January recap

What a busy month this has been! Not to bore you with too many details (as I am often known for!), I'll make this post fairly quick. The big highlights for this month included a baby shower for Aunt Jessica (due in March), nearly 4 inches of SNOW on Jan. 20th, shopping at the Kids Exchange (huge bi-annual consignment sale), a cardiology checkup, and one of Ethan's church buddies 1st birthday party (tomorrow).

The baby shower for my sister, Jessica, was a lot of fun. It was a lot of work to plan, but totally worth every minute of it! My mom (Mimi) hosted the big event and my other sister, Jenny, helped with food and decorations. Thanks Ethan for bearing with me on all the shopping trips to Target, the dollar store, and beyond as I gathered all my supplies for it. Thank you also, Dan, for watching Ethan so I could have all afternoon at Mom's house to decorate, set up, throw the shower then clean up without having Li'l E clinging to me!

Snow day was also a lot of fun - Ethan's first real measurable snow! He didn't like me bundling him up at first, but then when we got outside, he didn't mind at all! We babysat Ethan's cousins half the day so their parents could work and we had a blast playing in the snow, having snowball fights, making snow angels and playing with our new neighbors. I know we've been bad about not posting many new pictures lately, we'll hopefully get some snow pictures up soon (we did manage to get them up on Dan's facebook account at least).

The Kids Exchange is always a highlight of the new year for me. I have yet to actually sell anything because I don't know if we'll need it in the future if we ever have any more kids. I just enjoy going for all the great bargains on anything and everything for kids. This year, I managed to snag a few Elmo and Veggie Tale DVD's, an old U2 CD for Dan, and lots of spring/summer clothes for Ethan. We went on a weekday while Dan was at work and Ethan did amazingly well during our hour and a half of shopping and another hour standing in line to check out!

Ethan's cardiology checkup yesterday went pretty well. At 17 months old, he doesn't like to stay still very long and he's becoming increasingly aware of his surroundings and started crying/trembling the second I put him on the exam table to undress him to get weighed (even without the nurse or doctor in the room). He weighed in at 24 lb. 14 oz. and his blood pressure seemed fine according to the nurse. The echo went about as rough as last time (Sept.) - Ethan just cried and kept pushing the tech's hand away. I had been dreading this part because I know they need to get some good pictures of his heart so I came prepared as best as I could with everything from toys to snacks to chocolate - nothing seemed to work. The tech did manage to get a few good pictures but not as many as our doc wanted so a sedated echo at UNC has been ordered for sometime in the next month or two (the good news is that they aren't rushed or didn't see anything of concern on what few pictures they did get). So we're now just in a waiting game - we're told it could take up to two weeks just to get the call about the appointment.

And last but not least, since Ethan's friend's birthday party isn't until tomorrow, nothing to really report about that yet. I'll just say that it's a girl's party since he doesn't have any boy playmates at this time!

Thanks for checking in on us. We'll try to get some more pictures up soon (they just take so long to load that I can only do a few at a time so be patient!).

Happy New Year!

I just realized it's been a few weeks since my last post. Things are still going well here in the Miles household. Ethan's getting to be quite mobile as he gets more and more steady on his feet and he's starting to move even faster (not quite running yet - thankfully!).

We had a busy Christmas season but it was a lot of fun. We celebrated Christmas Eve by volunteering in the church nursery for one service and planned to run and grab a quick bite to eat before heading back to church to catch the 2nd service but all the fast food was closed so we ended up at a Chinese buffet and never made it back to church. We ended up coming back home, putting Ethan to bed, then Dan and I each opened one gift before heading to bed. Christmas morning we went to my (Julie's) parents house to open gifts and have brunch then we rushed back home to have Dan's family all come over for a light lunch and to open more gifts. Then Christmas night, we ended up back at my parent's house for frozen pizza and snacks and a movie.

Between Christmas and New Years, Dan did some electrical home improvement projects around the house. He added under the cabinet lighting in the kitchen for me and he also added more overhead lighting in the garage for himself. We weren't originally planning to do all that at once due to our budget but Dan found the garage lights 3 for the price of 1 and coudn't pass it up!

We had a nice quiet New Year's here at home as well. Ethan went to bed around 8:30pm and Dan and I played some board games together then dozed off around 11pm and woke up at 11:58 - just in time to ring in the new year then roll back over in bed and went back to sleep until almost 10am!

Ethan goes back to the cardiologist the end of this month and we just pray that he'll be more cooperative in letting them do an echocardiogram this time than last. Well, that's about all for now. I think Dan just took some new pictures of Ethan so I'll try to get those posted soon. Thanks, as always for checking in with us and we hope you have a very happy new year!