Adam just finished his third round of swimming lessons yesterday. He is in the Shrimp Class, which I find adorable. His favorite part of the lessons is the time before class starts, when he and Dave play basketball and chase the ball around the pool. His least favorite part is floating on his back. He does not like that at all. Dave can normally trick him in to doing it for a couple of minutes by having him look out the skylights and search for things – the moon, clouds, birds, Luke – whatever works.

He also likes floating on his stomach and kicking and doesn’t mind blowing bubbles in the water either. He’s turning in to a regular little fish. They have next Saturday off, but then will be starting up classes the weekend after.

It won’t be too much longer before Luke is old enough for swim lessons too. They start at six months, though we will probably wait until he is a little older. It’s nice for Adam to have one-on-one time with Dave.

Seven things we love about that kid right now:

1. He often leaves the word “and” out when grouping people or things together. For instance the other day he came in to the kitchen and said, “Hello Daddy Mommy” and earlier today he said, “I love Mommy Luke”.
2. Because we frequently refer to Luke as “Luke-a-Duke” or “La la Luke” Adam also has adopted this behavior and call his little brother “Luke Luke Luke”. He also will refer to himself as Adam Adam.
3. A lot of the time right after he wakes up in the morning or at night when he’s trying to avoid bedtime he’ll say “See you Mommy”, which is Adam-code for wanting to snuggle. Adam is an expert snuggler. He’s also always warm, like a little baby space heater – so snuggling on these chilly days is extra nice.
4. He is a very protective, loving big brother. He gets nervous if someone he doesn’t know is holding Luke and alerts me right away if Luke is crying (even if I am standing right next to him). He asks for Luke as soon as he wakes up in the morning and loves to make Luke smile. Lately he’s wanted to hold and feed Luke more often. He has about a 3 minute attention span where that is concerned, but takes the job very seriously.
5. When Dave comes home from work Adam runs to the door and says “Daddy home! Daddy home!” he gets so excited and can’t wait to see him. When the weather was warmer we kept the window open in what will be Luke’s room (once he moves out of the bassinet in our room) and when Adam would hear Dave’s truck pull in the driveway he would hurry to the window and yell to Dave. He greets me the same way if I go out without him. It’s a pretty fantastic homecoming.
6. He loves music. He always has, but now he’s getting more in to singing and will request Dave and I sing along. He’ll pick a song, have us all sing, and then at the end will say “one more time” to get us to sing it again. He’ll repeat this for as long as we let him. We sing a lot of “Row Row Row Your Boat” and “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star” in this house.
7. He is so smart. He has known the upper case alphabet for a while now. He also can count from 1 to 11, and backwards from 10 to 1 (he always adds a “blast off” at the end). He recognizes the numbers 1-10, and likes to turn sixes upside down and say they are nines (and vice versa). We’re working on colors now. He does pretty well if you ask him to point out a certain color (bring me the red crayon) and is getting better at naming the color of an object when we ask (what color is this block?). He does insist my car is purple, as much as I try to tell him it is blue. I think that’s a losing battle for me (even more so because Dave and my Dad call it purple as well). Adam also can identify a bunch of shapes. He knows circle, square, and triangle of course. He also knows rectangle, oval, diamond, star, and heart. Most impressively though is that he recognizes cylinders, octagons, and pentagons – he’s definitely a pint-sized Einstein.

(Mickey Mouse is wearing a pair of Luke’s pajamas – at Adam’s insistence – I’m fairly certain we won’t be getting them back any time soon) 

I’ll let the cuteness speak for itself.
I am fairly certain that level of adorableness is illegal in at least 12 states.

There was never really any question that Luke would be a dinosaur for Halloween. I am so in love with the the dino costume Adam wore his first Halloween that Luke and any future babies will most likely be wearing that their first Halloweens as well (provided I can squeeze them in to it it fits them).

I had a really difficult time deciding on Adam’s costume though. I originally toyed with the idea of him being a dinosaur too, but I knew there was no way Adam would keep any sort of mask or hood on, and most of the costumes I found online had one or the other (and not to mention were more than I wanted to spend). I really wanted the boys’ costumes to go together though (because I’m nerdy like that) and so when Dave suggested Adam dress as a caveman, I knew it was perfect (technically according to the geologic timeline cavepeople and dinosaurs did not coexist, but what’s 65 million years between friends?).

