Don't Make Me Say Cheese

What is it with kids these days? You pull out a camera, wanting to capture their personalities and growth and you get this. Seriously, these were my first shots with both of them. What's up?!




I realize that I might have ruined Ben for life with a camera. But I thought I did much better with Andrew. My record with Ben is 3000 pictures in 6 months. In my defense, he was really cute and he was my first. To get Ben to sit still now I have to pull out the same material that I use with Jason and haircuts. It sounds like this, "If you make trouble for me, I'll go slower, so just indulge me for five minutes." Maybe it's genetic, because I'm starting to realize that if I can put a time limit on it, they can usually sit through anything resembling male torture (i.e. haircuts and photos). Or maybe it's not genetic, and it's just that Y chromosone.

Anyways, so I haven't posted any updates on the boys for like a month, but since I haven't been writing it all down, this is what I've got.

Andrew is almost two and a half and he's finally starting to talk alot. There are still moments where I have no idea what he's saying. But he does have an oddity with his speech. Instead of saying the name for something, he'll refer to it by the noise it makes. For example, a car is a "vroom", a dog is a "wuff", a bird is a "tweet tweet" and so on. (His new word is "pop" for bubbles.) The other day we dropped Ben off at school and Andrew points at the car next to us and says, "Mommy there's a "wuff" in the "vroom". We try to teach him the words, honestly. It goes like this:
Me: Andrew, say car
A: Vroom
Me: No, C-ar
A: V-room
Me: Andrew look at my mouth. C-C-C-C-Car
A: V-V-V-VROOM!

I give up.

He also likes acting like a dog. One afternoon at Ben's school, Andrew and I were walking in, and all of a sudden, I didn't see him out of the corner of my eye. I stop and look around, but there he was on the ground, on all fours. He beams up at me and said, "Mommy, look, I'm a 'wuff'". When we're at home, he'll go so far as to fetch us balls and bring them to us.

Jason was playing the Mario Kart the other night and he drove through some flying bats. Andrew said, "Daddy! Tweet Tweets!"

Andrew also likes playing Ben's leapster. One of his favorite games is Nemo, which is based off of the Disney movie about fish. Andrew had the leapster this morning and just started bawling about the "WEEE". Ben and I thought he wanted Ben to play the Wii, so Ben started turning it on when I realized that Andrew was trying to say 'fish'. His 'fish' sounds like 'weesh'.

A funny thing I've noticed about Andrew is that he is always ready to leave the house, and he usually races to the door leading to the garage. Once we get that door open though, he just stops. He refuses to go into the garage when the door is down. I think it's too dark for him!

Ben is getting curious about words. He is constantly coming up to us saying "What does q-r-o-f-e-g spell?" It's usually any combination of letters, but it never comes close to an actual word. One night Ben and I sat down with a dry erase board and I wrote down "at" and then put letters in front of it like c, h, s, or b. I was hoping he could form them from the sounds, since he knows almost all of his sounds. He really tried, but he didn't get the concept yet. Undeterred, I tried "it" and put and f in front of it. I gave him a hint and said he throws a lot of these. He didn't get it, but thought it was funny. So I erased the "f" and put in an "s" to form 'sit'. For some reason it turned into pictionary or something to him. Instead of sound out the word, or guessing, he'd say, "Ben throwing a fit." "That doesn't fit." or "Playing the Wii fit." I gave up then.

Ben favorite game is Mario Kart on the Wii. It's a driving game, so every player has a 'license'. There are three categories of races, where you can race in eight different cups. Each cup has four races in them. If you win first, second or third in those four races you get a medal in that cup. Ben had almost won all of the races (nearly 100). It was three months of hard work, when he accidentally erased his license. It might not be noteworthy here, but it was earth shattering to him!

Ben asked me, on the way home from school one day, if boys get to choose who they want to marry. I told him they definitely get a say in the matter, but asked why he wanted to know. He said, "Well, I really want to marry Rebekah (neighbor girl, and school mate), but she doesn't want to marry me." So I asked, "Why does she not want to marry you?" He replied that she thought that he called her a slow poke one day on the playground, but he wasn't talking to her, he was talking to Justin, but he was looking at her when he said it. Let the love drama begin.

My sister, Dani, messed up her foot by longboarding with her friend, CJ. It's like skateboarding with a longer board. Anyways, she came over in her walking boot, and Ben asked what happened to her. Nana was there and promptly replied, "CJ pushed her." All afternoon Ben kept asking, "But Dani, why did CJ push you?" It didn't matter how many times we told him that Nana was just teasing, he still thought she was purposefully hurt and couldn't understand why. It got funnier when CJ came over to pick her up. Ben made sure he got the whole story!

That's all the stories I have for now. I did want to leave you with some nice photos of the boys though. I did finally manage to get some good photos of them, but only after I promised Andrew an actual piece of cheese for saying "cheese", and I promised Ben he could watch his cartoons, if he let me take a good one. I hope you enjoy!