Almost Halloween

Yes yes, it is almost time for Engineer Peanut to set out upon the land and conquer it for candy. But before then, we need to paint one of his toenails, let him draw impressive drawings of himself, and pick out some happy/weird/spooky carvings for us to carve. He thought the inside of the pumpkins were icky :)

Also, he asked if he could lay down on the ceiling, and has been playing "underpowered train" almost nonstop.

Just a quick update!

October:

• His vocabulary increases, stringing together sentences
• Still loving Winnie the Pooh. Curious George becomes big.
• Eating a greater variety of food
• Making new friends at school
• Leaves are fun to play in
• Some illness but sleeping well

That's a pretty good synopsis of October I think.


So yeah, I haven't been good about updating. Part of it was I wanted to do a good update. And then failed to do so, so I left it sit. I need to become ok with just any kind of update. I did though update a million videos to my youtube account though, so enjoy those.

We've been getting new windows on the house, hopefully this winter we can stay toasty warm without space heaters and covering up the windows. Peanut enjoys checking out what the contractor is doing, checking out all the 'new wiiindows!' etc. Today we took another step into more imaginative play with trains. One of his naptime videos has a segment where one of the power units die and we watch it work slowly up the hill till it comes to a spot it can stop. Peanut's been replaying this scene for most of the day, super cute. "Underpowered train can't go" "here comes helper train" "train more power" "there goes helper train" and "train go fast now."

Super cute. If you ask me.

Just a random picture from earlier

Birthday Recap

Peanut's 3rd birthday has come and gone. On the whole it was a terrific experience. Peanut loved having all his family here, and all the Winnie the Pooh fun and games. And then of course he had a complete blast on the train ride. I really wish I had written a recap earlier so I could remember all the details. But oh well.

Peanut slept poorly the night before his birthday. So he went to school, where they did birthday stuff for him, and Mr Veggie went to pick him up, and drove him around so he'd nap. Everyone showed up in the meantime, and we watched videos of Peanut while we waited. They got back and we snuggled, then went to help Pooh out of the honey tree. Then we went in and had a yummy lunch, pizza, mac and cheese and vegetable soup. Then, gasp, Pooh got stuck in Rabbit's hole/door, so Peanut bravely went out and we all helped rescue him, after declaring that no one was to feed the bear with the sign.

Then we headed back in (with some difficulty as he wanted to replay the scene over and over. But we did it, and we ... opened presents? I think so. Lot's of awesome gifts, then we played Pin the Tail on Eeyore. Then Winnie the Pooh cupcakes!

We played a bit and slowly got ready to head out to Pooh Stick Bridge. He loved playing this sooooo much. We took a walk around the island, and played at the playground. Then my family headed home and we went home with Mr Veggie's family. We played, popped Piglet's balloon and put it in a useful pot, and had a video chat with more of his family. He was a happy boy, playing with all his new toys.

Super fast recap, and here's the video.

Birthday Week!

So, it's birthday week, HUZZAH! I loooooooooooove birthday week!

Sunday: Wakes us up 4 times between 230 and 400. Is up till 7 when he crashes for a nap. After he wakes up from that, and he's on the potty, he poops in underwear. I threw him in the shower, and he began to sing happy birthday to me. The stinker. Afterwards he asks me to play and I tell him I'm feeling sad from the morning. So he sings twinkle twinkle to make me happy. A little snippet from that day.

Monday: Went to play at the gym! Peanut used the phrase "Watch Winnie the Pooh on the TV" which was jaw dropping. And then at the park he kept asking "hot it work?" and ducking down to try to figure out how the different equipment worked. Overall a good day.

Plans

Tuesday: School today, so we'll spend some time getting ready for the party while he's there. Afterwards I'm thinking we might have a Winnie the Pooh movie night to psych ourselves up for Thursday.

Wednesday: School today. Mr Veggie works, but Uncle A flies in! We'll be playing at Meemaw's house in the evening.

Thursday: BIRTHDAY!!!! We go to school just in the morning today, then we come home for our AWESOME Winnie the Pooh party! With GG and Grandpa S!

Friday: GG and Grandpa S are around for awhile. Chilling with all ze families.

Saturday: We're going on a train ride!

That's the general plan.

New gems out of Peanut's mouth:

"Watch Winnie the Pooh agin?"
"Sleep in a tall bed!"
"1, 2, 3, 4, 5!"

Also singing the alphabet song with us! Ahhhh life is good :)

More Peanut

It's been a chilly week here, highs in the 40s-60s. Fall weather. And considering he just grew, we've been messing around with his clothes. I've got a big ol' pile of clothes that he's too big for now.

He's upstairs right now watching trains. Or napping. He should be napping, he didn't sleep much last night, he was up past his bedtime last night due to the fact that his mommy was at a football game until late and poor Meemaw and Papa had to watch him all day. At the last minute. They kind of rock. Though I just heard him cough, sooo... I don't know.

We'll be spending the afternoon working and planting outside. We also watched the first new episode of Sesame Street of the season. It was pretty good, there was more singing and dancing this season, and Peanut happily danced and waved his arms and such.

Gonna go check up on him.

Yay, he was asleep!

He invented a new game, of course from Winnie the Pooh. I had my measuring rope, I was working on a project, when suddenly he grabbed it and started saying 'heave, ho! heave, ho!' like when they pull Pooh out of Rabbit's doorway. He's just so gosh darn cuuuuute!

