The other day, Boo found his old photo album which has pictures of him and various family mambers when he was a baby, just a few months old. He took out one of the pictures (I think it was him with Uncle Doug and Aunt Ashley) and told me it was a picture of baby brother!

I’m not the only one who thinks they look alike! I told Nathan that was actually him, not baby brother, and he was very pleased that baby brother looked like him. How sweet!

We were spontaneously gifted a fort the other day, and it’s really fun to put together:

The Boo’s little couch fits in it perfectly. The first time we put it together, we had it facing the television so he sat in his little “house” on his little couch watching a movie. Very cute.

Unfortunately we don’t have a whole lot of room for it, but fortunately it packs away into a bag which we can stash somewhere, so that’s good. It attaches with magnets so it’s very easy to put together.. I fully expect the Boo could put it together himself if he was so inclined (although he’s still requesting help at this point).

It was generously given to us completely free after a friend’s children had outgrown it, and I hope to have quite a few years fun with it! Of course I still have plans to make a canvas cover for our table that can be decorated as a space ship, but until that happens, the fort will definitely do. Yay!

The lad collapsed asleep yesterday at 5:30pm. This is usually not a good thing — he’s really hard to wake up, is super grumpy, and when he IS ready to wake up he won’t go to bed for ages!

However once in a blue moon he’ll fall asleep in the afternoon — and stay that way. He slept until we got him ready for bed when we went to bed, was awake for the brushing of teeth and the reading of books, then went back to sleep. Until 7:30 this morning. That’s 14 hours! The child slept for 14 hours!

Either he’s growing, he’s just been lacking sleep lately (due to waking up earlier and going to bed too late probably), or he’s sick. I hope he’s not sick! That would be bad timing.

Lately the Boo has been into playing with dinosaurs. He didn’t used to like it when I tried to make critters with playdough, but now apparently it’s an acceptable pasttime. So make dinosaurs we did!

He requests his dinosaurs by the names used in the Land Before Time series. There are Longnecks, Three Horns, and occasionally a Sharp Teeth.  He’s particularly a fan of the itsy bitsy baby three horns. We make food for them out of playdough as well, and they eat, play chase, and also ride skateboards. Don’t ask.

Dinosaurs are surprisingly hard to make out of playdough. It’s too pliable and at the same time dries out too fast. The necks break and the feet get squished. We need to explore the world of modelling clay next, I believe.

We went to a three year old’s birthday party recently that took place at a bouncy castle gym!! Much fun was had, especially by the boys:

Daddy was SO MUCH FUN! It took the lure of cake to get him to leave. We’re looking forward to more opportunities for the boys to go play.

Wait, no Christmas post? We’ll have to upload some photos this weekend and post them!

But first, some great news! The Boo had his first dentist appointment. He wasn’t too sure about the whole procedure and sat in his Daddy’s lap the whole time, but in general he was very cooperative and thought the dentist’s spinning toothbrush was really cool. (He says that now.. “really cool”!)

His teeth appear fine. He’s got space around most of his teeth, which is desirable for preventing cavaties, although we need to pay special attention to the molars where they are touching. They gave us a very cool little flosser which so far the Boo is agreeing to use. He loved the bubblegum flavored toothpaste. Mostly the news was keep up the good work! We’re doing well and his teeth look good.

Yay!

According to the Boo:

No Mario Kart after sun goes down!

Who knew?

This morning the child told us the clock says 8 and it was time to get up. He pointed to the clock and everything.

I was stunned! Since when does he know how to tell time?

Then H tells me that the Boo says a lot of things are 8, so we ask which number was 8. He points at the 0. Oops. But then he pointed to the 8 after that.

Ah well. It’s a start!

Sorry these are so late! We don’t upload photos as often as we should.

Halloween was great this year. The boy liked his astronaut outfit, even though the helmet is still a little big. We went to H’s work for trick or treating, which was wonderful because a) it was indoors and therefore not cold, b) it was during the day so we weren’t keeping the boy up late, and c) we got to see where H works! Not to mention the boy filled a gift bag half-full of candy!

Now, a week later, the candy is gone. It was fun experimenting — the lad didn’t know what most of the treats were, so Mama and Daddy got a fair share of the booty as well

The boy had some birthday money (thank you family!) so we went to our favorite mom and pop toy store for some fun. It was the first time we’ve said “You have x amount of money and you can choose what to buy with it.”

It should come as no surprise the boy chose trains and train accessories! We did peruse some cars, marble runs (I still want one of those!), books and puzzles, but if you ask him what he really, really wants, the answer is going to involve trains.

He picked out two things:

A turntable and a train called Mighty Mac that has two faces. Mac is cool — he can face either way! Boo was quite excited by this.

As far as the turntable goes, we’ve always resisted it because they are usually attached to a roundhouse and we have deemed the roundhouse to be an excessive and useless waste of space. However lately he’s been more into the train items that involve some finesse — train table, washdown station, etc. So we relented and it was the right decision. The turntable is awesome! The lad LOVES it!

It also cleverly solves one of our more troublesome dilemmas — making the track run correctly either way, so you don’t get “stuck” going one direction. Now, however, all of these problems are gone. Don’t like the way you’re going? Turn around on the turntable! Brilliant!

Then the other day H went upstairs while the lad was playing and found this:

Boo had taken all of the extra track pieces and made his own little track on the floor. What a clever little engineer. There shall be no waste! Somehow I feel like we’re doing good