Monkey say

I think besides “Wogan” my favorite of FrogMonkey’s pronunciations has to be “vitenum”. He likes to take his C vitenum every morning.
Oh, and this weekend he asked if he could have an exhibition.

Smells like preschool spirit

FrogMonkey’s preschool class is made up of 4 girls and 16 boys most of whom come to school each day in cute little matchy-matchy outfits from Baby Gap and Old Navy with the occasional exquisite hand-knit sweater thrown in. FrogMonkey, coming from a practical household that does not believe in exposing a child’s best clothes to flashlights taped to paintbrushes dipped in sparkly neon paint and applied to paper in a pitch-dark room, was yet again dressed as a member of Nirvana.

Of course it was the day the professional photographer parent brought her camera.

Rip it, rip it!

The FrogMonkey makes an excellent frogger. I cleaned out my yarn stash today and gave him several unfinished projects to rip. He did so quite happily, then offered to rip all my finished projects.
We had to have a little talk.

No accounting for taste

If FrogMonkey had his druthers the four food groups would be crackers, bread, pesto and berries.

An Oystercatcher by any other name

Yesterday at preschool one of the moms mentioned that FM was really good with names. He knows everyone’s name. And who is whose mommy.

I attributed it to the fact that I try to use names with him whenever we talk about people. Now I am beginning to wonder.

This morning we pulled out the Birds of North America matching/memory game. I put out 15 cards face up without naming them and then held up their matching cards one by one. I asked FM to find the “other bird that looks like this one”. He took his time looking over the cards and eventually found the matches.

The second round, with different cards, I named each bird as I set it down and then asked him to find the bluebird or the meadowlark. He went straight to the right card every time.

The third round, again new cards, I named some of the cards as I set them down and did not name others. Some cards I simply called Oystercatcher even though there was both an American and a Black Oystercatcher in the set. Others I specified Stellar Jay and Blue Jay. I then held up the matching cards one by one and asked him to find the Stellar Jay, the Black Oyster Catcher, the Oriole etc. He had trouble finding the cards I hadn’t named, immediately found the ones I had, correctly identified the Stellar and Blue Jays and picked the wrong Oystercatcher.

I’m curious to know how other kids his age would do the same game.

I’m also realizing I really need to watch what I say.

Why?

Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why?
Because.
(Oh. I swore I’d never say that.)

Meal times

While most people fly fork airplanes into hangar mouths, we “open the pod bay doors, HAL” at our house.

Yeah, this pretty much sums up Halloween

Halloween

We were ’sittin the night of the neighborhood Halloween party so Kim was good enough to send Ellie over as her true impish self. We hauled our little garden fairy and pardner on over to a neighborhood potluck, 5-gallon drum band/tap dance extravaganza and rock hunt.

We do things just a little different up here on the Hill.

Pictured are the Cowboy riding off into the sunset and the reclining garden fairy at home, Cowboy and Fairy at the party watching the percussion show and finally, Ellie, the tribal dancing fairy. That girl knows how to have her a good time.

Lucky for us we had several neighbors present who helped corral, feed and rock-hunt or we might have lost a kid or two over the course of the evening. Ellie was seriously channeling her inner sprite.

A boy, a horse, a truck and some poop.