My boys...

Eating a garden cucumber...
Eating an avocado roll...he ate almost the whole roll!!!

I feel the need to record stuff about the kids as I don't journal much (okay, at all) and want to do a little update on their lives. So here we go, a little glimpse of our day-to-dayness.

Samuel talks. No one other than us understands him, I'm sure, but he really does say stuff. I think he'd do great on Sesame Street on "B" day (do they still do that?!?) as most of his vocabulary is brought to you by the letter "B". Book, ball, bread, bear, Bob (as in, "Bob the Builder" from one of his books...this one sounds remarkably like "Bob", probably his best word), these are some of his faves. Then we have cracker and kick. The "B" words pretty much all sound like "buh" with slight variations or an occasional "r" in the mix, and cracker and kick sound pretty much like "ca-ca" and "ca". Sometimes his "b" words sound quite a lot like the real thing to us but mostly people probably just think he's grunting. He loves talking though, whenever he tries out a new word he smiles at us in this coy little way and looks so proud. We're all about accolades around here too, so he knows he'll get some praise if he orates. Do you like my two big words there? I'm trying to impress you.

He also runs. He and Luke chase each other around the house a lot and Samuel is a worthy contender, at least in terms of heart. He has great chasing stamina and it's very cute. He really seems like a two-year-old in a one-year-old body as he tries to keep up with Luke. Today they were teeter-tottering on our little backyard swingset teeter-totter and Samuel was just giggling away, as if he was a big kid. He's already doing slides by himself at the park like a pro, it's so cute.

And then there's the tantrums. They've come a year early. I don't remember such irrational fits with Luke, but maybe they were there. If Samuel is mad about something, we all know it. He puts on a fine little show. For example, if one of us decides to go downstairs without him, that's definitely cause for a fit. Or if I decide that maybe he shouldn't eat all the acorns from our yard, along with the half-rotten apples that come out of no where and land on our yard, that is a fine enough basis for an all out scream fest. Lovely. But thankfully he gets over these moments usually pretty quickly so we're coping.

Then there's eating. These are the 3 (or more) times a day I'd like to have a dog. He's a great eater but loves to touch and feel everything he eats, take it out, do a little looksy and then keep going. It doesn't work so well with yogurt, fyi. Luke has been known, on many occasions, to physically turn the other way when Samuel's eating and inform me that Sammy is "yucky". His one cute food thing is that if we say, "Sammy, that's hot!" he'll do a little blow on his food before putting it in his mouth. It cracks us up.

He's also a ton of fun. He's always ready for a joke and a laugh, and a little tickling goes a long way. He's a fine peekaboo player and loves any kind of rhyme. I can hardly wait to see what his personality will be like as he grows up, I just keep imagining him to be the biggest goof.

Okay, now for Luke.

I love him. He's getting to be such a big kid, I can't even believe what a big boy he is. Whenever he talks about doing things when he's older he says, "when I be a dad, THEN I'll..." whatever it is. And he's a great big brother. He's always watching out for Samuel, whether at the park or climbing stairs, he's all about Sammy being safe. He's a little extreme sometimes as he often screams "Mommy get him! He's going on the road!" when he's a million miles away. But better that then pushing him into traffic I'd say. He's really enjoying any aspect of independence and his voice often gets noticeably deeper as he talks about whatever big task he's going to do...putting on his own shoes, riding his bike, whatever. He says stuff like, "oh, that's okay mom, I'm a big boy, I can do it" in his tough guy voice. He's got faults too, to be sure, but next to high maintenance Sam he's looking pretty good these days. We were watching this Baby Einstein video yesterday that had the "wheels on the bus" song on it, and it has a dog puppet on it so they sang "the dogs on the bus go arf arf arf" but Luke kept saying "barf barf barf". It still makes me laugh out loud, I try so hard not to laugh around him as he gets pretty self-conscious but some of the things he says are so hilarious. Another funny yesterday story was that we were meeting my dad at the mall for coffee and Luke asks, "what vehicle do you think Papa Ron will have?" and I said that I wasn't sure, what did he think? So he said, "maybe his cadillac...or maybe his big truck...or maybe his OLD cadillac!" (He really does have all those vehicles too!) And this morning his Uncle Duane dropped his cousin off at our house during gramma babysitting morning, and asked what vehicle he was driving. If we're crossing the street and a truck or SUV is there and I say, "watch out for the car!" he'll say, "NO mom! It's an SUV! (or truck, or whatever)." So now it's all "vehicle" talk around here, just to cover our bases.

Okay, that's all the rambling I can come up with for now. In other news, I've started a new job, teaching one course for one semester at Miles Mac, a high school a worked at 5 years ago and subbed at 2 years ago. So far so good...I can definitely say I have teacher blood in me. I have no idea what I ever found stressful about it, compared to parenting it seems so easy :)! I could gladly stay and prep and chat all day long there, it's such an enjoyable switch in routine, but I love my boys too, so I do manage to drag myself away. It's not all so rosy, I do have one colleague who's a bit of a mooch and self-proclaimed lazy person, so that's a winning combination. She's always asking to see what I did, tells me she looked through my stuff while I was away (at least she told me, that's a positive!) and today she must have been waiting for me to come, lurking in the hallways somewhere because she ambushed me as soon as I came in asking for another lesson idea and copy of it! Yikes. Not sure what to do about that, but she's also not the worst person ever, just probably trying to adjust to a new place and figure out how to be a high school teacher after being a junior high teacher for 15 years. And after spending 15 years with Junior High kids, I'd be a little nuts too.

Happy back to school everyone!!!