Dear Lucas (75 weeks),

The one thing that has not changed since the very first day we brought you home is you keep us on our toes. You are a pretty easy going baby and stick to a schedule until one day you decide... "Hey, I think I'd like to change things up just because," like this week when you started to get up before 6Am when your Dad is leaving for work. Then you fool me into thinking you getting up early means you will take an earlier nap... nope! You end up taking a LATE afternoon nap and not getting up until 6:00PM which is the time you would normally going to bed. So now you eat dinner at your old bedtime and stay up until 8:00 PM! I wouldn't mind a later bed time if that meant you slept later in the morning.

I'm not used to you being awake for such a long chunk of time and the longer you are awake the quicker you get sick of playing with the same old toys and dancing to the same old songs. It is a good thing you never get tired of going outside. Going outside means you have a chance to try and chase the cat that you never catch. You never get frustrated that you can't catch him. Instead you crack yourself up by growling and making the cat run away from you over and over again.

Today you took one of your balls outside with you. It tickled me to think that you figured out all on your own that balls are even more fun to play with outside since you have more room to kick them and throw them.

Unfortunately, kicking the ball around the yard didn't last for too long since we have tree roots sticking up all over the yard. You haven't quite mastered the whole "look when you are walking" thing yet so you kept making yourself fall. You ended up leaving the ball in the yard and going back to chasing the cat.

You've been eating a little better this week than you did last week. You've actually been sitting in your high chair long enough to eat and even eating your own food instead of wanting what is on our plates. When you are done eating you calmly tell us and expect us to get you out of your highchair the very moment you tell us "uhhhhp" and when we don't do that you start gesturing up just in case we don't understand Lucasese.

You are so much fun to just sit back and watch lately. You've started to "pretend" while you are playing. You will have conversations on the phone (which you've been doing for a while) but now you pass the phone back and forth from me and your Dad and yourself. Also, you pretend to cook and eat your play food. The other day you had an empty raisin box you were carrying around and you were pretending to pass out raisins to everybody. You would reach into the empty box with your pincer grasp and pull out an invisible raisin to share. Your toy cars have giant toy car crash pileups and your Noah's ark animals now hang out with baby Jesus and the sheep from the manger.

Bugga, I love you to the moon and back,

Mama