Tidbits

I was baking some cookies this afternoon when Aimee walked in and wanted to help. She began criss-crossing the peanut butter cookies with a fork, and after a minute I gently urged her to hurry a little (which looks bad in print, but there really was a good reason for it). "I'm doing my best, Mommy," she replied, "I'm just not accustomed to baking." How old are you? and in which century exactly were you born? :-)

Later, while the older ones were at Awanas, the little boys were having a blast together, mostly by making a mess just for the fun of it, and at one point I saw Chase carrying the backdoor mat - the one out of which can be shaken at least a gallon of sand (our backyard is full of it) at any given time. And yes, he was trailing all that sand behind him as he traipsed all over the living room! He dropped it and I went to get the broom; when I came back a second later, the rug was gone. To my query concerning it's whereabouts, Ryan said sweetly, "I put it up for you!"
"Oh, really - where?"
"On the table!"
Um...thanks, dear little man!

A little while later as Ryan was helping me put things back in order, I thanked him for his cheerful cooperation, and said "You're so..." pausing to let him fill in the adjective of his choice. "Smart!" he chimed in. We did it a few more times, and he offered, "awesome," "cool," and, finally, "three." So there's Ryan in his own words - smart, awesome, cool, and three. :-)

Drew is almost always good for a one-liner, but lately his vocabulary has been liberally sprinkled with five year-old boy language that is not so nice in print. Ah, well, there's still a brilliant, sensitive little mind under all that, and it's my opinion he's becoming especially good with numbers. He's breezing through 1st grade math - and actually knows most of Aimee's math facts as well - and he's constantly asking me all kinds of completely random math questions. The other day he asked me the sum of 71 an 71. I answered 142, and he thought about it for a second before offering, "So, 70 plus 70 is 140..." and a few seconds later, "...and 69 plus 69 is 138..." Today he started at the same peg, and went up, "If 71 and 71 are 142, then 72 and 72 is...144! And 74 and 74 is...148!" It may that I'm just extremely deficient in math skills, but I think that's pretty good for a kindergartner!

And Chase... He communicates so that I can understand him perfectly, of course, but he still doesn't talk much at this stage. Aimee was quite a talker at an early stage, and I was a little worried, admittedly, when her brothers were "behind" in the verbal department. Drew and Ryan have excellent vocabularies for their respective ages now, though, so I feel pretty relaxed about Chase's pace in that area. I do get excited when he articulates something well, however, and it seems that his latest word is "nanana," which he says pointedly at bananas (and any other fruit!). Okay, so that may be a little hard to distinguish from the other "na-na" words in his vocabulary, but I know what he's talking about!