A Ducky Halloween

It was a beautiful, crisp, sunny Halloween morning, so Theo and I took a trip to the zoo. Some of his favorite animals to visit are the ducks, so it was perfect that Byron and Elke offered to lend us their duck costume. We brought Theo over there and got pics of the three kids - Skyeler the robot and Teagan the ladybug, cute as can be. We even got them all three to hold still for a photo for about half a second! Theo did pretty well in the costume and thoroughly enjoyed saying "quack quack" often.

Autumn greetings

Dinosaur rainboots!

Giving credit where credit is due

This morning, I realize I did not give Theo's language skills enough credit in my post last night. In five minutes over breakfast, I realized phrases are most definitely the norm, sentences even, even if I may not always understand all the words that come tumbling out of his mouth. About breakfast he's said "want je-je" (toast with jelly), "big piece", "small piece", "je-je stick", and distracted by the inevitable cars around, "dua truck" (his toy garbage truck) and "blue car" (his very favorite toy car). The best phrase of all, though, was "hank tou" (THANK YOU!)

Ten car!

These days its hard to take pictures of Theo because he gets too distracted by the camera. Nonetheless, I do manage to capture a moment now and then, and it's easiest to do when he's distracted by his favorite things: vehicles. He often gathers as many of his vehicle toys as he can and lines them up in a big group and plays all sorts of games with them, concentrating with great intensity and stopping for no food or other enticement. The picture to the above is actually a picture of Theo dancing and playing cars at the same time; Theo has become an incredible dancer.

Theo's language is rapidly developing, with multi-word phrases almost the norm. These days we hear phrases like "more cheese stick" and "no, stay, car" (meaning no thanks, mom, I'd rather stay here and play with my cars than have a diaper change right now).

As his concepts develop, he begins to use words to mean more than what we might expect. For instance, he developed the phrase "ten car", to describe things he thought were great: car is his favorite thing, and ten is the highest number he knows, so "ten car" became "this is something fantastic". The other day, I came home with a pizza box. Normally, when Theo sees a pizza box, he excitedly exclaims, "piz!" and follows me into the kitchen. This time, he pointed to the pizza box and said "ten car!". Meaning, of course, yeah, mom, my favorite food! Another recently highlight is "'sup dude". Theo heard me teasing Matt about answering the phone 'sup dude, and started mimicking it. I, of course, have encouraged such a cute phrase whole-heartedly.

Fun in Minneapolis

We did so many fun things in Minneapolis. Mom and I took Theo to the greatest playground EVER - picture those McDonalds playlands times ten, with three sections for different ages, is a setting comparable to a state park! We walked across the Mississippi River on the stone pedestrian bridge by the old mills and saw ruins and the Guthrie Theater, AND we went to lots of playgrounds located some of Minnesota's 16,000 lakes! For Theo, though, probably nothing beat the awesome new trucks Grammy had waiting for him when we go there! What a happy kid.

Visit with Mom and Brother in Minneapolis

Matt and I took Theo to Minneapolis to see Grammy Betsy and Uncle Chris. Theo learned to say Grammy and ate potato chips for the first time (yum!) The best part was getting to see Theo having so much fun with Grammy and Uncle Chris.