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

The other day the Boo requested to watch the “black horsie movie”. I had no clue what he was talking about. We don’t have a black horsie movie, to my knowledge. I ran through the list of movies we had, two have horses, but they weren’t the right ones. Hmm! He was being very specific — there was a black horse at the top of a hill and there were little baby horses. And he did this cute galloping motion with his hands to show how they moved.

After a few days, we figured out he was talking about Fantasia of all things! The Pastorial Symphony by Beethoven is animated with cherubs, centaurs, various gods and goddesses, unicorns, and a black pegasus with babies, of all things! So that’s what he was talking about! What an incredibly memory the boy is developing!

So we’ve been watching Fantasia. I have to admit this tickles me to no end. I’ve tried putting on classical music but he generally is having none of it. In fact if I even put on normal music and sing along to it, he tells me to stop singing and turn off the music! But Fantasia, he seems to like. I think the music is probably incidental, it’s the animation he’s interested in. But that doesn’t matter — he likes it and hey, it’s good music

The other pieces of Fantasia he likes are the Rite of Spring by Igor Stravinsky, and the Sorcerer’s Apprentive by Paul Dukas. I’m working on the Nutcracker and the Dance of the Hours, but so far he’s not interested in those, as if anyone could resist a dancing hippo!

Nevertheless, I’m pleased. Now if we could only find a copy of Fantasia II! I think he’d like the flying whales.

We’ve been visiting some farms recently and had lots of fun!

The latest was the Klesick Family Farm way up north. We went there with some friends for their Harvest Festival. This place was superb! It’s a family run organic farm, and since they are small and don’t have a lot of money, much of their farm equipment is old and manual-labour-intensive.

For example, we saw a demonstration of how they dig up potatoes. They hook this 100-year old machine up to a tractor (it would take 6 horses to pull!) where it digs under the plants, pushes them up a sort of potato escalator, someone shakes the plants around to loosen the potatoes, then it dumps the potatoes back along the ground behind. People then follow along and pick up the potatoes. In our case, the kids went ballistic, ran to the potato line, and did all the manual labour for them. Fun!

They also had many, many tractors, most of them looking pretty old. The Boo of course thought this was fantastic and had to sit on all of them. The lucky boy managed to score a tractor ride this way!

Isn’t that a crazy looking tractor? Instead of tires it has spikes! The farmer came up to us and said he needed to use this tractor. I started to get the Boo down, but the farmer (his name was Larry) said Boo could go for a ride if he wanted to, but little kids are often scared by the noise. So he started the tractor and Boo got a HUGE grin on his face! I asked if he wanted to go for a little ride and he nodded his head vigorously. So there you go! A not advertised perk of the journey, an honest to goodness tractor ride.

We also saw some other older equipment demonstrated, took a horse-pulled wagon ride, and pushed around some toys in the “children’s garden” which was basically a big patch of tilled earth. We picked potatoes, bought some stuff from the farm stand, and eventually had to leave in search of lunch. We had a brilliant time!

Earlier in the week we also went to a different farm. This one was the South 47 Farm where they have a “farm tots” program. This was also very good. First there was a little craft where the kids made a tissue paper flower (incidently the Boo really got into this), they dug around in bins full of beans and seats, they wandered through a pole bean maze and over some hay stacks, fed some goats, took a hay ride behind a tractor (big hit), and picked some cherry tomatoes. Boo had a marvelous time. It’s a good thing he likes tomatoes!

Now we’re looking forward to doing a corn maze, picking out our pumpkin from the field, and picking some apples this fall!

A few weekends ago Several months ago (I wrote this ages ago and then forgot about it!) it was grey and rainy so we passed up the zoo for the science museum. There was a dinosaur exhibit going on that we didn’t want to miss. The Boo has recently taken not only to dinosaurs, but the concept of their bones, thanks to one of his favorite online games where you put the bones together to form a dinosaur who them walks off the screen.

The exhibit itself was pretty good. There’s not much sign reading when it comes to taking Nathan to the museum, but the dinosaurs were big and this was good. There were your usual “sharp tooth” T-Rex type dinosaur, a brontosaurus type dinosaur, and a myriad of other smaller ones.

