Some of what we do

Monday, December 31, 2007

Guitar Hero, cake, cousins....

what more could a kid ask for?

Alex and Maya both crashed on the way from New London to Green Bay. Alex fell asleep reading a book so I grabbed the book from him so he wouldn't drop it......his eyes popped open and he yelled "HEY! I was reading that!" Not even 2 minutes later I turned around and he was back asleep before he even had a chance to open the book - you can see the mark where the book was resting against his face:

And we're off

After some creative packing we picked up the circus and headed south to New London. Alex had been talking about seeing his cousins for weeks so he was pretty excited. Ben and I were pretty excited that both kids slept the entire 2 hours from Rhinelander to New London!

6 am Christmas morning

Alex: "Uncle Matt, I need Obie." (Obie is my parent's dog)

Matt: "You need Obie? He's upstairs sleeping"

Alex: "Oh. I need Daddy."

Matt: "Daddy is right over there with Mommy and Maya"

Alex: "Ok. HEY! I bet Santa Claus came!" Let's go see!"

Band of gypsies

or a traveling circus...that's what we felt like over the holidays.

We left our house nervously early in the morning on December 22nd. Maya had never been in the car more than 30 minutes.

8.5 hours and about a million "are we in Grandma Ruth's neighborhood"s later (yes, Alex has reached the age of are we there yet) we arrived in Rhinelander. Maya was amazing. Alex did awesome too, despite all the questions and the fact that he only slept for about 40 minutes of the trip.

We had to tweak the sleeping arrangements a bit after the first night that resulted in everyone in the house being awake around 4am due to a chain reaction that started with Maya waking up and needing to be changed. But after that both Maya and Alex slept just as well on the go where ever we stayed as they do at home.

Sunday we visited Grandma and Grandpa Bergeon. We had a good snowstorm. In the evening we had an adventure on unplowed roads going out to Kim and Jim's. We had a great time there. Alex was in awe of all their Christmas decorations and lights and he and my cousin's daughter Katie had a pretty serious air hockey tournament going!

Christmas Eve......great to see everyone! Jared, Zoe and Wes - we missed you, hope you had a great Christmas. As you can tell from the pictures Alex and Katie had fun together!

Drawing

Alex really has been drawing a lot lately and I am amazed at how quickly he has gone from drawing scribbles to drawing things. Things that actually look like things. Here are some people he drew. They look about as good as most people that I draw. He also draws really good giraffes, goats and snails. I elected not to include a picture of his drawing of an anatomically correct boy goat that had to go potty. You can thank me later.

Speaking of trains

I got out of the shower the other morning and was greeted by this. Alex informed me that Percy told him that all the engines wanted to watch.

I always knew that Percy made me uncomfortable.

Festival of Trains

A local hobbyist group puts on a really great model train show every year from mid-December thru the new year. It was a big hit with Alex last year so we made sure we got to go twice this year.

I'm behind

I know.
I'm working on it.

Monday, December 03, 2007

Alex is getting so grown up. Last night we were watching football and Alex asked who the quarterback playing was (he likes to know the names of all the teams and players). We answered "Eli Manning". He repeated it back - "Eli Manning". And then I realized.....he said the "L" sound properly. He didn't say "Ewi". He realized it too. We spent the next 10 minutes saying all the "L" words he could think of. Llllladder. Llllloud. Llllllightening......... He was very excited.....we were too but it's bittersweet too. That was the last "babyish" thing about his talking really. I mean he uses words like "appreciate" and "disappointed" and "fantastic". And now the "w" sounding "L" is gone.....he sounds very grown up.