Two Babies and a Big Kid

The stars aligned! 3 kids, all looking at the camer and smiling! Admittedly, Spencer's smile is a bit forced, but most of them are these days - at least in this one he doesn't look like he's in pain.










Teddy is normally my little grinning boy, but the camera makes him suspicious. It's that silly red light or something.

Aunt S and Uncle J try to provoke a smile from him:

Ha! Got him! (Teddy's on the left, if that's not clear):

Uncle J holding Lizzie - the angle on the picture here is a clue that this one was probably taken by our budding photographer, Spencer. Lots of his pictures turn out great; others turn out to be of more limited interest (if you're interested in somewhat-in-focus pictures of toy cars, we have enough to fill a gallery.)

Aunt S tries to perfect her baby-juggling skills:

I took Spencer up for bed a few weeks ago, and when I came down, RB was trapped - it's surprisingly difficult to move once you're covered with sleeping babies:

Some Spencer news, since he can get lost in a haze of baby pictures if we're not careful. He seems to be growing up every time I see him - when I gave him a bath last night, his legs splayed out and were straight and long and tub-filling, and I realized that he's not going to want me overseeing his baths forever. Sigh.

And the school thing... it's still strange how much he's learning when we're not around, and we're always surprised when he pulls out something new. Last week, RB was working on a puzzle of the US states with him, and at some point mentioned "the United States of America." Without missing a beat, Spence continued "... and to the republic, for which is stands, one nation, under God, indivisible, with libery and justice for all. Please take your seats!" My sweet little baby boy knows his phone number and address, can pick Montana and Illinois out on a map, and has figured out how to sound thoughtful when he's answering a question (he prefaces every answer with a drawn-out "Wellllll, you see..." Sometimes it seems like he's stalling at a press conference.)

We've been disciplining him by giving him time outs from time to time - the strange thing is, he occasionally gives himself a time out. The book recommended by the pediatrician that is in vogue these days suggests counting infractions: "That's 1!", "That's 2", "That's 3, take a time out" - with the minutes of time out equal to number of years of age. A few times, after I've counted to 1, he'll say "I need a time out!" and sadly go up to his room. We check on him a few minutes later, he comes back down and apologizes for whatever.

His favorites: cars, dinosaurs, rockets, trains, tools, puzzles, books. Occasionally someone presents him with a doll, which he generally tries to use as some sort of weapon. He has learned to sound out a few words, mostly due to the Leapfrog videos, and adds numbers like crazy, as long as they fit on his fingers. He tells us jokes constantly - generally over and over and over again, finding them more hilarious each time (since he only knows a couple jokes, I guess he gets through his repetoire pretty quickly. Quick, why is 6 afraid of 7?)





He loves to flip coins, and to race from one part of the house to another (PLEASE tell me winter is over soon so we can get the poor kid out to the park again!) And he's no longer satisfied with my attempts to declare us all winners - I guess he comes by a competitive streak naturally enough. Really, the desire to win races is quite handy recently - the easiest way to get him to go somewhere is to announce that I'm going to win: "I'm going to beat Spencer upstairs!" "No! I'm going to win!" he shouts, pushing past me in his eagerness to get upstairs, where once again I reveal that it's time for tooth-brushing and pajamas. I would have thought that he'd realize by now that if I'm offering a foot-race, he won't like the results at the finish line, but it still works so far.



And finally, he loves surprises - we get surprises from him at least a few times a day, and sometimes he'll present me with a "Surprise!" every two minutes for an hour. A toy car! Yay! Though he never lets me keep the toy car - he always takes it back so he can surprise me again later.





Surprise!