Hooray! I finally found time to sit down and write an update. Strange how home-ownership has filled the gap I used to call free time… :) I was forced to take a week of vacation (or lose it!) at the end of last year and was able to catch up on a lot of the stuff that has been keeping me from sitting down and writing. Plus my last O-Gram was in the middle of September!! Holy cow! A time gap like that makes it really hard to include everything that has happened. So, for the sake of brevity (and interest levels!), I'll just mention the real highlights.

I'm officially and gleefully settled into my new house!! It was a really long and interesting move. The "crew" included Mom, Dad, Alli, Dave (my new brother-in-law), Shannon Janicki (my co-worker and good friend) and David Jordan (my ex-boyfriend). Things were going along at a good clip until I was notified that all the muscle (except for David) would be gone at the Crystal Lake end. Having had an offer from him (and having discussed it with David), I called ex-husband (Matt) to lend a hand. It was very weird to see so many parts of my life collide in one place. But it was also a real testament to how amazing the people in my life are that everyone got along, worked well together and were able to sit down for pizza at the end. A HUGE thanks to everyone who helped!! This is hopefully the last time for decades that I'll even have to think about moving.

We had a couple of months celebrating everything from Halloween to Thanksgiving to Christmas. And in the middle of it all, my baby boy had his fourth birthday! Instead of having a kids party like I have in years before, I decided to have the family over for a smaller get-together. Ethan picked the menu (PANCAKES!) and the activity (SLEDDING followed by HOT CHOCOLATE!). It was a blast! My family is so great in that they are up for anything. It was really frickin' cold but we all bundled up and enjoyed an hour of the finest slopes Crystal Lake has to offer. It was so fun for me to get to see Ethan enjoy his family doing something he loves. He would go sledding every day if it were up to him. And always on the fastest and bumpiest hill we can find. Many happy birthday wishes to my Big Boy!

I'm amazed at how old four really is. Ethan has become such a capable, independent little boy. He is fully potty trained during the day and is working on staying dry at night. He does his morning "charms" all by himself: he picks out his clothes (and even knows when he doesn't match, although sometimes chooses that anyway), dresses himself, makes his bed and brushes his teeth. He works the computer and the Tivo better than some adults I know! He has wonderful manners, holds the door for people (sometimes until I tell him we have to go) and is friendly and warm. He knows his phone number, street, city, state, country and planet. He knows the alphabet and can count to twenty (if you don't need 15-18). He understands things that amaze me and has critical thinking skills that occasionally scare me. He is sweet and methodical and totally able to ask for what he wants (sometimes to the tune of driving me nuts)! I'm a very lucky mommy to have such a wonderful, healthy boy.

In moving to the new house, we also had to find Ethan a new school. I had liked Ethan's previous Montessori school and quickly found a spot in a similar venue not ten minutes from our house. Whew! Thing were going along great until week two when Ethan's teacher pulled me aside for "a talk". Ethan had some problems in his previous preschool so this did not come as a total shock. Still, I was disappointed and had hoped that the things I had seen before were environmentally related and that a change in scenery would alleviate the worst of it. Ethan's new teacher told me that he had been acting out in class, hitting children, and interfering with their work. She told me that she was willing to work with him but that she needed me to know that they were having some problems. And so it went on like this for some time. I would get the occasional report that Ethan was misbehaving in school. There was one call home to report that he had put tweezers into an outlet and shorted out half the building (and yes, I did ask how 1) he got tweezers and 2) why there was an open outlet). Honestly, none of it completely surprised me. Ethan is a very high energy, very smart, very impulsive little boy. He has a hard time keeping his hands to himself and likes to be in physical contact with his environment at all times. Plus he's big and often doesn't know his own strength. Anyway, to make a long story short he was kicked out of preschool! It was a horrible time for me. It was so ripe with opportunity for being mad at the school for labeling Ethan as a "problem child" and for thinking that there was something wrong with Ethan and for being angry at his dad for his poor genetic contribution and for blaming the whole mess on my substandard parenting skills and on and on and on. It's hard when they are your babies – to see them having so much difficulty and not knowing what to do and feeling like it's all your fault. And while I know that looking for someone to blame and feeling sorry for myself doesn't actually help, it was all I could do for a while. Luckily, it wasn't a long while. I'd say it took me a whole three days to get my head straight again. And having done so, I got in action and got a plan. I got Ethan tested and screened through our brand-new-totally-awesome school district and got him qualified for special services. It turns out that Ethan very likely has ADD. So, Ethan started "big boy" school on Thursday. It's officially titled Early Childhood Education Services. The bus picks him up and drops him off at our driveway. There are 12 kids in the class and 4 highly trained teachers, occupational therapists, social workers and speech therapists. The help he is getting will be priceless and I would pay whatever was needed to get it for him. The beauty part is that it's all an entitlement and that Ethan being in this program will save me in the neighborhood of $550 a month. You couldn't have told me the day it happened, but getting booted from preschool may just have been the best thing to ever happen to us.

After playing around some, I've been able to upload some of my favorite phrases for your listening pleasure!

Hello everybody!
I'm so excited!
You're a nice pretty girl
This is how we express frustration…
That's a great one mommy
I love just how dramatic Ethan can be at times
We were talking about peanut butter crackers here
I hear this a dozen times a day!
My favorite one of all

You may have noticed something strange if you looked at all the pictures. At least, I would have a question if I didn't know the whole story. It would go something like this: If you and David broke up, why is he at every freakin' thing? So, at the risk of looking really stupid, I am telling you that we got back together. The next question invariably is: so what is different this time? Good question. That's actually something that we talked about before ultimately starting to date again. And the answer is not all that complex but sure took me a long time to figure out. When we broke up, I had it like this: I am looking for X. David Jordan is not X. Therefore, we have no future together and need to split. What I realized over the course of the three or four months we spent apart was that I actually played a part in how David was allowed to be around me. It makes sense when you think about it. There are people that I feel really funny around. And people that I don't. Or people that I feel smart around. And people that I don't. Or strong or not or brave or not. And at the end of the day, I'm the same person. What changes is how they are listening to me and how they expect me to be. So I was listening to David in a very small, constraining way. He had very little space to be much of anything around me and so (not surprisingly) that was who he was. The longer we stayed together, the less space I gave him and the smaller he got. No wonder it was so unsatisfying for both of us at the end!. Our relationship looks very different this time around. We're having way more fun and just enjoying each other. We are being intentional and making the time to be together. We are creating shared experiences and working as partners to both get what we want. It's wonderful! It's like dating a whole new person! I spend way less time looking for evidence that something is wrong and way more time trying to "catch him being great". And, strangely, it happens all the time. I'm very happy with how things are and can't wait to share our future successes with you.

Until next time!