word choice matters

Theo walked into the kitchen this eve and announced, "Mommy, look at Theo's hooker." He was carrying a clothes hanger. Not surprising given his recent obsession with hooks (on cars, tow trucks, and on fishing poles in the bathtub). He also got his hair cut today. After:

Before:

During:

fleece snuggie - scary

I work with some pretty thoughtful and funny people who pitched in to get us a couple get-well presents after my surgery. The first (thoughtful) item: a gift cert to a local dinners to go service. The second (funny) item pictured below: a cheeta/leopard print fleece snuggie to help me stay warm while recovering. So naturally I had to have a picture taken to humor my co-workers and naturally I wanted Theo to be in the picture too. One problem. Theo found the fleece snuggie scary and while he looks agreeable in the picture, he refuses to let me wear the snuggie anymore and insists that it is scary. Turns out he is right. The boy has some fashion sense I believe.

imagination at work

Theo has a pretty vivid imagination or he is going through an imaginative phase at least. He makes up all kinds of names for his various lego and digger and buggage (garbage) truck characters; names like Bla Bla, or Shlarp, or Clim Clam and not what we would consider to be normal names anyway. He will also sometimes just blurt out random nonsensical things like lobo-laba and when we ask him what a lobo-laba is he will pause for a minute, I think realizing we are calling him on his BS, and then say “some people like lobo-laba” as if that is sufficient definition. But the thing we get the biggest kick out of is the way he can pull a truck or a huckleberry or a dinosaur out of thin air and play with it or pass it around the room. He does so by pinching his index finger and thumb together and pretending to pick whatever it is he wants to play with off the closest and most convenient surface. He then announces what he has and often will hand it to one of us. We of course play along with this and ask all kinds of questions about this imaginary thing. What color is it Theo? Blue. Is it a big truck? No, mall truck. Is it a garbage truck? Yeah and so forth. Then we will drive the imaginary truck around the couch or room and pass it back and forth. We once ate an entire meal of imaginary food with him. He also likes to imagine that a train is coming through the tunnel which is the gap between the pillow and couch back. He’ll go so far as insisting that we get off the couch to let the train go by. And recently when he started to tire of having his teeth brushed I spiced things up a bit by asking him to put huckleberries on his tooth brush in addition to the tooth paste. He has a renewed vigor for tooth brushing now and reports that the huckleberries taste very good.

grocery shopper

We took Theo to the Greenwood Market the other day because they have mini shopping carts meant for kids to use. We thought he would get a kick out of it and we were right. He took right to it, steering his little cart around and stopping to pick out item he wanted and putting them in his cart. His first item? An avocado. Second? A green apple. Of course he quickly moved on from fresh produce to ice cream. And of course this garnered all kinds of attention and cute comments/looks from our fellow shoppers.