First Real Snow - Winter 2011

11/28/10 - Last night and this morning was the first snow fall of this winter (enh... there was the inch or two on Halloween, but that was fall). We could all feel it coming, but it was still a surprise to look out this morning and see what looked like an inch or so of wet snow. We have had freezes and frosts already (and it has been raining a lot lately) but up until last night, there hadn't been any snow.

And, as luck would have it, we had just gotten our snow tires on the day before... through some impromptu craziness in Concord.

Looking out our front door in Sachem Village

...ditto...

Little Gardener...

If I had actually kept up on this blog this summer, there would have been many blog posts about the little garden that Ethan and I tended. It was all in a series of pots in our front yard, but it was our pride and joy and we spent many an hour tending to it. In addition to actually tending the garden, Ethan spent a lot of time pretending to plant, and grow various things. In this series below, he is inspired by some work we were doing with our tomato seedlings and decides to plant and water some of his own pretend plants.

It all began with transplanting some of our first seedlings....

(Bye bye) Red Room

For the last two and a half years or so, Ethan has been attending day care at the Child Care Center in Norwich at least one day a week. He started out in the nursery (which we all loved), moved up to the Red Room, and just a month ago, he moved into the Yellow Room. The Yellow room is more like a pre-school setting with formal circle time and the like. Regardless, we will all miss Carol and the Red Room immensely. Though I am sure Ethan will enjoy his time in the Yellow Room, I think it will be quite difficult to top the amazing times he had in the Red Room with Carol.

This is Carol, the mastermind of the Red Room and all of its wonderful, ever-changing wonderfulness

This is an attempt of a picture of Ethan and Carol together... as is often the case Ethan is a bit shy and hard to get to pose.  He is full of energy in this picture as he always is.

These are some pictures from on of the last big adventures that took place in the Red Room.. CAMPING. (Pictures courtesy of Carol)

Ethan is panning for gold (which we still play with often)...

... Fishing...

... Eating gold fish...

... playing with pine needles...

... Fishing again...

... Eating a snack...

... listening to a story...

... And finally roasting marshmallows.

I think that balloon is gonna land here... (runs and gets camera)

Jody had come home a bit early from her rotation at the hospital and met Ethan and I in the dining room.  She said "Did you guys see what is out side?"  We were both intrigued and said "no" with a smile of excitement.  We went outside to the field behind our house and saw a brightly-colored hot air balloon not that far in the distance.  I watched it grow bigger and bigger quite quickly.  Jody looked at me and asked if I thought it was going to land here.  I said "yep" and began running into our house to grab the camera.

The landing of the hot air balloon in Sachem field was a public event is the oldest sense of that word.  Many people just walked out of their yards and playgrounds and made an impromptu procession to the touchdown site.

As an added bit of fun, the balloon touched down RIGHT in the middle of the end of a middle school soccer practice, so one of the people who were helping tear down the balloon spent the entire time making sure middle school soccer cleats did not trample holes in the some-odd thousand dollar balloon fabric.

Also, if you will notice, Ethan was so excited about the event that he didn't even have time to get some underwear or pants on.  It was freezing, but hey, there was a BALLOON landing in our back yard.

Our Little Garden

Ethan and I spent much of our summer tending to our little garden (read: a series of potted plants in our front yard). Below is a progression of photos from the beginning of summer to the end of fall.

Ethan and I potting the first set of seedling in flats.

Ethan helping me do some transplanting after we got the seedlings to take to the outdoor sun.

Once transplanted, the plants spent most of the summer out in our front lawn arranged like this.

After getting the plants in the right sized pots, they really grew quite well.

Our first tomato... we didn't have a great harvest (there were certainly more tomatoes than this one) but we enjoyed what we did grow very much.

Our bounty of green peppers (brought in right before the first frost, which was quite early this year)

Pots washed and stacked, as they dry to be put away for next year.

Black Paint, Black Hands

As noted in previous posts, Ethan LOVES working with tools. After we took apart a small book shelf we inherited from some friends that moved, I made a little "work board" for Ethan out of the leftover shelves. Ethan would spend lots of time putting screws or pounding nails into his work board. But, as the work board was made of particle board (read: sawdust and glue), it did not survive long. AND it was hard to get screws to really dig into it. SO, when we were having a cook out with our friends Emma and Tommy (who happens to be a wood worker), I picked up a few scraps of pine from their porch for Ethan to work with. A few days later (when he finally had the chance to dig in) he was focused like a laser beam (thanks Mark Minnett for the phrase) for about 45 minutes painting on of the scraps black. He did an amazing job, and was pretty proud of himself -- I was, too.

Sure, he was excited about the board, but he was REALLY excited about his nearly all black hands. He insisted I take a picture of them.

OMG - Do you see that Train!?

Way back in the beginning of Winter, when we trying to get Ethan to want to poop on the potty, we used a sticker chart as motivation. Each time Ethan went #2 on the potty, he would get a sticker to put on his sticker chart. After 8 stickers, he would get a BIG treat. In made the chart myself on Photoshop and it had a picture of the BIG treat right on it... A BIG TRAIN. That's right, we made an agreement with Ethan that if he made poop on the potty 8 times, he would get to ride on the big train.

It took Ethan a while to earn his first 2 or three stickers and then he went a few months with no sticker earning, and then all of a sudden, he was a pooping machine and the sticker chart was soon filled. We had learned though, that the BIG train we had planned to take Ethan on, only runs in the later summer into the fall. So, we had a lot of waiting to do. The day finally came, we invited our friends Emma, Maisie, and Patrick along for the ride. Ethan's expression above, says it all. "Is that the big train, papa?"

We rode the train the few miles from White River Junction to the Montshire Museum (where we had seen the train the year before and hatched our plan). It was a little bumpy (and a little crazy), but a good time was had by all.


After a good 1.5 hours of playtime at the Montshire, we heard the train's loud whistle and headed back down to the platform to ride back to the station (and our cars).

After we detrained in White River Junction, Ethan went running around the rail yard looking at all of the trains and railroad machines. He would have crawled up underneath one of the engines if I hadn't stopped him -- he just wanted to see how is works. Even the promise of ice cream was not strong enough to lure Ethan away at first, but he eventually came.

After the train trip was finally over and we left the train station, we popped over to the Dairy Twirl for a little ice cream. Ethan got to use the free ice cream cone coupon that he got from the summer reading program we did at our local library. It was a tiring but a great day.