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