Dallin is really a smart, sneaky little boy. He knows when he's getting into something he shouldn't. He tries to be really quiet when he does, because he knows that as soon as I find him playing with the forbidden item, it's gone.
He's discovering how to manipulate his surroundings to get what he wants. The other day, I caught him like this:
He moved the stool over the the window (it wasn't there before) and climbed up on it so he could look out the window. When I came in, he was just bouncing and staring out the window, laughing and talking. Of course, when he discovered me trying to take his picture, he started to climb down from the stool, hence his position in the picture.
He's also starting to take some independent steps all on his own. He's going to be running around before I know it. I'm in trouble...
Do you remember the Real Men of Genius ad campaign by Budweiser from the early 2000s?
We've had some recent experiences with our neighbors, and it seemed the best way to put my feelings into words was through a Real Men of Genius mock advertisement.
Inspired by actual events that have occurred twice...
The Easton Family Presents:
♫ Real Men of Genius ♫
Today, we salute you, Mr. staying up all night drunk neighbor.
You and your buddy come home drunk at 3 in the morning, and make sure all your neighbors know by talking about it... loudly.
Any man can open the screen door to his patio, but a real man rips the door from its track and throws it off the third story balcony.
(♫ Where is my screen door? ♫)
Common courtesy is for wimps. Stomp on your floor as hard as you can, even though it's the middle of the night.
When the rest of the world is asleep, you're throwing water balloons made of latex gloves right outside your neighbors' window.
Go ahead and stay up for the 7AM sunrise; everyone else is going to their jobs, but you probably won't have yours much longer.
(♫ Too hungover to go to work ♫)
So crack open another Budweiser, Mr drunk neighbor. In your honor, I'll be playing the piano loudly all day.
Some people mentioned that I don't look pregnant in those last pictures at the walk for WS.
Here's some baby-belly proof for you, or at least, proof that I've been eating a lot.
17 weeks
I know I don't look huge, but the baby is the size of an onion now and only 5 inches long, so I think I have an appropriately sized onion bump.
If I recall, I was about this size when I was this far along with Dallin, so at least I'm on track to have a 7 lb baby that never gains weight after birth!
We heard about a huge community garage sale going on in Indianapolis last weekend. Conveniently, we were planning to be in Indy for the WS walk. Even more convenient was that this garage sale happened to be 15 minutes away from the park when the walk was held! This was a large neighborhood development with a garage sale every 3 or 4 houses all the way down each street. We probably hit 14 garage sales in an hour.
We got down there for the walk a little early so we would have time to look around. We weren't looking for anything in particular, we mainly just wanted see what everyone was talking about. And it was a pretty big deal. Tons of people showed up. I've never seen so many cars parked on a tiny neighborhood street before.
We did find some pretty great stuff. We found some cute summery clothes for Dallin.
Doesn't he look so cute and trendy?
We got a shirt, 2 pairs of shorts, and 2 new looking pairs of shoes for Dallin for only 5 bucks!
Last week (May 8-14) was Williams syndrome awareness week. We got to participate in some really exciting things to help promote awareness.
We were interviewed by the local news station about Dallin and our experience with WS. We recently discovered that there is another family in our city with a daughter that also has WS, so we got to meet them and do the news story with them. If you haven't already seen it, here is the story that ran on the 6 o'clock news!
We are pretty happy with how the story turned out. We said so much more about Dallin and WS, but she could only include so much of what we said in the short news story. We're really glad we had this opportunity though (it wasn't as scary as I thought it would be), and hopefully it helped someone who hadn't heard of it before.
On Saturday, we went to the Walk for Williams in Indianapolis. I've "met" a lot of WS parents online, but this was a great chance to finally meet some of them in person.
Here are most of the kids with WS and their parents.
It was a beautiful day, perfect for a walk in the park.
Dallin got to see his friend Kendal (the girl from the news story) and meet some other kids too.
It was fun to see how the kids were drawn to each other. All the kids with WS just wanted to get together and play.
There was a pretty good turn out.
Dallin loved eating the popcorn.
I loved watching him eat popcorn. Add it to the list of foods he'll eat!
Chick-fil-a was one of the company sponsors for the event, so they had the Chick-fil-a cow mascot (Eat Mor Chikin!) there to take pictures with the kids. Some of the older kids thought he was pretty cool.
Dallin was just trying to figure out why this big weird thing was trying to hold him.
They had a fire truck come (like they did last year in Utah) and Dallin seemed a lot more interested in it this time.
We couldn't resist putting the fireman's headphones on him again and comparing how much he's grow in a year.
He's gained a whole 4 pounds since the last walk!
We had a great time at the walk. And we're really happy that some of our family got to participate in walks for WS in Colorado, Utah and California. I think we did our part in raising awareness.
I had such a wonderful Mother's Day this year. Since Dallin is still too young to really show his appreciation to me, it felt more like "Wife's" day, because I was spoiled by my incredible husband. Most of the day revolved around food (as do a lot of my blog posts apparently). We've been enjoying trying a lot of new recipes recently and learning new cooking techniques.
For breakfast, Mckay made me Biscuits and Gravy with Sausage. And since our church starts at 9am, he really had to wake up earlier than normal to accomplish this, and I was very grateful for his sacrificed sleep.
The big dinner feast consisted of Asian marinated Flank Steak and Lemon Asparagus Risotto.
I can't even begin to tell you how delicious the food was. Mckay knows how much I love to cook, so it would not have been a very good Mother's Day present to me to kick me out of the kitchen while he cooked. Instead, we cooked dinner together. He made the flank steak, I made the risotto. It really was a very fun present to look over recipes together, choose the dinner and work together to make our meal. And seriously, this flank steak was amazing! I want to eat it every day. I don't know how I've come so far in life without ever eating flank steak. (Our recipes were based on this one and this one if you want to try them out. And I do recommend trying them out!!)
Even Dallin liked the risotto.
We couldn't even get him to stop eating long enough to smile for a picture.
Finally, for dessert we had crepes topped with a strawberry lemon reduction sauce. (The sauce was all Mckay's idea and made by him.) It was a lovely day of eating. Since baby #2 has taken up residence inside of me, I pretty much eat all day long, so it was nice to shake things up and eat something different and fancy for a day.
Dallin did his part of making me feel special and appreciated on Mother's Day by being a very well behaved boy. And he took an extra long nap which meant I got to take a nap too! He's such a good boy!
I feel very lucky to have so many wonderful Mother's around me. I'm grateful that my mother has helped me learn how to be a mother myself. I'm so glad that Mckay was raised by such an amazing mother who taught him to love and respect women... and flank steak.
And I'm glad that I get to be the mother to sweet Dallin and to my little yet-to-be-named peanut.
We found a house that we really like and we should be closing on it by the end of June.
Do you want to see a picture? Here it is:
Ok, so it needs a little bit of work, but it's gonna look amazing!
Seriously though, we're building a brand new house and this is the empty lot where our house is being built. They told us that it takes 3 months to build and should be done around end of June/ beginning of July, which is perfect for us because our apartment lease is up mid-July!!! (In case you didn't know, I'm super excited to get out of this apartment!) For about 3 weeks, the lot has been completely empty and looking the same as in the picture above.
But in the past few days they've actually started working on it! Here's what it looks like now:
We have a driveway!
It looks like so far they've just leveled the dirt and are starting the edge for the foundation. We're excited to see the progress the builders make and we'll try to post pictures as more of the house is completed.
If you really want to know what the house will look like when it's finished, you can look at our floor plan here.
