3 S's for Ethan

It's been awhile since I've updated this site on my favorite 7-year old. Ethan's been doing quite a bit lately, now in the home stretch of his 2nd grade year, about to receive his first communion. But why the title "3 S's for Ethan?" Really it all stems from a sad little game I play with my brain when I'm trying to remember something. I figure my brain can only remember 3 things at a time, and then only if I name them interestingly. In this case, I came up with three things I wanted to write about for Ethan, and I managed to make them all conform to some word starting with S. Let's begin:

Skiing

A couple of weeks ago, Ethan, Jenny, and I went to Lutsen, MN for a small ski vacation. We left Quin with his Grandpa and Grandma Grady for the few days we were up there. It was a great vacation, but the nicest part was to see how well Ethan had taken to skiing. This is his fourth year on the slopes, but it's only been a couple of times each year. Nevertheless, he has proven to be a very adept student of the sport, and is now skiing much faster than I'm comfortable seeing. By the end of the vacation, and one day of ski school, he was handling all the hills that Jenny was comfortable with. My only concern is that he is a bit cocky. By the end of the second day skiing, he was begging me to let him go down the black diamond hills, the ones rated for "experts only." I talked him out of it, but I'm sure it won't last too many more years. Where has my baby gone!!?

Segway

In my posts about Disney last year, I mentioned that I got to ride a Segway, and it was awesome. On that trip, Ethan and I tried to convince Jenny that we should buy a Segway for us to use at home. She said we could do that when she got new furniture.

A couple of weeks ago, Jenny ordered a new couch and coffee table from Overstock.com. It was delivered a week later, and while I was putting it together, Ethan came in the room and said, "awesome! Now we can get a Segway." It had been almost a full year since we had talked about it, yet he remembered the conversation immediately upon seeing new furniture in the living room!

Adult Things (wait for the S connection)

On Thursday night, Ethan and I were saying our prayers. I mentioned that we should pray for Grandma and Grandpa so they had a safe trip back from Arizona. Ethan asked me where that was, so I explained that it was in the southern part of the US between New Mexico and Nevada. In fact, I explained, it wasn't far from where Jenny and I were going to take a vacation in the coming months. "Are you taking us?" Ethan asked me, referring to himself and his brother. I told him no, that we weren't taking them. He asked me why that was, to which I answered, "because we're going to do adult things." "Like swear?" he retorted...

Smartest Kid Alive???

I can't be sure, and I'm probably not a good judge since he is my child, but I'm pretty certain that Quinton is the smartest 13 month old to have graced the planet. My first clue happened a couple of days ago. We sat him in his high-chair to feed him and mixed all of the food onto his tray. His tray does have segmented areas, but we generally just put stuff in the large middle one. I think we put some chicken, apples, cheese, and crackers on the tray. He finished up the apples and cheese pretty quickly as they are two of his favorite foods, but the crackers and chicken remained in the center. I turned around to do something (I would claim that I was doing dishes, but my wife may call my lie out on that one), and when I turned back, all but a few of the crackers had been placed in one of the segmented partitions. I watched in amazement as he sorted the remaining 2 or 3 crackers out from the chicken and the proceeded to eat the crackers one by one, all the while ignoring the chicken (he doesn't like meat very much). Some could argue that it is an early sign of OCD, but I'm pretty sure it's an early sign of pure genius!

Another sign showed up a couple of weeks ago. He has a toy telephone that he carries around with him. Lately I've seen him talking on the telephone. I'm not really sure how he got that one. I'm guessing one of us did that to the phone since this is a pretty antiquated toy telephone, looking more like the phones of the 80's and 90's rather than the ones we use today, but he knew what it was for!

Speaking of talking, apparently Quin has been talking to us for quite awhile. It took his grandparents to realize it. We left Quin with them while we vacationed in Lutsen, MN for a ski getaway and when we returned, my mom and dad told us all the words that they recognized. Sure enough, taken contextually, he was saying all sorts of words! Before we left, we thought all he said was "da-da" and "da-di-di-da" and other variations therein. But if you listen close, he is actually saying words. The ones we recognize so far (and this is not all inclusive) are:

• Hi
• Dada
• Thank You
• All Done
• Uh Oh
• Barley
• Ethan
• Peep

I'm sure there are more, but those are some of the more frequent ones.

I haven't even started talking about how well he sings! Oh well, I guess that's good material for another post sometime down the road.