Dear Lucas (40 months and a day),

In some ways it is almost hard to believe that next month you will be exactly 3 and 1/2 but in others you are so grown up. You are now in the preschool class at church and it is quite possible that in just a few months you will be going to school. Most days you think that you are even older than 3 and try to boss your Dad and I around, which never works, but you still try. I think you are 3 going on 13. We are so in T-R-O-U-B-L-E when you are a teenager.

You are already begging to go to school. You still like to throw on a backpack and pretend to tell us good-bye and pretend you are headed off to class. In just a few months we can sign you up for preschool but there is no guarantee that you will get in because the selection process comes down to a random name drawing. I've spent the last few weeks researching schools and trying to narrow it down to the two selections we are allowed to make. We should know in the middle of march whether you will be headed off to school in September or not.

Even though you are so "grown" you still need your baby when you are tired. I am secretly glad that you haven't gotten to grown up for him yet. I do wish however, that you would stop chewing on it. "Baby" gets so disgusting that we have to switch him out every day for a fresh one. It drives me crazy to see you chewing or sucking on him but for some reason it gives you so much comfort. For a while there, the two of you were sneaking into our bed in the early morning. Your Dad or I would wake up with wet stinky wet lovey pressed up against our face and told you that you could stay in our bed and go to sleep but baby had to go. After 5 minutes without baby you decided you would rather be in your own bed with baby then in our bed without him.

You are constantly cracking your father and I up. You love knock knock jokes and are constantly making up your own (even though 9 times out of 10 they don't make any sense to anybody but you, but then again your father is almost 29 and his jokes are still like that.) Your Dad recently told you this joke about an interrupting cow and it is now part of your act. It is really cute hearing you try to say "interrupting" and you don't quite get what it means but that is okay. It still cracks us all up. You are always saying funny things even when you aren't telling jokes. You used to say "nose" but know you call it your "no." I wonder if it is because you think nose means more than one. The hands down funniest thing that you have said recently had to be when you and your Dad were wrestling and you squinted your eyes at him and lowered your voice and said "you'll never take me down!"

Besides knock-knock jokes your latest obsession is trains. All you want to do is play with trains, watch train movies, and read train books. You play with your train sets all day everyday. Usually you have the Lego train set set up and stretched across the living room and your take along set stretched across your bedroom floor. (Then there is your third train set that we keep at Grandma and Papa's house that ends up either covering their kitchen table or the top of their bed.) You've even told us that all you want Santa to bring you for Christmas is a train table.

You are so excited for Christmas. A few weeks ago our neighbors started putting up Christmas lights and everytime you see new lights on a new house you get so excited. When we go to any store you beg to go down the Christmas aisle and look at all the decorations. Also, I must make sure that I have changed on me at all times because you love putting money in the Salvation Army red kettles when we leave a store. Since Thanksgiving has finally come I unpacked our own Christmas decorations and as soon as you saw our nativity set you had to set it up and play with it. You didn't even care that our Christmas tree is up and undecorated.

The other thing that you were excited to see come out of the box of Christmas decorations were all the Christmas books. You've already aquired quite the collection of Christmas stories. I'm sure we'll be reading them over and over and over in the next couple of weeks, and I can't wait!

Bugga, I love you to the moon and back (of course if you heard me calling you Bugga, you would tell me "I'm not Bugga, I am Lucas Hunter," except Lucas always comes out at You-cas,"

Mama