I had grand plans to do NaBloPoMo, in which I would write one blog post every day during the month of November. You can see how well THAT worked. LOL Kind of like my neglected 101 in 1001 project. At least I have like a year and a half left to accomplish that. :D
Today was a very productive day. First of all, the weather was GORGEOUS for Nov. 2 - I think the high was in the upper 60s. I'm going to miss that. Not ready for winter yet. Anyway. We got the backyard cleaned up and all the toys put in the garage, and put some straw in Abbie's doghouse. There will be no cops accusing us of failure to provide shelter to our dog this year, thankyouverymuch. (Have I mentioned that I'm still pissed about that?)
We also picked up our new snowblower this afternoon, courtesy of Freecycle. I have no clue if it works or not (the guy we got it from said it did the last time he used it 4 years ago) but Shawn is pretty good at fixing things, so hopefully we'll have a functioning snowblower for the winter. Our driveway is hella long and my poor husband had to shovel it last winter, which was not good on his back, especially with all the heavy wet snow we got.
Still working on the potty training thing. He's getting better and better, and we had him in underwear for over an hour last night before he had an accident. Baby steps. He doesn't have preschool on Tuesday, and we're not doing gymnastics this session, so barring any unforeseen circumstances I'm going to do potty training boot camp starting tomorrow. We're going to my parents' house on Thursday and then he's staying there all next week (and my mom has been nagging at me to get him trained so I'm sure she'll be on top of it), so with any luck he'll come home and be day trained! There's no way he's ready to be night trained yet - he's woken up dry maybe twice. That's OK, though.
Yesterday we went to the American Baby Faire in Schaumburg. Basically a ton of baby vendors giving out free samples. It's awesome. :D Anyway, Chicco had a race thing with their Rodeo horses, and we entered Ethan in it. He won! Not that it was much of a competition - it was open to ages 2-3 1/2, and I think the other 5 kids in his race were all quite a bit younger than him. He kicked butt. LOL He crossed the finish line and totally didn't understand why I was whooping and hollering, it was kind of funny. He won a Chicco Bilingual Smart Driver, which I though was kind of a weird prize for a race for 2-3 1/2 year olds, since it's a 12+ month toy. But we figure we'll just give it to Logan for Christmas (from Ethan, of course) and buy Ethan a toy of comparable value to replace it.
Friday was Halloween, of course, and we had a good time. We made a quick trip to Streamwood's Safety Town for ToTing, and apparently they're going to be on the Streamwood Park District website at some point. I'll post a link if they are. After that we came home and went ToTing around the neighborhood. We were just going to go around our cul-de-sac, but only 5 people were home and Ethan was having fun, so we went up the street a little way. You know, I realized before this that whoever designed this neighborhood really packed the houses in, but that wasn't truly clear to me until we went ToTing. We walked a half mile loop to 4 other cul-de-sacs in our neighborhood and his bucket was overflowing with candy. It was nuts! He had a lot of fun, though, and by the end he had the "Trick or Treat"/get candy/"Thank You" thing down pat. :) Logan tagged along, but somewhere between the 3rd and 4th cul-de-sacs he fell asleep in Shawn's arms. It's so tiring being a cute little monster.
I leave you with a few pictures of the last couple of days. Don't forget to vote on Tuesday!
My boys at Safety Town ToT
My sleeping Logan-monster
Our pumpkins
Ethan's Rodeo debut