Better go get ready, we've got flowers to plant and raspberries to plant as well! My berry patch will soon be both black and red raspberries :D

Digital Artwork Storage

---forgot to post yesterday, my bad ---

Upside down stamps!

Ok, so, I know that I loved going through my parent's files of all my artwork growing up. And he's bringing stuff home from school, but some of it is just... 99% teacher and 1% Peanut. So what I'm thinking of doing is taking photos of the stuff he makes, and keeping the stuff that is actually him doing stuff, and ... tossing the stuff that he clearly had next to nothing to do with. I love it regardless, I love walking into his school and seeing stuff in his cubby waiting for me. But I'm not going to care about most of it in 15 years. Obviously. "Ooooh, lookie, 100 sheets of paper with one crayon stroke on it, with the teachers carefully hand drawn fish depicting friendship!" So yeah, that's my plan right now.

I'll do a little montage on here, that's one of my goals today!

A run through of school mornings:
Peanut didn't nap yesterday so we were really hoping he'd sleep 12 hours last night. Nope, only 11. At least it's a good night sleep overall. But it did mean he crawled into bed with us at 630. And kicked us for awhile. Then gave up on kicking, crawled out of bed and turned the lights on and stood around demanding we get up. He's so nice to us.

Family tree!

So we get up and get him begrudgingly on the potty. He eats breakfast just in his pj shirt and underwear usually, there's no point to getting him dressed, more on that in a sec. We head down, he sometimes demands to go play with his trains right away, which means I have to release the cats. I want to get the basement to the point where I can lock the cats up there and Peanut will have free range of his trains in the morning. We ask him what he wants for breakfast, and it's usually peanut butter toast. He eats it with a towel on his lap, but usually he gets some on his clothes. Hence not getting him dressed right away.

So he eats, either a bite or all of it. While he's doing that, I start his lunch. I take a piece of bread out of the freezer and toast it to defrost. Then he gets a one slice grilled cheese for his lunch, fruit (this week raisins, as he's been anti non dried fruit) and veggie straws in his lunch.

He's done at this point and Mr Veggie has come down to head off to work. Peanut runs to the window to wave goodbye. Then we head up and Peanut now INSISTS on picking out his own shirt. Alas he does so indiscriminately, so I think I'll just be hanging up the shirt I want him to pick at the end where he always grabs. We're getting closer and closer to him getting the shirt on completely by himself, but I still need to tug the shirt down over his head, as if it's not a baggy neck hole, he freaks out with it over his face. This morning I actually did it all - he was determined to no wear a shirt, despite the fact it was like 40 degrees out there.

So we're dressed, lunch is ready, so we head on out. Usually we need to hop over multiple cracks in the garage/driveway before he'll hop in the car. But it's usually not too difficult to get him in the car. He likes going to school, just playing outside is pretty fun too. And that's our morning at home before school!

Boys Gone for the Weekend

New PJs!

It's actually been a quiet week or two here. It's been a lot of stressful ups and downs. We were all sick there for a week or two (colds, still have a nasty morning cough here but Peanut and Mr Veggie seem past it) and then in the middle of it we got bad news about my out of the home job, it was a start up and it was struggling and needed to cut labor.

School - it's going great! He's communicating so much better - still not in the normal range, but damn it feels like we're getting close to whole thoughts, pronouns are sneaking it, and he's often attaching 'the' and 'a' in front of nouns. And he's a singing fool. I go pick him up and he's playing trains with another kid, or pretending to make lunch with another kid, or playing chase/tag with groups of kids. There are always a chorus of kids who yell 'goodbye!' when we leave, and it only takes a nudge from me to get him to reciprocate (the first few weeks it was a lot of coaching 'say byebye back. No louder. No yell really loud!'). His teachers say, aside from a few quirks he always is a great role model, great at cleaning up, and participates in group activities (quirks? Yeah, well, he likes to dump his water on the floor when done drinking).

He's tooooo big

Yesterday he was in such a great mood, and it was after sleeping 12 hours, we had a monster on our hands tonight, after 9. And he's struggling to fall asleep tonight. Ah well.

We've been discussing his birthday party, a small thing on Thursday then the train on Saturday. We have a great idea for Thursday, but I gotta give the beginning credit to Mr. Veggie. The rest was all me ;) He suggested that we have a Winnie the Pooh birthday instead of trains, since Saturday was going to be about trains. And considering he wanders around quoting pooh lines and singing pooh songs, we can have a lot of fun with that. My beginning plan:

Hiking

Breakfast of honey butter toast. go to school, come back and the house is all ready to go. Hopefully GG will be here by then, we will give Peanut a blue balloon, lift him up onto Mr Veggie's shoulders, and they'll go searching for the honey jar in the trees. Then we'll have lunch of yellow pasta (his favorite) and with stuffed tummies, we'll go discover Pooh is wedged... somewhere. We'll pound a sign into the ground next to him saying "don't feed the bear!" Then pull him out. We'll then get into the car, head down to Pooh Sticks bridge, and play pooh sticks. If it's a 'Windsday' we'll fly a kite too. Then we'll head back for cupcakes decorated like Winnie the Pooh. Peanut has requested 'cockolat cucakes.'

So that's our running idea. That's enough rambling for tonight.