Merry Christmas Everyone!

Twas’ the freaking month before Christmas

And all through the Lusty house,

Only one creature was stirring…

It was Evan! Who wore his parents OUT!!

From drawing on the walls

To screaming down the halls

From falling down the stairs

To his parents pulling out their hairs!

Now don’t get me wrong this kid is no Jack*

But when he does a somersault down the stairs
He’ll give you a heart attack!

Kendra’s the lucky one she hangs with Ev all day

She only gets things done
When Evan is at rest from all that play

Kendra still enjoys her job it is true,

But why does Access have to give
SO MANY DIRECTORIES TO DO!!!!!

Ryan is still a killer for hire

Skeeters can run but
They can’t hide from his ire!!!

Evan is growing at a very rapid rate

He’s learned his colors, some words
And he already knows his alphabAte.

So as the New Year comes

And you enjoy this Christmas time
Remember the Lusty’s
Or just send us a dime! **

Merry Christmas to all

As it is the season
To remember the Savior
His love is our reason.

*Jack is Kendra’s sister Kathryn’s son.  Dude is a terror.

** Feel free to send more than a dime.  Cash, check, money order, Pay Pal, American Express…  we aren’t picky. 

Bye Bye Beardie

Ryan grew himself a pretty impressive beard. At first, it was because he didn’t want to shave as long as his St. Louis Cardinals remained in the baseball playoffs. Then after they won the World Series (yay, Cardinals!) he kept it because my mom hates beards. Beckie: “What is that thing on your face?!” and “Wash your face before you come over to my house.” Exactly the response Ryan was looking for. He laughed for days.

When he finally did shave, he did it in stages. I wouldn’t have dated any of these men had they shown up at my door 5 1/2 years ago:

Mountain Man

Redneck

Crazy Motorcycle Man

Bad Cop/Good Cop

Ummm… No

Ah, there’s the husband that I know and love

The Spooky and Not-So-Spooky of October

October was relatively uneventful. We enjoyed conference. Evan enjoyed the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. Every single time they started singing, Evan would drop whatever he was playing with and come out to watch. He’d stay for the entire song and then wander off again. It was really cute.

Right after conference, we headed to Park City for Ryan’s final conference as UMAA President where he got a big fancy plaque. Yay, plaque!

And then there was Halloween. We invited Ryan’s family to join us on Halloween night because they don’t get trick-or-treaters at their house and we were hoping we could make them answer our door for us (we couldn’t). We played games and ate caramel apples (not pictured because they were UGLY. Yummy, but ugly.) Here they are playing some game with Evan’s blocks that I still don’t understand the rules to, but evidently requires lots of yelling.

Evan was Superman. Doesn’t he look getting ready to take off? We took him trick or treating to exactly 2 houses and he was shaking with excitement over the pack of M&Ms he got. He would have eaten them all in one bite had I let him.

The last couple years, we’ve been carving pumpkins. And, of course, we try for increasingly complicated designs each year. Maybe in a few one of us will work up the will to try one of those don’t-cut-all-the-way-through designs.

Here’s Evan’s (a mama and dada collaboration)

Here’s Kendra’s:

And here’s Ryan’s:

You should all comment and vote for your favorite (hint: Kendra’s is your favorite)

Sept 2011

And here is a blog post about the happenings that happened to happen in September.

 We started off the month by invading my sister’s home yet again (they MUST be sick of us visiting by now. Ryan did manly things like Fantasy Football drafting and big mouth bass fishing. I did girly things like baby shower going and adorable new niece holding. We both had our own brand of fun. :)

I’m glad I got to see my neice while she was still itty bitty (or at least as itty bitty as a roly poly chunk can be). Either way, I just want to pinch her sweet chubby cheeks!

And, of course, there’s no visiting Kathryn without getting railroaded by this little pantsless whirlwind.

The next week, we celebrated the return of the BYU football season with an exciting win. We promptly proclaimed ourselves number one. E gave his own version of a one fingered solute.

 

E actually points with his middle finger about 90% of the time. Recently, he’s become fascinated with the sky. He points at it enthusiastically and yells “SKY!” all the time which is endlessly amusing to us and random people around us. We’ve tried to teach him to “point with his other finger” but for some reason he interprets that as “wave your middle finger back and forth.” 

E is hilarious. We laugh at something he does almost every day.

His new favorite game is throwing stuff over the baby gate and watching it roll down the stairs. As fast as I can gather his toys back up, five minutes later it just looks like this again. This is just one form of his favorite game that I call “Distributing Things.” I give him his box of blocks and he runs them throughout the house, distributing a few in his window sill, a few on the bookshelf, a few down the stairs, a few in our shoes, etc.

Another variation of this is “Tapping Things.” A few months ago E stumbled upon a stash of Mardi Gras beads we happened to have in our closet, and they have provided hours of entertainment ever since. He just walks around with a strand in his hand and tapping it to the floor, lowering it into holes, setting it into a pile, dunking it into the toilet, etc. His newest accomplishment is to drape the strand over a bar and when he can get it to stay, he gets SOOOO excited. He runs over to us chanting “Wow. Wow. Wow.” And drags us over to see.

I’ve talked about his splashing before, but it truly is getting far out of control. Maybe it’s time to start saying no.

When he doesn’t want to eat, this is what happens. Notice how when he actually lands a bite in his mouth on accident, he spits it right back out again.

Little stinker.

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We're Baaaaaaack!

Okay, we never really went anywhere. I guess you could say that Ryan was swimming his way out of Mosquito Swamp and I was digging my way out from under 1000s of pages of savings directory. So, now we're back to a land where we have actual free time. Thus, a blog post. Yay! And hopefully a few more in the near future to bring us up to the present.
So, what's happened since July? How about we start with August.

