels. The federal government not responding quickly enough. A system that built a city in a bathtub, just waiting to be filled, in the first place, where they knew levies wouldn't hold up to a storm of this magnitude. No actual evacuation strategies for the state or local governments in the areas. There were many people who couldn't evacuate when ordered to do so, because of health or poverty or both (and the conditions these people were put into once they were evacuated or rescued were appalling) but there have been many others who just didn't want to leave the doomed city, because of stubborn pride and outright foolishness. One man interviewed on TV, a former "King of Mardi Gras", was proudly staying put in his house, along with his family which included a very elderly lady. They were all staying above the water level, in the attic. All that was left of his house was the top attic floor, and he said he wasn't leaving because he didn't want to leave his stuff behind. The idiotic local TV reporter, opined after the story, "It's so refreshing to see such optimism in a time like this." That's not called optimism, that's called foolishness. His house is full of water up to the attic! The news just seems to get worse as the days go by. It makes your heart sick to think about it all, and it's overwhelming to try to take in all the stories and images of the last week.

This week Ethan started nodding his head, saying "yes", and it's a very cute and emphatic nod. I made cookies earlier this week, and when I asked him if he wanted one, he pointed to the cookies and nodded "YES!!" He's been doing that all week. It's very cute. Ethan started getting tooth #8 today, the match to the one that popped through on his birthday. He has been particularly fussy the past few nights (he only finally conked out after we gave him Advil) so we were pretty sure a tooth was on its way. The tooth cut through the gum today, so hopefully the worst is over. Soon come the molars...(cue ominous music)

This weekend, on Saturday, we took a day trip down to the Hocking Hills area, and hiked to see Old Man's Cave. Phil and I last went there for our second anniversary, so we wanted to get out of town for the day and decided to head down there. I carried Ethan in the sling, since the trail is not in any way stroller accessible, so I got a good workout that day. Natalie did a great job walking all day too! Her legs didn't give out until much later that day, when we were on another trail. It was a lot of up, down, and around, very steep slopes and stairs. She just held onto Daddy's hand the whole time and she did great! It was really pretty there, and a very fun day for all of us.