The best part? The exhibit on dinosaur eggs. They showed some with babies coming out of the eggs, and some models of eggs with babies still in them. Nathan found this endlessly fascinating. Plus they had some boxes where you could “dig” and discover eggs. This was fun too.

The Pacific Science Museum is a strange beast. They have a million things to look at and you would think it would be heaven. There are outdoor water cannons that you can fire into a pond, there’s a digger indoors where you can, not surprisingly, dig, there’s an entire section devoted to toddlers and water play, there’s a butterfly house and accompanying insect exhibit (where you can even pet giant hissing cockroaches), somewhere there’s a wind tunnel that we haven’t found yet, and there’s even a model space ship you can climb in. But somehow it always seems lacking. I’m not sure why!

Anyway. Dinosaurs were good and the boy’s current favorite movie is about dinosaurs as well. He’s all boy, that’s for sure!

H and the boy were reading some nursery rhymes yesterday, including Jack and Jill. Quite a few nursery rhymes mention wells, and when we were in the UK we saw an actual well (that was mostly filled in) and showed it to the boy. He had never seen a real one before and was very impressed.

So yesterday while reading “Jack and Jill went up the hill” yadda yadda yadda, H asked what you do with a well. Boo answered that you get water from it.

And you put cats in it.

He’s been paying attention! There’s another rhyme that goes, “ding dong bell, pussy’s in the well, who put her in,” etc etc etc. Funny boy

The Boo enjoys counting. He also seems to enjoy doing it his very own way.

For the longest time, he counted “1, 2, 6, 9″ or some such combination of numbers. Three didn’t exist. He refused to use it.

These days, he’s finally begrudgingly admitted that the number 3 might exist. Now he counts “1, 2, 3, 1, 2, 3″. He’ll parrot 4 or 5 if he’s counting with you, but for him, it’s all about 1, 2 and 3!

What’s very cute is that he totally gets counting. If you ask him to count ten things, he’ll say “1, 2, 3, 1, 2, 3, 1, 2, 3, 1″ — of course that’s if he decides to begin with 1. Sometimes it’s two. I blame video games that count things backwards from 3 to 1

The other day we were at a friend’s house, and they had a little tee ball set in their backyard. Nathan took to it immediately! I would put the ball on the stand for him, and he’d swing that bat ferociously. Everyone was surprised how far he could hit it!

He did need a little help in learning how to hold the bat correctly. I suddenly reminded myself of my Dad, talking about grip and such.

Nevertheless, this was just the ticket for the Boo. He played tee ball for quite a long time, and wasn’t very pleased about having to share. I guess anything that involves both balls and thwacking something is right up his alley

The Boo has spontaneously started saying “thank you”, but he’s put an extra spin on it. He says, “Thank you too much.”

I think the story is that I often say “Thank you so much!”, perhaps with too much emphasis and excitement, because it kind of bugs me that he never says thank you. So when he suddenly started saying thank you, he took my longer version and started saying “Thank you too much.” He’s very matter of fact about saying it, and is very cute in his rather quiet way. I have to try really hard not to giggle when he says it because it’s so cute.

The funny thing is, although it’s most likely just a mispronunciation, in a way the grammar is funny because it’s like he’s saying, “Too much emphasis on thank yous, Mom!”

Nathan likes the Thomas and Friends games online. When we first discovered them, he enjoyed the memory match game for the train pictures and the flipping over action. He liked the trains driving on the railway journey game. He didn’t really get the games, but he liked looking at them and watching things go.

Lately he’s been more interactive with these games. He understands the point of the memory match game, which is awesome. He has a rather unorthodox method of picking out the cards, but it works! (He picks out one set, then keeps going with that one card and picking another one until he gets a match.) The railway journey is cool now because the Boo will trace the lines with his fingers talking about how they are going up and down, and he can accurately determine where the trains will, in fact, end up.

Today though was a huge milestone. Today, the Boo worked the mouse entirely on his own for the memory match game. It’s not any old mouse either, it’s my tricky laptop mouse, and he gets it! He uses one finger to move the arrow until it turns into a hand, then he takes his hand off the trackpad and clicks the button to select that card. He played two whole games this way. Our boy’s first 100% doing it himself computer game! We’re so proud