Fire Fighter Poles and Armadillos

Feb. 18-Feb.24, 2008
We saw an armadillo by the red bridge on the bayou on Tuesday. It was really cool to see an animal like that up close and alive (usually you just see them as road kill). Isaac thought it was the coolest looking animal ever and wanted to spend the rest of the day hunting for armadillos and hephalumps.
Isaac always mixes up his pronouns, “can I stay with me?” / “can I pick me up” “can I go to the park with me?” but he’s really good about correcting himself if I model it the right way for him
Levi loves his veggies but he’s refusing bananas lately—I can’t get either of my boys to eat bananas and it drives me nuts. Isaac has also decided he wants to live on tostadas.
On Wednesday we went to another Hershey Trail Park that Isaac has dubbed “Levi’s park”—he would have named it Isaac’s park, but since that name has already been assigned to the little park by the Catholic church down the street, Levi got to have Hershey park named after him. The best part about this park for Isaac is that there is a really tall “fireman’s” pole that he can slide down. He’s very into sliding down fireman poles. Unfortunately, he can’t quite do it by himself yet, but he’s getting more and more confident.
James was out of town all week and it was really hard to have him gone after have about a month without him traveling. Levi kept looking for James all over the house and saying “papa?” “papa?” Very cute. Isaac, on the other hand, knew that James was far away and he would continually insist that I take him to the airport so that he could fly to Canada to find his papa.
James brought both of the boys little matchbox cars from Canada and they both absolutely loved them. You’d think that he’d brought them home a million bucks. They were both very excited about the cars and spent most of the day playing with them.
On Saturday we got Isaac’s haircut and it was a miracle—he actually didn’t cry or do any major freaking out. He let James hold him in his lap while Perla cut his hair and he was a fairly good cooperator. James and I couldn’t believe our eyes. It was truly a beautiful moment to behold. Afterwards we celebrated by going to Double Dave’s Pizza—an amazing pizza place that we just discovered. Isaac downed his weight in pizza and Levi focused on drinking ranch dressing, decorating the table with ranch dressing and creating mosaics with the croutons and the ranch dressing. James and I indulged in the chocolate chip pizza and then we conspired not to let Isaac know that it existed for fear that he wouldn’t eat normal pizza anymore if he knew that something called chocolate chip pizza existed.
So we’ve made it a whole month without t.v. in the house, but the boys haven’t been completely deprived because they can see t.v. when I go to the gym and they’re in the daycare area. The nice thing though, is that by not having it as an option at home, its forced the boys and I to be a lot more creative and we’ve had a lot more fun together and there’s a lot less whining and contention. We read a lot more books during the day and Isaac is very into role playing imagination games. He likes pretending that we’re characters from books or movies (Bob the Tomatoe, Larry the Cucumber, Dora, Diego, Boots, Smile Crocodile, Nanny Goat, Tito the Firefighter, Anthony, etc.)
One day this week we went out to get the mail from our new mail man that we met a couple of weeks ago. I was about to ask his name because I couldn’t remember it, but before I could say anything, Isaac said, “Thanks for the mail Robert!” The mailman was so surprised he about dropped our mail and said “He remembered my name!” with a true look of amazement on his face. I think that Isaac definitely made his day. I’m hoping that Isaac’s talent of remembering names will start to rub off on me.
James and the boys got sand for our green turtle sandbox (kindly left by the previous owners of the home) and it has been a big hit. Levi loves sitting and pouring the sand back and forth and Isaac loves making imaginary strawberry and rainbow cakes.