Well, I haven't done so well at posting every day, but I'm back now. I do have a sort-of excuse... we were gone to GC for 5 days, which was a lovely, busy time.

As often happens with our vacations, we brought back a cold. I hate colds. I understand why we haven't been able to cure the common cold, seeing as it is actually 200+ different viruses, but I still feel put out whenever my family is knocked down by one. I still find myself thinking, "All these technological advances and inventions to make our lives easier and virtually pain-free, and really? We can't cure the common cold?"

On a lighter note....

Ethan's speech development has been a source of constant amusement for Heath and I. He has a pretty sizeable vocabulary of words he seems to have just made up. "Dute-doo" was popular for a while - it seemed to be a generic term for any human being. As in "Dorry, dute-doo" in apology, or "Hi, dute-doo!" to family, friends, and strangers in the parking lot. Then there is dee-one. Which at first observation would seem to mean "this one," except it doesn't always fit. Again, it seems to be a generic term for any sort of object or person that he wants to "name" or draw attention to. So, the obvious use is "Dee-one! Dee-one!" meaning he wants us to get him the object he is pointing at, or wants us to notice that object. The less obvious use is, "Ethan, what kind of animal is that?" "Dee-one."

The crowning achievement of his language creation is a certain sentence he repeats over and over, exactly the same each time, and we have no idea what it means. When we couldn't understand most of what he said, we would just nod and say "Un-huh, yeah," like we did to everything else. But now that we understand most of the rest of what he says, this sentence stands out. He seems to be asking something about Daddy, because that is the last word, but the first 3-4 words I don't know. I'll try to listen closely today so I can post the phoenetics of the sentence on here, and maybe we can analyze it. I suggested to Heath that we record it and slow it down or speed it up or break apart the syllables to see if we could figure it out.