Three Years Ago Today

On March 11, 2003, I found out that I was pregnant. Sometimes it feels like it was just yesterday.

At that moment when I saw the positive test result, I could never have known how much love my heart would have for our little boy. And that love just grows more and more each day. He was brought into our lives to make us laugh and to make us stop and remember what it was like to be young again. I gain a whole new perspective on life when I look at things through his eyes.

It’s really not hard to make him happy. I know that when he gets home from school, he wants a cup of milk and he wants to kick back in my purple chair and watch a Little People DVD or he wants to watch a DVD about fire trucks. The second he walks in the door, he wants his school bus and he has it tucked under his arm from the time he gets home up until he goes to sleep.

He always wants to help (pronounced he – el – p). He’s a true southerner. On Sunday, we were at our neighbor’s for a cookout and I was carrying a huge bowl of salad outside and he was insistent that he wanted to help me and he wanted to carry it. Luckily I was able to get him to carry the bottle of salad dressing instead. Less chance of dinner being ruined. When he gets to school in the morning, he helps his teacher by carrying milk or bowls back to the classroom. He also helps her make copies. He loves pushing that green button and then waiting for the copy to spit out. One morning, he was so into helping that he could hardly tear himself away from the copier to tell me good-bye! And he’s so proud of himself when he does help us by carrying something. He always says, “I helped”.

I hope these good manners last for a while! He is also very good about saying “thank you”. If Daddy makes him dinner or I get him a cup of milk, he always says “thank you”. And you better say “you’re welcome” pretty quickly. Or else he’s going to keep on saying “thank you” until you acknowledge him! When we visited a friend of mine in Baltimore a couple of weeks ago, her son was the same way. It was the cutest thing to see two 2-year-olds being so polite to each either! They were constantly saying please, thank you and you’re welcome.
And if he greets you by saying hi + your name, you better acknowledge him then as well! He will keep saying your name until you say hi back to him. His teacher said he does this at school as well.

He’s not always so easy going though. He gets clingy in the morning if his favorite teacher isn’t there when we arrive at school. So I was trying to distract him one morning by going over the vocabulary words for the week. I would point to the picture and he would correctly identify the object, but he would put a “no” in front of it. So it was “no mailbox”, “no pig”, no “bottle”, etc. It was actually pretty funny. His latest is “no dinner” and “no night-night”. Those aren’t quite as funny!

His favorite shape right now is a triangle. And he recognizes them when we are out and about. We were driving down the interstate and he saw a sign for a Citgo gas station and immediately pointed and said “triangle”. He also likes to take his fence pieces and put three together to make a triangle.

He also recognizes the logo for Coke. If we’re at a restaurant and he sees the Coke logo on the menu, he’ll point and say “Coke”. I’m really not sure where he learned them because we don’t drink Coke! Maybe one of his teachers at school drinks it during lunch.

His school bus has now become a holding place for things…especially crayons. Dave showed him how the back door of the bus opens and he’s taken to putting or shoving things in there. If we’re at a restaurant that hands out crayons, he opens the back door and starts shoving them in there. They are in there so good that it’s hard to get them out! I drew the line at putting scrambled eggs in the bus.

He loves giving hugs and kisses and is getting good at saying “I love you”. When I tell him good-bye in the morning, he comes over and gives me a kiss on each cheek. He’s also a great hugger and gives really good hugs. Thankfully he’s still at the stage where he wants to sit next to us or sit on our laps. I know one day he will outgrow that. So we enjoy it while we can. He also loves snuggling between us in our bed. If I turn my back to him, he gets up right next to me so I can’t even move!

Some of the newest words he’s saying:
Caterpillar
Hippopotamus
Zebra
Alligator
Butterfly
Up there (when he wants to sit on my lap)
Covers (when he’s in a our bed and wants to be covered up)
School bus
Fire truck
Police car
Remote
Mommy, mommy, mommy (when I don’t do something fast enough)
Tara, Chuck, Ellen, Kyle (some of the neighbor’s)