So, now I'm finally going to get to what I've been trying to write about for the past couple weeks. This is the story of my friendship with my neighbor April, and her kids Emily and Sarah. Emily is a year and a half. Sarah is almost four. We met back in May, out at the playground that is close by. It was a beautiful, sunny day and I had just gotten a double stroller, finally, so I tested it out by taking both kids out to the playground. She was out there with her kids, and Natalie really hit it off with Sarah. They played together so well. The natural shyness of Natalie was just nowhere to be seen when she was with "my new friend Sarah". April and I started talking, too, and soon more than two hours had gone by. I've made chit chat with moms in these situations before, but with April it was very different. It was like we had known each other all our lives; an instant connection. We talked about things that really mattered -- and  that was just the first day we met. Within a week, we were spending at least an hour together almost every single day, and if a day went by when we didn't get together, Natalie was asking me when Sarah would be over to play, and Sarah was asking April the same about us. They were so cute playing together. Natalie picked up a few bad habits from her friend, like crossing her arms, rolling her eyes and sulking if she didn't get what she wanted, but overall it was the most positive friendship she has had. Never before had Natalie played with someone where she seemed on equal terms. Normally, Natalie is happy to let other kids tell her what to do and where to go, but with Sarah they really did play -- together. For the first time since my friend Leslie in high school, I felt like I had a close female friend again too. I got to know all about April's background, and it is tragic. Her mom abused (abuses still) drugs, and growing up would often make April go to the local drug dealers to buy her drugs. Why send her daughter? Because mom didn't want to get in trouble with police. Her parents never took her to church, but at the age of 7 she and a couple friends were offered rides to church by someone who drove the church van. This man started sexually abusing April, and this went on for several years. When she tried telling her mom about it, she wasn't believed. Her mom thought that whenever April tried to improve herself, dressing nicely, that she was just doing that to "steal" her stepfather from her. And so it went. At 16 she left home and lived with grandparents for awhile, then at 17 got amnesty and lived alone. At 20 she was pregnant with Sarah, and she got married to Jo. She got married just to get out of her former life (of course). Jo has been abusive, as well, both physically and emotionally, and very controlling. He would get violent with her when she took money out of the bank to pay for doctor's visits for the kids. Eventually, this summer, he took her bank card away so she could not get money out at all. And, of course, the cars, house, bank account, everything, were all only in his name. After we met, April finally started feeling like her life was starting to come together. She told me that despite everything at home, she would spend time with us here and would get a taste of how families should be, and it gave her the strength to keep going. On the fourth of July, April prayed to accept Christ as her Lord, and we were all rejoicing with her! She had so many very basic questions about everything, because her only very limited knowledge of God was so tainted from the memory of the abuse. We would sit and talk for hours about the things of God, and she was starting to see for herself that she was a beloved child of God, and had so much worth -- something she never had seen or been told about before. We would sit and talk while the kids played. Even Ethan and Emmie played together. (Other kids often make Ethan crumple into dramatics when they look his direction.)   And now, I think April, Sarah and Emmie are gone from our lives. Two weeks ago, April had enough of Jo's controlling ways -- the last straws being Jo not returning home from his second-shift job one morning until 9 am, without explanation, and then him disabling her car so that she couldn't get to church. She said she was going to go visit her family back home for a couple days. Her sister was having some medical problems and she wanted to be there for her. When she told Jo to either fix her car or she would be taking his, Jo "fixed" the bad car for her to take on the 600 mile trip. (We just hoped and prayed it would make it there - and it did.) Jo was asleep on the Friday morning after Ethan's birthday, and she knocked on my door, saying she was taking the girls and leaving to drive home. She needed to use my computer to get directions on MapQuest. When she left, she assured me that she would be back on Sunday afternoon, but I felt in the strongest way, that I would never see her again. Sunday came and went. On Monday, she called to tell me that she was in the car and heading back. She was in almost hysteric tears. Later that night she called to tell me that 80 miles into the trip, she couldn't go any further, and she turned back around. She stayed for a night in a hotel with the rest of the money that she had (that she'd taken out of Jo's wallet). She didn't want to go back here, but she couldn't stay with her mom, either, because of the drug situation. She didn't know what she was going to do about money, but she told me she just kept in mind the times in my life that God had provided the right amount at just the right time (and our "faith trip" to Florida last year was in her mind too), so she just trusted that God would provide for her and the kids. All she knew for sure was that the moment she turned that car around, she felt calm and right. I didn't hear from her for several more days. Later, she told me that on Tuesday she again started heading back here but the same thing happened. She had picked up a newspaper from her hotel, and she saw a want-ad for the hotel where she had been staying. So she went back there to ask if she could work for the cost of a room. The manager told her that the ad was wrong and that they didn't need anyone, but he was willing to write something to the local human services people, basically saying that she had been staying there, and that without it she was homeless. She ended up getting emergency assistance from them - a month's stay, and $500 in food stamps. That same day, she had two job interviews. Within a week she had a job, and she'd found an apartment that was low-income, based on ability to pay. She will pay only a low rent, and no utilities. The kids started into a day care last week, and her job starts this week. She is working half days, and the other half she is going to school to get a certificate in accounting. Everything just really came together, amazingly, for her and the kids! I miss her terribly -- it's very hard when you'd gotten used to spending at least a little time almost every day with someone. And every single day, without fail, Natalie asks if Sarah is going to come over. Initially, they went out there to visit April's mom, so Natalie asks every day if Sarah and Miss April are still visiting Sarah and Emmie's grandma.  It breaks my heart. I don't know what to say, other than "yes, she's still there, and she will probably be there for a long time." April told me that when Sarah started her school a week ago, she cried that she couldn't go in because Natalie wasn't there. (Like Natalie, Sarah is also very shy with new people. When Sarah started going to Rainbows at church, she held Natalie's hand the whole time.) Unfortunately I only have a couple pictures from the whole summer, none of which include Sarah, because we were often talking so much, so involved, or the kids were off playing, that we never thought much to take photos. We'd bring cameras but they were always forgotten.  I'd like to think that we will see her again, and we're going to try to stay in touch. It's hard, because I know April's in the place that God wants her to be and I know the reasons why God brought us together even for a short time, but selfishly, I miss her, and I miss the way Sarah made my sweet little girl light up every time they played together. I don't know how long it will take before Natalie stops asking about Sarah every day, but I know that eventually she will. They'll never be far from my memory, but it's hard knowing that Natalie may never know what a close friendship she had at the age of three.