How Do Your Kids Eat Veggies?

This is how we do veggies at our house....

Believe it or not, Ethan LOVES this nasty looking stuff.  It is celery and broccoli soup and he asks me for it just about everyday. Amazing? I think so.  He has always like broccoli and carrots but I have always had a hard time getting him to try new veggies. So one day I was thinking how I could help him and I thought of the many yummy veggie soups I have had in Mexico.  My neighbor in MX taught me how to make this soup and it is super easy! All I do is boil cut up celery until soft and steam some broccoli to go with it, throw it in a blender, fill up the blender about half-way with the nutrient filled water from steaming/boiling, add a little bit of cheese and a tiny bit of  Caldo de Pollo and voila...a healthy way to get Ethan to eat veggies! Although I haven't tried other veggies yet, I imagine that this could work with just about any veggie you want!

Here is Ethan loving his veggie soup!

If Ethan is happy, we are happy :)

Amazon Link to Lucky 7

Ok, so a few of you have informed me that you can't find the product mentioned in my previous post on amazon and that is probably because I had no idea that the company had changed the name again for domestic sale. Don't worry, it's still the same product, just a different name :) It is now called Fertil Gold Grow & Bloom Liquid Fertilizer and you can click here to check it out. Happy growing!

Lucky 7

As you all know, Justin works in international agriculture for a company called BioHumaNetics located here in Chandler, AZ. This company was started by his grandfather, who was quite a genius when it came to figuring out the best way to make a plant grow amazingly. He received a doctorate from Purdue University and later invented the amazing products that have made BioHumNetics into the prospering and growing company that it is. If you have not ever heard of this company or the products it is probably because they only sell to big farm growers and they are much bigger in international sales rather than domestic. I never really knew just how good these products were until I saw my mother-in-laws garden. She just used a product called Lucky 7 on her plants once a week and I have seriously NEVER seen a garden grow so much before! I mean she had tomatoes coming out of her ears and she has never had any luck with growing them before! It was amazing!
So Justin brought me home some Lucky 7 to try on these poor withering flowers in our front yard....

So I took on an experiment to see if my mother-in-laws blooming garden was just a fluke or the real deal. I have two plants that look exactly like this in our front yard and this poor flower bush above recieved the exact same amount of water everyday as the other but it not recieve any Lucky 7. To the other bush, which looked exactly like the one above, I applied only one recommended amount of Lucky 7 (a little bit goes a LONG way) with the same amount of water as the other and within a few days the plant looked like this...

See a difference? I was truly amazed! I am now a believer in Justin's genius grandpa's product! If you are interested in trying it out on your garden, a tree, a plant, or anything like this, you can actually buy some of this amazing product on Amazon. They have just started selling it on there and it is under the name of "MaxPak7." I can't wait to use it on our winter garden! I'll be sure to post some pics once we get it going!

A Trip to the Zoo

Last Friday a friend of mine from our new ward, Alison, was kind enough to invite Ethan and I to join her and her 3 kids to the Phoenix Zoo. She has a Zoo pass which got me and Ethan in free along with her and her kiddos. So we packed up her minivan and headed out there for a fun-filled half day at the Zoo! Ethan had fun copying everything Preston (who is 3 years old and one of our favorites in our nursery class) was doing and her two twin boys (18 months) were so good to just watch Ethan and Preston run around the zoo from their strollers.

The kids had fun seeing the..

Rhino's..

and the ostriches... actually I don't think they were ostriches but they sure looked like them...



and we saw a whole lot more animals that I didn't take picture of such as: the lions, monkeys, tortoises, lots of birds, giraffes, elephants, etc. We also went to a cool little water park they zoo has there for the kids. I guess because it's Phoenix, they kinda have to have one of those :) Ethan loved the water park and LOVED going down the slide. I've decided that going to the zoo is so much more fun when you go with other people! Thanks so much Alison for inviting us to go. Let's do it again sometime!

A Toddler's Prayer...

Every night Ethan and I have his night prayer together and sometimes he says some pretty funny things. Tonight was no exception as he said the following:

Me: Heavenly...
Ethan: Father

Me: We are grateful for this....
Ethan: Day

Me: We are grateful for the
Ethan: Mormon (Book of Mormon), Jesus, Daddy, etc.

After some other lines...

Me: We are grateful for the baby and please bless it that it may be.... (usually Ethan says healthy. Instead he says..)
Ethan: A boy! (laughter) Yeah! A baby boy!

Me: We are grateful for..... and before I could say another noun, Ethan excitedly says....
Ethan: FOOTBALL!!

I couldn't stop laughing after that and Ethan kept excitedly saying "Yeah! Football!"

Hmmm....all this makes me wonder what Daddy has been talking to our son about lately :)

Counting & Beethoven's 5th?

