mom can be fun!

brian captured this shot of me and ethan on the slide last weekend... and it did my heart good to see both of us having so much fun together. so often i am teaching and correcting and disciplining ethan in an effort to "train up this child" for God's glory that i forget or run out of time in the day to just have fun! i find myself telling him not to drop the crayons on the floor more often than i sit down and color a picture WITH him. i think i can be a pretty fun mommy when i take the time to put the laundry down and let caroline just be for a minute so that i can attend to ethan's wishes for "more football" (basketball). he recently discovered that i can dribble the basketball on the living room carpet (quite a talent with a foam ball, actually!!), and he gets pretty cracked up about it.

in the world of child development and speech therapy, we use the term "language explosion" to refer to the point when a child's expressive language increases tremendously in a short amount of time... usually, it's when children progress from the point of saying mostly single words to all of a sudden speaking in phrases. i'd seen this occur in the children i'd worked with, but boy do i understand why it's called an explosion now!!! in the last 2 weeks, ethan's language has absolutely exploded. he is saying new things everyday that crack us up. (of course it's too late for me to think of any right at this moment...) he knows most of his basic colors (thanks to his matchbox cars!), and his favorite by far is "GEEN!!!!" his walls are painted denim on top, and below is white beadboard. he can be found sitting on his bed, pointing back and forth, saying, "white wall, buuu wall. white wall, buuu wall." :)

i have to remind myself on a daily basis to slow down and enjoy this little explosion we call ethan. well, maybe slow down isn't the word. :) but you know what i mean. we went to visit brian's grandparents last weekend, and i was reminded of how much he'd changed since christmas-- and that was only 2 months ago! there are so many things he's done lately that i've already failed to write down. i'm sure i won't remember them all. and it really doesn't matter that i remember them all. what matters is that he learns the love of our Father through the love of his mommy and daddy. sometimes that means discipline. sometimes that means one more reading of "time for bed". and sometimes that means an all out tickle war on the couch... and for those of you who know ethan's laugh, you know that i could live off one good laugh of his for a week.

this week's gonna be a busy one. we're getting ready to go out of town next week (yay!!!!!!! more about that later...), my grandma is having surgery, friends and family are coming in town, and frankly and i just have a lot to do. but between packing and visiting and cleaning, i hope to brush up on my basketball skills... i'm gettin' pretty good!