Little Chiropractor

This is the spine that Joel built with his legos all by himself. He built it last week and when I asked him what it was, he said, "it's a spine!"

Little Things

Little boys are so funny. Hugging and giving butterfly kisses at naptime and bedtime is, I think, one of the best things I get to see each day. James putting his hand flat across his ear (imitating putting a telephone to the ear) and saying, "Hi? Hi!" Joel saying almost every morning, "can we listen to Dan's CD?" and singing so many of the words to all the wonderful, old hymns on it. (His particular favorite is "Soar Away"). James' one-legged dance (to bluegrass music, of course) with his diapered bootie bouncing up and down while his foot slaps the floor. Joel saying that eating a particular thing or other makes him "jiggle". James' imitating everything is adorable, particularly his pretending to do things ("drinking" out of a "cup", then saying a guttural, "AAAAHHHHHHH"; rubbing "lotion" onto his hands; licking his lips, with an extra pouty-looking lower lip; "talking" on the phone).

Joel has an ever-growing instrument wish list. Yes, instrument wish list. Heaven help us. His first instrument was his guitar from Grandmommy and PawPaw. Then he asked Grandmommy for a banjo, which she provided. He has already asked her now for a violin, and his latest request has been for a trumpet.

I actually got to witness James taking three steps yesterday. He took about 5 consecutive steps today. Yeah!!!! James wasn't too proud of himself, as he was quite distressed and drew his motivation to move those legs from his frustration/anger, but Joel was quite impressed and asked me just to make certain, "did James walk???"

James likes to pester Joel. He'll crawl up to Joel and say, "NAH" very loudly, and Joel will say - can you guess? - "don't say no to me, James". It can become quite upsetting to Joel when James tells him no over and over. But then there are times when they turn it into a game. It seems to happen a lot in the car. They will just be (practically) yelling the opposite of whatever the other one is saying, yes or no, back and forth. As long as it doesn't irritate me to death I'll let them irritate each other until they work it out themselves.

A State of Mind

Joel was introduced to Billy Joel music a few weeks ago in the song, "New York State of Mind". Now, the whole idea of this was quite a lot of information for him to take in. First of all, the CD case had Aunt Joyce & Uncle Eric's picture on it (the CD was a favor from their wedding rehersal dinner). Then the man's name who was singing the song was Billy JOEL. I mean, can you imagine that??? To top it all off, the song is about New York, where Aunt Jeana lives. So what in the world could this man be singing about? What? "Is this song about enemies?" Joel asked me. I'm not sure if he was referring to the Twin Towers (yes, he knows about them) or if he was misunderstanding the word "evergreens" in the song. I didn't even tell him what the name of the song was, I just told him Billy Joel's name. Then he said, "can we listen to 'New York State of Mind' again?" It was adorable.