Here's a sequence of what happens when we say bye to daddy.

Ethan is 5!!

I let Ethan pick out what he wanted to do for his birthday. I had narrowed it down to a bouncy house and Creature Encounters, and he chose the snakes. Duh. It was a really fun party!! For the adults as well as the kids! The zoologist was very knowledgeable and fun to talk to and he had answers to all the questions we could think of to ask. The animals and insects were docile and fun, and really they were quite beautiful, in a creepy crawly sort of way. They are a lot more beautiful in this environment than they would be if I ran into them in the garden. The scorpions are famous, they were just filming in The Lone Ranger with Johnny Depp last month. Pretty cool if you ask me.  

Ethan is one of the coolest kids ever! He is always smothering holding Roxcy. And he's gotten better at being friends with Seth. He is a goofball (as is evidenced by the underwear on his head). He wrote a funny letter to his dad. He started out by picking out stickers and putting them on a page, then he dictated to me exactly what he wanted to say, sometimes using a sticker as the word. You can blow it up to read it if you'd like, it's pretty funny. And he and Kurt built the block city at the end. Pretty impressive.

The rest of the weekend at my moms went something like this:

Jam!

I made jam with my mudda a while back. Worked all day and had 108 bottles. Whew! 

We asked my dad to take a picture of us but they were either blurry, or we were pulling funny faces. Usually it was both.

So we had to try and take a picture ourselves. 

Ethan started soccer today!! This is his first time on a team sport of any kind, and he had a good time. He was a little less competitive than I was expecting, he spent most of the game running next to the player that had the ball, regardless of which team they were on. We were talking after and he told me that we aren't supposed to snatch toys from our friends!! I told him soccer was different, that was the point of the game is to try and get the ball. I told him that I never got sad when he took the ball from me (we played the night before together) and he said that he didn't want to make the other kids cry. Sweet kid.