I was thinking that I didn’t have a lot to report for the first couple months of 2006. And while I haven’t had a ton of big events (except my yearly pilgrimage to Portland), I realized how much is going on for me “behind the scenes”.

Ethan and I spent a long weekend visiting our dear friends Jason, Jeri and Sierra Stein in Portland in January. There may be those of you for whom “Portland in January” doesn’t actually mean anything. I’ll translate: it was fairly chilly and rained EVERY FREAKIN’ DAY! And Portlanders just take it! And go outside anyway! :) We had a great time traveling the city on the public transportation system. It was a totally new experience for Ethan and was very interesting for me to watch him. He wanted to sit by himself ten or so rows away, surrounded by complete strangers. Of course, he wanted to know that we were there for him, but something in Ethan really enjoyed the independence. It’s been a whole year since our last visit and I couldn’t believe how big the smallest Stein has become! Sierra is totally adorable and Jeri and Jason are doing such a great job with her. She’s SO cute and such a sweet little helper. The kids only had a couple (okay – no more than a half dozen) run-ins but in general they got along well and we had a great visit. I’m seriously thinking about moving our yearly trip to a more pleasant time for Oregon. Jeri assures me that summer is lovely…

I started Ortho-K. It’s basically a non-surgical alternative for having fully corrected eyes during waking hours. I’ve been considering doing something to fix my eyes for about 10 years. I’ve been in glasses/contacts since the fourth grade and have wanted better vision for a lot of reasons: swimming, actually being able to see the clock when I wake up, losing a contact while driving, not being able to travel in my lenses because of the dryness. The list seems to grow as I get older. I seriously looked into RK a couple of times but just couldn’t get over the permanence of it and the “what happens if I don’t like it” factor. Doctors just can’t guarantee that you will have vision that you’re happy with and then you’re kind of stuck. Ortho-K is basically contacts that you wear at night that fix your eyes during the day. So far, it's been a rocky road, mostly because I think I was expecting faster results. I’m about eight weeks in and we are on my third pair of contacts. Each time we start a new pair I go back to ALMOST blind, but not blind enough where my old contacts work. As a result, I have a contact buffet to help correct my vision during the day. And that’s not all! My vision (for now) degrades during the day which means that the contacts that work at 10:00 am don’t necessarily work at 3:00 pm. I have been carrying around an assortment of lenses – a prescription for every occasion! My doctor assures me that this is the normal process and I have high hopes for the whole thing. But in the meantime you’ll probably want to stay off the roads of Crystal Lake at dusk.

I realize that I almost never talk about my job in the F-O-Gs other than to say that I am still working for the same company as the last 8 years and that things are going well. Just to be clear - that part actually hasn’t changed. The NEW part is that I got a promotion! I am now in charge of fixing ALL the bugs in our product. I am the one woman bug fixin’ team. It was funny how it came about. My former boss ran a contest to see who could fix the most amount of bugs by a certain date. In short, I won. A lot. :) So I was knighted Darth Bug Slayer (yes – this is a software company and we are a bunch of geeks). Fast forward 6 months. A new position is created at the company for someone to fix bugs full time. My new boss offers it to me and I accept. This is really good news for me since fixing bugs is something I really like doing. It is also really good news for our product because it is sorely in need of fixing. It’s the perfect match!

Things with David are really great and have been since the last time I wrote. We’ve been spending more time without Ethan. Sometimes we go out and sometimes we stay in, but we really have been making the effort to get and stay connected. We realized in January that we still had some lingering “stuff” from past incarnations of the relationship. So we sat down one night and answered all the really hard questions for each other, first writing and then talking. Questions like: What do you wish you had done differently? What are you really proud of you/us for? What are you afraid to tell me? It was amazingly powerful to get all of that out. The last question was especially freeing for me. I was able to tell him all the things I was REALLY afraid he’d find out and he just listened and didn't freak out about any of them. Then we burned the lists and haven’t looked back. The more time I spend with him, the more I realize how truly wonderful he is with me. David is totally able to give me space to be crabby and not take it personally. He has learned, through trial by fire, that reaching out to me when I seem unreachably angry it the surest way to melt me. He is playful and fun and neurotic in all the right ways. We are really enjoying our time together, as a twosome and as a threesome, and I couldn’t be happier with the way things are going.

Ethan’s been attending his new school for almost two months now. He LOVED it – absolutely LOVED it – for the first three weeks. He loved the school. He loved the projects. He loved the bus. He loved his teachers. He would come home from school and and gush about the day's activities for like 15 minutes. And then one day he came home and hated all of it. With a vengeance. I tried to put my finger on what happened and he just couldn’t tell me. The honeymoon just ended. He started requesting – nay demanding! – that he be returned to his “old school” because he just hated his “new school”. Maybe he forgot that the exact same thing happened at the old school… Anyway, after some conversation with his teachers, it sounds like they started making him responsible for the behaviors that have been getting him in trouble all along. Putting him in time out. Making him clean up his own messes. Basically catching every transgression and holding the line. I really like his teacher and we are in almost daily communication about Ethan. We use a notebook for the back and forth and every day I get a progress report on how Ethan is doing, about what is working for him, and about incidents when he crossed the line. I don’t know how much improvement I see in this short amount of time, but I can tell you that it’s a huge relief to not be having the “ weekly meetings” about what Ethan does when he is out of my sight. I’ll keep you updated as things progress.

I’ve also been very aware lately that the vast majority of life with Ethan is working very smoothly. I thought I would share the secrets of our success with you:

1) No sugar. I’m telling you that it makes all the difference. I’m also mostly sugar free too so we don’t even keep it in the house. It’s almost become a non-issue.
2) I get to sleep to 7:00 am every day. That’s a HUGE deal to me and helps a ton in the crabby-mommy-avoidance plan. I put Ethan’s nightlight on a timer and have trained him to stay in bed and be quiet until it goes off. The downside is that I have no idea what time he really gets up. The upside? I get to sleep to 7:00 am every day!
3) No dinner table battles. I cook the food and Ethan eats it or he doesn’t. When he gets up that means he’s done. If he wants desert then he eats the required “pile”. Or not. No more fights about “just eat three carrots!” Hooray!
4) No bedtime battles. I set the timer and Ethan is responsible for taking his bath (I do keep him company), getting PJ’s on and brushing teeth before it goes off. All leftover time is story time!! Sometimes that means that we have a full half an hour for stories. Sometimes it means I put his him to bed with no stories. And, very rarely, it means that he goes to bed naked because he dipped around in the tub until the timer went off. In fact, that only had to happen once. “But Mommy… I’m naked!”. “Yup. Goodnight!”
5) The gym! Free child care up to two hours a day. Sometimes that means exercise and sometimes it just means two hours with no boy.

These are huge things that we’ve overcome through trial and error to make life run smoothly and so much more enjoyably.

Lastly, I LOVE LOVE LOVE this message and wanted to share it with you.

My big sister got engaged! Hooray Hooray Hooray! Sheila and her (now) fiance, Rob, have been dating for about nine months. They’ve worked together for years but only got interested in dating last June. Originally they told us that they were going to wait a year before deciding about getting married. But they just couldn’t wait. :) They have the wedding planned for August 19th. Rob is a really sweet, down to earth, easy going guy. And he is crazy about my sister – the most important thing. They seem very well suited and I couldn’t be happier for them. Please join me in wishing them all the best in their new life together!

Until next time!