Gucks

Sam has been growing so much, it seems like he's bigger every day and in every way. Lately his new favorite thing is lining his trucks up all in a row. If you mess up his rows he gets upset and has to get everything aligned again. In this first picture I had him come back and sit by his trucks for the picture, he got so excited that I made a big deal out of it! His trucks have become his favorite toys and he has even started to try and say a new word, "guck" (translated as "truck"). It just cracks us up to see him working so hard to get them organized. He'll get a couple of them just right and then raise his hands above his head and clap, looking at me to expect an enthusiastic "good job!". He does this sweet thing where after he gets a "good job" and applause he'll run over for a quick hug. It's so sweet! He first started doing that a few months ago when we play basketball in the tub during bath time. I've got to get video of that before he grows out of it.





Sam has started to branch out in his reading material, the board books have started taking a back seat to longer, thinner books and he doesn't rip the pages any more. His current favorite is "The Little Puppy" which has been around since at least the 80's. It was part of a series and I still have "The Little Lamb" that my Aunt and Uncle gave me when I was his age. I think I've had to read it 8 or 9 times so far today. I love that he loves reading and I'm certainly not going to turn it down but oy! Sometimes I wish he would diversify just a bit.

Dad has been doing a great job teaching Sam where all of his body parts are. He knows what everything is on his face and where it is, plus we've gotten to where he knows the difference between his right foot and left foot.

We had dinner at Memorial City Mall last week with Uncle Eric and cousin Ajeng (their foreign exchange student from Indonesia). Sam sat in a big boy chair and actually stayed very still for a long time...then he got down and started pushing it in circles around our table. I'm not sure if he was still because he's a good boy or if it was because he got Chik-Fil-A for dinner! Yum!



We're also going over to their house tomorrow for Halloween. They live in a better trick-or-treating neighborhood, plus Ajeng is really excited about the holiday. It's definately not something they have in Indonesia. Sam is going to be a duck...Daddy wanted him to be a chicken (or something yellow) because Caspian has a chicken suit he'll be wearing. He absolutely loves ducks so I think this is perfect, plus the separate webbed feet still barely fit so he can actually wear them! I can't wait to see what he looks like! We'll be sure to post pictures. Before that we're going to the CEPC Fall Festival so it'll be a fun and busy day.

In other news we are going to see my family in Belgium at Christmas. Yay! We haven't seen Gigi since she went to stay there awhile in July so we're very excited. Also Tio J and Aunt K are coming too! (Tio J should be coming home [to Germany] from his deployment in Iraq any week now.) We haven't seen them in over a year either. Plus, did I mention it was Belgium? At Christmas? That means guaranteed snow and my Aunt and Uncle live in a fancy country Chateau complete with farm animals. It's going to be awesome. Now if I could just figure out how/what to pack; and how to keep an almost two year old happy for hours on end on a plane.

Feeding the Fowl

One of Sam's favorite activities is feeding all of the birds at McGovern Lake in Hermann Park. I felt like the last few weeks all we had been doing together was eating and sleeping so last Thursday I took him to Hermann Park and we fed the birds and went to the zoo. He got so tuckered out that he was asleep before we even pulled out of the parking lot on the way home.

It's so much fun watching how he behaves at zoo changes as he gets older. He used to just sleep in his stroller the entire time. Now he points at the animals, laughs at them, claps for them if they do a trick or impress him somehow (especially the sea lions during their show) and he'll wave goodbye to them when its time to move on to another exhibit.

I took some video on our digital camera of him feeding the ducks so the quality may not be great, but I hope y'all enjoy it.