Me Caveman Adam, ugh.

So a a quick trip to the craft store for some animal print fabric and another to a Halloween costume shop for the plastic bones around the top and we were in business. I used one of Adam’s shirts as a guide for the size (and still ended up having to take in the sides twice).

CaveAdam mad! (he wasn’t really, he was just beating his hands on his chest, Tarzan-style)

We added his dinosaur feet slippers and there you go, instant Cavekid.

There was one other piece to his costume that my father insisted he needed.

Papa make CaveAdam happy. CaveAdam dance.

Papa say CaveAdam need club.

So yes, we got a two year old a club – a club that is almost as tall as he is. For some reason whenever he uses it (and he is actually really good about only hitting it on the floor – excluding earlier today when he hit Dave in the head) he says, “hiiiiyah”. It’s pretty funny.

I think the caveman costume suits our little wild man just fine.

Adam and I went grocery shopping last night and the store was packed with Christmas decorations. It’s not even Halloween yet and already they are breaking out the Christmas paraphernalia.

Insane.

There are 58 days until December 25th – just in case you were wondering.

A cute picture of the boys, since I know that’s really what you’re here to see.

Luke can bend his big toes completely down without moving any of the other toes.

Okay, honestly now, how many of you read that and then tried it to see if you could too? I’m not going to lie, I tried (and failed).

Last Sunday we took the boys to the Children’s Discovery Zoo near our house. They have their fall fun festival going on right now and since it’s only fifteen minutes from our house we decided to check it out. I am so glad that we did.

They had scarecrows manning two of these chairs just outside the entrance. We tried getting Adam to pose with Luke, but he was not at all interested. Poor Luke didn’t have a choice – doesn’t he look thrilled?

That penguin costume was originally going to be worn by Adam for his first Halloween, but then I found a dinosaur costume I loved and he wore that instead (spoiler alert – Luke’s going to be wearing the dino for his first Halloween too). The penguin is made of fleece and is really cozy, so it kept him nice and warm. Plus Luke is the most adorable penguin (even grumpy) ever.

They had a lot of different animals for the kids to interact with – some you could feed or pet. Adam was a little leery of the goats and tended to keep his distance from most of the bigger animals. They had ponies, sheep, chickens (Adam is waving to one of them in the picture above – that was as close as he would get), llamas, alpacas, peacocks, wolves, and a bunch of other animals.

He wasn’t at all shy around the bunnies though. I think he would have been content to sit and watch them all afternoon. They had two pens of rabbits – there were two in this one and they were the “big bunny rabbits” according to Adam.

These little ones were his favorite though. There were so many of them (you know what they say about rabbits) that there were always some hopping around. One of the workers picked one up for Adam to pet while we were there. I may have had to stop him from trying to climb in there with the bunnies after that.

That same nice young man went and got a hedgehog to bring to Adam to pet as well. He wasn’t too sure of the spikes.

They also had a hayride where you could go see more animals, but it was too close to nap time and so we figured it was best to try that next year. In addition to the animals there were all sorts of vehicles for the kids to ride around on – it was pretty muddy though, so he didn’t go too far.

We took a bunch of pictures of Adam in the ball pit and in every one he has such a serious look on his face. He loved it though and even played a game where he would fight his way through the ball to give me a kiss through the net and then go back a couple of steps, turn, and do it all again. At one point he was completely covered by the balls and I was terrified that he was going to flip out and I was going to have to rock-paper-scissors Dave to see who had to go in after him. He loved it though and thought it was hilarious to hide on me.

We spent quite a bit of time in this area as well. Those tables were filled with some sort of grain and were the perfect height for Adam. He had a blast filling the containers and transfering the contents from one to another.

Dave even got in on the fun; I was busy holding a sleeping Luke. Adam did bring me a couple of cups of grain though.

They only way we were able to get Adam away from the grain table was to tell him he could paint a pumpkin.

I think we’ll be painting one or two of his little pumpkins that he got on Saturday later this week. He really enjoyed it.

It really was a great way to spend the afternoon. I’m so glad that Dave suggested going.