Your weekly dose of E...

I realize looking back over my recent entries that I promised pictures on the first day of our trip in LA and then completely blew that off. So, without further ado (or more of my senseless rambling), here are some pictures from our trip....

Thanks to Dora, Ethan is deeply in love with the whole concept of having a backpack...

Our view from the hotel. Love the carefully placed palm tree covering up giant almost naked billboard man--he is wearing a pair of very well stocked tighty-whiteys, but I like the palm tree better, personally.

Apparently every bed in LA has a silver lining...

Thank you, Husband's company, for footing the bill for this SEVEN dollar bottle of water.

Ethan approves of his new digs (and of mama's sunglasses, which will end up broken in a day's time)...

This is where I tried to take Ethan for lunch the first day (see below about $15 temper tantrum).

This is where he ended up actually eating lunch the first day. Thank goodness for Trader Joe's snap peas. And freeze dried mangoes. They were pretty much his entire diet while we were there.

Oh, and cheerios & craisins...

More cheerios & craisins....

What do you know? They have parks in LA that look exactly like the parks in Virginia! Check out the glee!

First time scaling non-stair based climbing apparatus...success!

I have to admit that LA agreed with him. Sigh. Whatever.

I have to admit, this part of LA agreed with me. The retail therapy is nothing less than phenomenal.

Hello, pretty pretty purses. I will be seeing you soon!

Despite the "I am going to vomit on you any second" look he gives the camera, Ethan is a big fan of vanilla ice cream. When we walked by the ice cream stand on subsequent visits to the Grove, Ethan repeated ad nauseum, in his best beggy voice, "I-ceam! I-ceam!" So, add ice cream to snap peas, freeze-dried mangoes, cheerios & craisins...

Hello, 3-story Barnes & Noble; where have you been all of my life? (truth be told, it's pretty average--one whole story is just DVDs and books on Hollywood, and there's not even a Thomas Train table in the kid's department. But doesn't it look beeeooouuutiful?)

We took E to the zoo, where his favorite attraction was the top of Husband's head...

Amazingly, we have family in LA (who knew?!) and they had us over for dinner on Saturday night. We all enjoyed ourselves immensely and Ethan even got to pick a lemon right off a tree. Can't do that in DC...

Then he tried to eat the lemon...

That'll teach you to try to eat a lemon...

Melodrama at the hotel...

Ethan at Travel Town, or where old trains go to die...it's basically a retirement home for old train engines that they let kids walk around and climb on. A pretty good use of the old heaps. Very cool.

Freeze-dried mangoes on the tracks...check out Ethan's own little train.

Freeze-dried mangoes on the choo-choo....

Hrm. My little green Percy train is a lot smaller than this one, Mama...

And home we go...Elmo, remote and head phones (at almost zero volume, parenting police. I am not deafening my child) in tow...

And so there you have it; I did not take pictures of Finola Hughes, Lance Bass, Dakota Fanning or Bob Saget, who were the "celebrities" we saw. Okay, so only Dakota Fanning really counts as a bona fide star, but when you recognize someone when you're 3000 miles away from home, that counts as a celebrity to me, mkay??

Hopefully soon I'll have pictures to post of the fabulous hilltop villa Husband is going to find for us out there (ha ha ha). But for now, enjoy!