Ryan and I had been dying to take Evan swimming forever. He loves his bath so so much that we knew swimming would be a hit. Tooele even has a great pool nearby and in August we finally got the chance. Guess what? It was a hit! He splashed us, himself, kids sitting nearby, etc...

I don't think he knew quite what to do on the waterslide, so Ryan taught him to say "Weeee." Then we couldn't get him to stop.

Then on the 17th, we went camping to Payson Lakes. We passed a lot of beautiful (and empty) campsites to arrive at the site we reserved online sight unseen. It was the campsite from Hell! The one scraggly tree in the area was too far from the firepit to provide any shade AT ALL. Poor Evan couldn't take a nap because the inside of the trailer was like an oven.

From 10-4 the only way to survive was to live by the lake. That was really fun for all of us. We didn't take swim diaper for Evan so he sat right on the rocks with just a onsie for cushion. It shows how much he loves water that he stayed in the water for a long time anyway. When he got cold, I held him on my lap to dry off and after a second my lap went from being cold and wet to being warm and wet. Yuck! I guess it had been a long while since I'd been peed on so it was probably about time.

We taught Pips how to swim (by chucking her in the deep end. Nice, Ryan :) and she had herself some fun chasing after ducks.

Whenever we were back at camp, you could hardly find Evan without a piece of chalk in his hand. He'd walk around the cement pad and every few steps, reach down and draw a single line. The cement was pretty well covered at the end of the trip.

The second day coming back from the lake, we made it back just SECONDS before a huge storm ripped through and soaked everything not already in the trailer. Here's the Lusty family trying to dry out our chairs so we could sit around the fire later that evening.

At least it was nice and cold at night! The trip was really fun :)

And we came back with a souvenir: Evan DEMANDS to play "wee" anytime we are walking anywhere. Let me explain. To encourage Evan to walk all the way to the lake instead of being carried, Sylvia and I each grabbed one of his hands and taught him 1, 2, 3 WEEE! Pretty soon, he was requesting "wee" every few steps. Later that day, Ryan and I tried to play with wee with him, but he threw down Ryan's hand and reached for Sylvia's. Apparently its a mama and grandma game only. Funny kid.

Aaaand, this doesn't have anything to do with anything but I think it's cute how Evan sleeps with head jammed in the corner.

He wakes up like this more often than not. I love him.

18 Months and Stinkin Cute.

My sweet little boy is now 18 months. Here are some things about him that I love and just don't want to forget.

Evan has been saying “Bwap” non-stop for about 2 months now and we’d always say back “that’s not a word!” Last week, he finally added an R to the end of it and we figured it out. “Bwap’r” is “Tractor!” Guess we should have figured that one out for him only saying it while looking at the tractor page in his farm book.

When he gets excited, he rotates his wrist and ankles furiously.

If a book has a car, truck or tractor in it somewhere, Evan will speed through all the other pages of cute animals, babies, etc so he can stop on the car page. When we’re outside and a car goes by, he stops everything to watch it go by. He can’t see a car without making a motor noise constantly for the next several minutes.

He'll eat something just fine until he sees something that he wants more. Then, he spits out everything that is in his mouth, throw the rest of the old thing on the floor and start shoveling in the new thing.

I can't put more than a few pieces of toast in front of him at a time because he shoves one after the other in his mouth until he gags and spits them all back out again.

Drumming is his new passion. He walks around the house hitting things with a drumstick and listening to the different sounds they make. He hasn't learned to eat with a spoon yet because the instant he gets one in his hand, he turns his plate upside down and starts hitting it with the spoon. He also likes to put the stick/spoon/whatever in his mouth and bounce it up and down with his jaw onto whatever he's drumming.

Books hold his attention for long periods of time. When he gets bored of one, he slides off our laps, grabs another one and walks back with it held high above his head.

Three things guarantee a total meltdown: coming in from outside, getting out of the bathtub, and taking away bobby pins that he somehow finds even though I’ve SCOURED the house for them.

He’s been on a spitting kick lately. We used to have contests with him, spitting back and forth. But now that he’s started spitting on strangers, we’ve been working to stop it. Also, one day he discovered that he could spit on the floor/my couch/my shirt and watch the spit droplets accumulate. A few days later he discovered that having food in his mouth while spitting gets even more dramatic results. Ah the things that fascinate a baby. Why do they also have to aggravate the mother?

Sometimes he walks with his eyes scrunched closed, just for fun.

Evan has always liked splashing in the tub. Now that he’s bigger and stronger, we can always plan on getting completely soaked. It’s intentional, aimed right at our faces and apparently very amusing. He loves his bath so much, he almost can't stand the time it takes to get undressed and into the tub.

He refuses to say “mama” on command and ALWAYS responds with an enthusiastic “dada.” (This has been going on for about 2 months now.) Since I usually end with a “grrrrrr” of frustration after several times back and forth, he’s added a growl onto the end of the exchange as well.

He says:

• Dada is “Dada”
• Mama is “Dada”
• Grandpa is “Bampa”
• Baby is “bebe”
• Milk, cookie and cracker are all “k”
• Tractor is “Bwap’r”
• Banana is “Nanananana”
• Hi, bye and night-night are “HI-EE!”
• Wow is “Wow”

Some words he won’t say because he has a sound effect for it instead, which I think he finds much more amusing than saying the actual word.

• Doggie prompts panting
• Kitty and mouse prompt a squeak
• Car prompts a motor noise (vibrating lips)
• Fire truck prompts a siren (singing quickly between high and low notes)
• Pig prompts a snort (which actually sounds more like he's getting ready to hock a loogie)

We sure love you, Little Bug!