Lottas Etatoes

Grandma Kathy and Grandpa Dave came to help us celebrate our first Thanksgiving. We played in the 13th annual Clyde circle Thanksgiving football game Thursday morning. The guys didn’t exactly pick it right up, but Evan was starting to get the idea. He started by simply throwing the football and running after it. Then he started throwing it to other people, and turning and running like he was running a pattern. Unfortunately, he’s still a little too afraid of the ball to catch it, but that didn’t stop him from having a great time. We’ll give him a break. It was a full-sized pro football after all.

We had a traditional Thanksgiving dinner, complete with pumpkin pie courtesy of our neighbors. Strangely, Alex is not a fan of turkey. He wouldn’t even touch it! Evan was so tired at this point that he was throwing tantrums through most of the meal. I guess you could say we discovered why people have a kids table for Thanksgiving meals!

On Friday, we went to the Science and Nature museum to see the “T-Rex named Sue” exhibit. It was pretty cool. They had several animatronic dinosaurs, including a T-Rex, which was obviously the star of the show. Both boys bounced back and forth between ecstatic and scared out of their wits. They also had a green screen that allowed you to pose in front of a T-Rex, as shown in the gallery. Lots of fun!

We couldn’t stop there. So Saturday we drove back down to the zoo. This time both boys were much more animated than on our first visit. Of course, so were the animals. The lion was prowling the perimeter of his habitat and roaring, the elephants were having lunch, and the giraffes were holding races around their pen. We also got to see a baby orangutan. It was a great day.

We’re now swinging into the holidays full steam. The boys aren’t sure what’s going on, but they love the Christmas tree and the lights on all the houses. We have breakfast with Santa in a couple of weeks, and we’re trying to start explaining to them who Santa is. They may not get it this year, but we’re looking forward to Christmas this year nonetheless.

Today marks two months that we’ve been home. We can’t help but look back on how far we’ve come. Alex still isn’t speaking, at least coherently, but he is trying his heart out. When he gets frustrated with Evan, he’ll chase after him yelling something that sounds a lot like “Stop! Stop! Stop!” He’s getting pretty good at “please”, but that’s about it. He absolutely understand us though. It won’t be long before we’re chatting with him too.

Evan is really coming along. He’s starting to put together more complicated statements, which by the way is where I got the title for this post. The other day, Evan was asking for some tomatoes with his dinner. For seconds, he wanted “a lot of tomatoes.” He got pretty nervous when I got up first and served myself some of the tomatoes. He pleaded with me – “Papa! Don’t mya lottas etatoes!” Read this as “Daddy! Don’t eat my a lot of tomatoes!” How can you see that as anything but incredible cute?

As a typical 3 year-old, he hears a lot of “no”, “stop”, and the like. His new favorite phrase is “don’t do that!” For pretty much anything he doesn’t like, we’ll hear “Mama, don’t do that!”, in the cutest toddler speak you can imagine. Too bad we haven’t caught that on video yet!

Things are still going very well. Even bedtime is starting to settle in a bit. It still isn’t simple, but it seems a lot more normal. The two of them still keep us running, and they certainly know how to push our buttons, but they give us plenty of fun moments too. Hopefully we’ll start finding a little more time for pictures and posts.