I Love You

Nathan has started to give us completely unsolicited I Love Yous. It is so cute and I love hearing him say I Love Mommy (or Daddy or Emily). I still have so much to catch up on but when do I find time to blog with such a busy toddler. This past weekend we went to Grand Rapids and it was Nathan's first time in a hotel. We went to the Children's Museum and he had a blast. Pictures are still on my camera because I am running out of space on my computer.

"Thank you for peaches"

Ok, so I am soooooo far behind on blogging for the kids, and I still have to post about Christmas and Nathan's birthday (which was a blast, he had so much fun) and oh so many other things but I had to post what happened today.

I was oh so tired and knew Emily would be waking from her nap soon so I tried to convince Nathan to take a nap with me. We went and laid in "Mommy's bed" and pulled up the covers and I closed my eyes. Next thing I hear is Nathan saying "Father, thank you for day, thank you for peaches, thank you for peanut butter and jelly, amen." It was too cute.

Another cute prayer story, on Sunday we went to Tyler's (Nathan's cousin) baptism. It wasn't at our church and things were a bit different for us, like there were no kids at the service except for ours and Tyler. The rest were either in the nursery or "children's church" so it was very quite, as compared to a typical LDS sacrament meeting. While Tyler was being baptized the reverend said "amen" and Nathan very loud and proud said "AMEN!". I think everyone in the chapel must have heard it because everyone chuckled.

He's one smart cookie!

I was completely shocked by this during bath time this evening. Nathan was playing with his toys, which includes a foam number and letter set, and he started naming some of the letters correctly. He couldn't do them all but he got about 10 of them right on the first try . I had no idea he could do this since he usually just calls all letters "D."

In the video he does get one letter wrong. I just picked random letters and did them in no particular order. I didn't get this on video but for the letter "W" he calls it "WX." Most kids think L M N O P are all one letter, my kid thinks W X is one letter.

Nathan and Mommy sing the ABCs (and other things that make me so smart)

Nathan is trying to learn the alphabet song. We practice every day and he's getting quite good despite the fact that he seems to only join in around "H" or so.


Nathan's counting is also getting better. He no longer hates the numbers 1 and 4, so now he only discriminates against the number 9.
1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 10!

Nathan is also trying to learn his colors, but they can be tricky. He has orange, black, and brown pretty good now. He sometimes gets blue and green right too.

Nathan is starting to speak in little 2-3 word sentences, its great. His first sentence was "Shut the door."

As I said in the other post, Nathan is "reading." He has actually started memorizing some of his favorite books and reads along with us when we read to him. So cute!

Nathan knows that boats go in water and airplanes and stars are in the sky. And he knows so many other things, he is one smart cookie.

Nathan Reads a Book

We are very excited that Nathan's favorite activity seems to be reading. He enjoys reading even more than running around being crazy (which he does quite a bit). Most afternoons after his nap, Nathan will take his blankets and pillows off his bed and sit on the floor by the foot of his bed reading books until I go in and get him (I suspect that some afternoons he starts his nap out like this too because there have been times I have caught him sleeping on top of his pile of pillows and blankets and books and toys). Then I have a proud mommy moment because my not even 2 year old loves to read! Not only does he like to read but he loves being read to. Several times a day he will come up to me holding a book and say "read to to." I think he means "read to you" which is what I say ("Do you want me to read to you?").

Halloween 2008 Pictures

I'm finally getting around to adding this year's Halloween pictures. Both kids were little pumpkins so we had our own little family pumpkin patch.

Trick-or-Treat!

Although Nathan went out for Halloween last year this year he REALLY understood what Halloween is all about.

Halloween 2007- Dragon

(we didn't realize until after pictures that you can't see the teeth on the top of the cotume) Nathan had several opportunities to trick-or-treat this year. We went to Zoo Boo! We had our church "trunk"-or treat which ended up being a "hallway"-or-treat do to yucky weather. Then at Book Tots (story time at the library) they did a little trick-or-treat activity. And of course Halloween night. We went to Grandma and Grandpa's house to trick-or treat in their neighborhood. While we were at G-ma and G-pa's house waiting to start he found g-ma's candy that she was passing out and kept going up to the bowl, said trick-or-treat, and helped himself to a piece of candy! The first couple of houses he decided that he was just going to walk right on in the door. Luckily they were all houses of very good family friends. After that he got the hang of it and had a blast. He was very polite and said trick-or-treat and thank you at every house. He was even more excited if the house had a dog. He would say "dog, woof, woof." Now we just need to figure out where to hide the candy so we can control how much he eats. Between Nathan and Emily (because I of course had a basket for her candy too) we brought home about 5 lbs of candy. Not too bad for only doing two streets with only a few people giving out candy.

This year's pictures to come soon!