I know it's been eons since I have posted any video on my blog but I don't know how to convert and edit the movies on my mac so I use that as my excuse for never doing it. So I finally revived my old PC laptop and compressed a movie for you guys (well, mostly for my family).

This video is of Ethan counting to 10 and I would love to take the credit for being the one to spend all the time teaching him his numbers, but I can't. I owe my sons counting ability completely to Sesame Street...Sad, I know... At least all that TV watching he did while I was sick during my 1st trimester went to good use, right!? He learned something out of it!

I think in this video he skips the number 5 and who knows what he is counting after 10 but he still does a pretty good job for a 2 year old! Also at the end you will hear Ethan trying to sing Beethoven's 5th but I think it sounds more like Mozart's The Magic Flute, just not near as high pitched. He just has a little too many duh's in there for Beethoven :) (By the way, if you haven't watched the link above, you should. That little boy is pretty amazing!) I'll explain how he knows Beethoven below...



Ethan loves to watch Little Einstein's every morning and one of his favorite episodes is Hansel & Gretel. Whenever the witch pops up, the music to Beethoven's 5th Symphony plays and so Ethan always says "Oh no! It's a witch! Dum Dum Dum Duuuuummmm!!!" He does this anywhere he sees a witch and since it's getting close to Halloween time, this happens in pretty much every store we go in :) I think it's pretty cute but sometimes he is VERY loud with it. He also always makes daddy play it on the piano for him when he gets home from work. We just love our little singing and counting toddler!

14 Weeks

I dont know about you guys but I love reading about other people’s pregnancies and seeing pictures of their growing bellies. I think it’s so exciting and fun! So thus, I am determined to do a better job with documenting this pregnancy than I did with Ethan. I like to use the excuse that I was so busy with work and school at the time but I am still sad that I don’t have hardly any prego pics and don’t have very many memories to go off of! So hopefully I will have many more post coming full of pictures of my growing belly and all the details of this pregnancy…

So I had my 14 week check up with the doctor this last Tuesday and everything seems to be going well! Here is what’s going on:

-I heard the little heartbeat pounding away at 161 beats per minute and couldn’t be happier to know that baby is going to make it!
-I’m now off of the progesterone supplements since my placenta can now take full responsibility for making all the progesterone I need, but I'm still taking the baby aspirin to help with blood clots.
-I haven’t gained any weight yet but Im not too worried. The doctor said that it’s normal especially if you were sick in the first trimester and lost a few pounds. I didn’t really start gaining my weight with Ethan until the second trimester anyways.
- I am however starting to thicken around the abdomen very nicely although I'm not quite picture worthy yet. It really is amazing how much faster you feel fatter the second go round… Anyone else agree?? I remember starting to feel like this with Ethan at about 20 weeks! At least the baby is growing well!
-I have so much energy and am loving being able to eat again! The only things I don't want to eat are toast, pasta, peanut butter and tortillas since that is all I ate during my first trimester. It’s ok, I really don’t miss them.
- We have a ultrasound scheduled for mid-October to see what the gender is of our little baby! I don’t have any preference… I would happy with a boy or a girl!
And last but not least…
-The doctor took me off of pelvic rest since the amount of blood behind the placenta is getting smaller and no longer poses a risk to miscarriage! Hooray! I can now go back to the gym and resume all of my normal activities and stop worrying about our little miracle! I am so happy!

Thanks again for all of your support and prayers during these past few months. We are so excited and so happy that our little family is expanding! Stay tuned for more updates!

Big Boy Bed

I know it's been forever since I have posted anything but our kind neighbors (we have no idea who they are) who were unknowingly were letting us mooch off of them for our internet, finally got smart and put a password on their access leaving us without the internet. We have looked into finally breaking down and buying our own internet, but we can't believe how expensive it is! So anyways, we have become frequent visitors at the library so I can use the internet there... seriously... how cheap are we?!

Well we have reached and passed another milestone with our little Ethan in introducing him to his very own big boy bed! We debated between toddler bed/twin bed and decided on getting him his very own twin sized bed. We bought him a nice one at Sams Club and are counting on this one to last him until he moves out someday- long term investment, right?! We found some awesome Wall-e sheets at Wal- Mart and he was so excited to sleep in it! We havent had any problem with him getting out of his bed for either nap or bedtime. Well, at least not consciencely (sp?)....

We did happen to find him out of his bed one morning, but we are pretty sure it was unintentional :)

He is so happy to sleep in his big boy bed , even if he looks a little frightened in the picture below... Please notice not only his cool Wall-e sheets but also the matching pj's to go with it!

Both Justin and I are super happy that this whole milestone was a breeze to go through! Next stop.. potty training... dum dum DUMMM!!!!