New cars and landscaping ...

So we got a new car.
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Well, Ezra got a new car anyway. He really likes his present from Great-Grandma. If you push it backwards and let go it takes off on you, which Ezra doesn't seem to be too keen on. But you can't have everything, now can you?


The weather has been great, when it hasn't been raining. The yard is coming along. The orchid tree dropped all of its leaves (due to the "cold" and being transplanted recently), but has started some new growth. The palms look great, but they're not too picky.


The citrus trees look really good. The lemon tree is just covered with buds! A few have started blooming. Having fresh citrus will be really nice.


Shawn has spent a long time digging in the backyard for the sprinklers. The good news is that the digging has finished in the backyard for the most part. The bad news is that the backyard looks like a WWI battleground. The project will finish eventually.


We are excited for Emeline to soon be here. Both of us can hardly wait, for various reasons. Only a few more weeks...

Time flies

The last couple of weeks have gone pretty fast. We all got over our second round of the cold last weekend, finally. We've kept pretty busy with various projects, and chasing after Ezra.

Ezra has started trying to put random clothes on himself. Sometimes he'll end up with pants on his head, or a shirt on his legs, but he's working on it.


The weather has been interesting. It has been raining about once a week for the past month or so. And you thought we lived in the desert, huh? It's supposed to be raining tonight too, but we haven't seen anything of it yet.

Kelly and Cameron came over last weekend, originally with the intent of helping with some yard projects, but we got rained out. We had fun visiting though; it's always nice to see them. Ezra especially likes to see them. He wasn't sure exactly what to think at first when he got animals put into his pockets, but he kept trying to put everything in his pockets for the next few days.


Ezra got a new fleece blanket today from some fabric that we got this morning. He loves his new monkey blanket.


In the background you can see signs of the backyard project. The sprinkler system is going in, slowly, but going in. The constant rain has both helped, by softening up the clay, and also hindered the project, by making it too muddy to work on a lot of days. It hopefully shouldn't extend too much longer.


We hung pictures up in the nursery, and so now all that it's missing is the baby. She'll come soon enough, we're thinking probably around Easter sometime (nobody seems to think that Susan is going to make it to April 15th). It will change everything quite a bit again for us, which will be interesting, but we're excited as well to have our little girl. Hopefully Ezra will learn to be gentle with her and be a good brother for her.

Happy Valentine's Day

So we all got over our colds. Ezra, however, has started in on another round of teething and a growth spurt. It has made for a long couple of nights. Last night he seemed to do better, and tonight he's slept well so far. He tried to give up his nap today. Before church, he decided that he just wouldn't go to sleep at his normal nap time. He got pretty grouchy after the first hour of church, so we ended up bringing him home. We put him down for nap again, and he wasn't happy about it. A few minutes later we went back to his room and found him like this in front of the door:


He had just completely crashed, so it was probably good that we brought him home. Other than that, it's been a nice relaxing day.

Susan is counting off the days until her due date. She's ready to be done with the pregnancy already. Luckily, this one has not been quite as hard as the last.


On Saturday evening, we went out and bought a stand mixer. Susan has been wanting one for a long time, and having a 20% off coupon and an attached rebate helped as well. It will be, and has already been, a welcome addition to our kitchen. Within the first 24 hours of opening the box, we've already made cookies and bread with it.

Projects...

So the backyard is still muddy, thanks to the rain last night. That's okay, the desert could use the rain, and so can our trees. The yard has random trenches all over it (the start of a sprinkler system), but they have a tendency to fill up with silt every time it rains again. The fun that good old clay soil is.

We're finally just about done with our colds completely. Ezra has a bit of a cough lingering, but it's almost gone. He's back to his normal rambunctious self. We got him a small table and chairs that are his size for him sit on and color at. He really likes it, and it keeps him from climbing on the dining room chairs so much.

So we finished the nursery on Saturday. We had painted the walls two weekends ago, the trim last weekend, and just had to put it up and do some touch-ups. We also got a dresser and put it together. Not bad for amateurs. Ezra grabbed a couple of the smaller pieces of trim and held them up against the wall while we were trying to get them all put up. He always likes to help.

The couch is well-loved (read "old") but it will stay for a while longer. It's crazy to think that in about 2 months we'll have our little girl taking naps in here.

Big Storm and new words...

So we made it through the big storm this last week. We got around 3" of rain, which for here is about a third as much as we normally get in a year. All of the drainage fields around were more than halfway filled with water, and two of the three roads leading to our house were washed out. The winds were pretty bad too. We had flash flood warnings and a tornado watch, which made things interesting. Our trees seemed to handle it okay, though the lemon tree lost a few blooms. We'll see how long it takes the back yard to dry out, 3 days later and its still pretty squishy.

We've been working on redecorating the nursery (painting and putting up a chair rail). We'll post some pictures when it's done.

Ezra has been learning all kinds of new words recently. He points at his back and says "back". He'll say "sad" and then make a sad face. He's started saying "more", and "fall down". His new words the last day or so have been "ca-woon", "qwerl", "and mote" (raccoon, squirrel, remote). The "ca-woon" is the best.

Boxes and New Trees

Ezra continues to love to play in boxes. We had some big ones from a new Christmas tree that we bought, and he had a blast with them for a few days.


We decided that we should get started on our yard a bit. This is what is has looked like so far:


Today, we got our trees in that we ordered last weekend. We ended up with a Hong Kong Orchid tree, a lemon tree, a Minneola tangelo tree, and a couple of fan palms. It will be nice once the Orchid tree gets a nice full crown for shade and the citrus start producing fruit, but that will take a while yet.


Ezra got a chance to play outside a bit more today. He loves being outside and playing in the dirt.

Happy New Year!

Its hard to believe that the year has gone by so quickly. The last three months we've managed to post at least once a month, but a lot has been going on. Ezra has grown so much in the last little bit. His vocabulary just increases in leaps and bounds. He has had 4 molars come in within the last week, which would explain a bit of the crabbiness.

This last month we were able to go out to California for Christmas. It was nice to see everyone. There were a lot of presents with all 18 of us that were there.


We all got some new pajamas for Christmas, and Ezra seemed to like his. He also figured out that he can climb up onto chairs by himself (and from there to the table, which has been interesting)


Ezra enjoyed being able to go outside and run around quite a bit while there. He made quite a task of gathering up acorns in the garden and putting them in a bucket. With the maybe tens of acorns that he picked up there were still thousands more.

Its been nice to be home and relax for a bit as well. We've been able to get quite a bit done around the house the last few days. Today we went to the park, and Ezra had fun swinging. He really loved going down the slide over and over and over again.


Come to find out that Ezra loves blueberries. A few weeks ago we gave him some and he couldn't put them in his mouth fast enough. His whole mouth and hands were purple.


He likes apples too. Depending on the apple, he'll carry it around and eat off of it for quite a while.
Speaking of food, we made a nice pizza for New Year's Eve. It came together pretty quickly, and we all enjoyed it.


Kelly and Cameron came over for dinner tonight, which was fun. It was nice to talk with them. We had a roast for dinner, and then cheesecake for dessert.

It was really good! Ezra really liked it too.