Dear Lucas (4 Years and 2 Months and 2 days),

This last month has been one crazy busy month full of change and lots of adjustments. The first big thing is that you started school. Since you are in school during the day, I've been staying with your Great-Gram more. At least two days a week your Dad picks you up from school and even gets dinner started long before I ever get home. Some times I don't get home until it is almost your bedtime. The first night that I walked in late you looked up at me and said, "Who are you? Oh, are you my Mom?" I didn't know 4 year olds could be sarcastic, yeah pretty much proves you are my kid right there.

You liked the first two or three days of school and then you were OVER it! You decided that you were DONE with school and never wanted to go back. You would beg and plead and fake sick to try and get to stay home. One day we were in the car headed to school and you tried to bargain with me, "If you take me home now, I'll clean my room." When you would realize that we were STILL headed to school you would start digging your heels into the seat in front of you and use your hands to cover your car seat buckles. A few times I even had to get teachers to help me pry you out of the car. Some days it would be one teacher and one day it took FOUR! I think one of the hardest things I've ever had to do was drive away from the school while you were being carried away kicking and screaming, "I WANT TO GO WITH MY MOMMY!" Thankfully, those days seem far behind us!

You still try to talk me into keeping you home from school EVERY SINGLE day. You give up when you see that I am NOT turning the car around that you ARE GOING TO SCHOOL. On the way to school a few days ago you were playing with your Magna doodle and drew little scribble lines and said "Mom, I wrote you a note. I'm going to read it now. It says 'Dear Mom, Please don't take me to school. Turn the car around and go home. Pretty Pretty Please. Love Lucas." Kid, you crack me up. You don't know how tempted I am to just keep you home one day and just do all kinds of fun stuff together. I am even pretty sure that I know that I would enjoy it even more than you would. However, I know that if I do it one day it will just make it harder for you to go back to school the next day. So for right now we just have to make the most of our afternoons and our weekends and count down the days until school breaks.

The thing I look forward to the most is picking you up from school. I love watching you march in line from across the yard and I always know when you spot me. Your eyes light up and you usually wave and squeal "MOMMY!" as soon as you see me. Seriously, this is the BEST feeling in the world. On the ride home I try to get you to spill the beans on what you did at school or even what you chose for lunch. For some reason you HATE answering these questions. We have to wait for you to tell us in your own way. You will start singing some new song we've never heard you sing before or talk about a friend at school (the first few weeks you talked about a boy named Kevin but now all you want to talk about is a cute little blond girl.) I guess my questions are rubbing off on you because at dinner tonight you turned to your Dad and said, "So Daddy, what did YOU do today?"

I miss getting to do all the fun stuff we used to do together before you started school, especially our playgroup. We still try to fit special family stuff in, like going to the park together or planting pumpkin seeds. I also miss laying in bed with you in the morning and cuddling with you while you watched cartoons while we talked about what we should do that day. We've replaced our morning snuggle time with an evening one. This cartoon that you love called Phineas & Ferb, comes on at 6pm every night, so the two of us cuddle up in mine and Daddy's bed and watch it together. Our time together is even more precious now. It doesn't even seem like I had a whole four years with you at home. As cliche as it sounds it seriously feels like you were a baby yesterday and then I blinked and you are in school.

After the cartoons and snuggle time then come the bedtime stories. You have quite the ever growing collection of books. Tonight we had to clear out another shelf so that we could make more room. Lately, I've been buying you books about kids that wear glasses, since the other big change this month has been you've started to wear glasses yourself. I'm hoping the books will encourage you to wear your glasses more since you don't know anyone your age that wears them and sometimes you don't want to wear them. I do know they are helping you because I've noticed when you aren't wearing them you bump into stuff and trip over stuff, which you never used to do. I think you've gotten used to actually SEEING things.

Lately, the book you request the most is Peter Pan. It also happens to be the movie you request the most and what you pretend to be the most. So much so that one night I walked into your room to find your bed sheets sliced to pieces. When I asked you about it you produced a large knife you had swiped from the kitchen and explained that you were being Peter Pan like in the movie when he slices up the Pirate ship sails. It made perfect sense to you. We've since replaced the REAL knife with a plastic pretend one, which you even fell asleep still holding one night.

A few weeks ago we added another member to our family. You and your father decided that we NEEDED a hamster. You both promised to take care of the hamster and that I would not have to take care of the cute furry thing at all. So with the addition of Tinkerbell (noticing a theme here?) we now are a family of 5. So far you guys are taking excellent care of Tink.

Sweet Pea, I love you to the moon and back,

Mommy

My How They've Grown

The summer is coming to an end and on the last day of watching Lucas' friends, I found myself sitting on the porch thinking about how much they've grown this summer (both the boys and the seeds they planted,)

Pictures from the Last Few Days

Every once in a while Lucas stops pretending that he hates Maybe and climbs in her kennel for a cuddle.

Flags in front of the Savannah Mall

It's finally Swimming weather!

Doing a little gardening by reusing water bottles to plant seeds.

Can't wait to see what will pop up!

Monday at the Park

The last few days have been so gorgeous outside! Monday we spent the day at Forsyth with our playgroup. We had a picnic, flew kites, and the kids ran around and enjoyed just being outside. The fountain is dyed green for St.Patrick's Day. Before we left the park Lucas picked a few azaleas to put in a vase on our kitchen table.

Feeling Half-Way Human Again

We are finally starting to feel better and I can even half way hear!!! It was warm enough and Lucas was feeling good enough that we actually got to play outside for the first time in over a week. It was nice to see flowers starting to pop up in our yard, evidence that Spring is just around the corner.

Today I even made it out to the new grocery store that just opened. It is SO NICE having a grocery store basically right next door. I can't wait to see what other businesses open up in the surrounding buildings.

Our Little Herb Garden

Painted Pots

*And yes for the record my son is wearing the same shirt he wore yesterday afternoon, but he's got nothing on this kid.

Tales from the Outside

I didn't know cats were nesting animals. Now I have an excuse to NOT clean up the big piles of pine straw sitting in our yard! ;-)

The seeds that we planted last Sunday are starting to sprout!

The chives are starting to sprout too.

It's been a week and I still haven't killed the flowers, Yet!

See, the flowers in the window box are still alive too!

Gardening with Papa

Dear Lucas (103 weeks),

We're getting closer and closer to your second birthday and I am getting more and more emotional. Tonight I got chocked up while I was reading you a bedtime story about a cow that wanted to be a ballerina. When it got to the part about her big break in New York I had to stop and take a deep breath before I could keep reading because my words were starting to get all shaky. I used to make fun of my own Mom for crying at movies and commercials and then here I am having trouble reading a children's book.

You beg to help me cook all of the time. To keep you from getting bored we ended up starting to make dinner before we even had lunch! I think one of the reasons that you are such a good eater is that you love to help cook and help taste. While I was shredding carrots for a pasta salad you keep sneaking little bites of them and going "mmmm" like you were eating the best candy you have ever tasted.

You are turning into quite the little chef. Tonight when we were making something else you opened up the egg carton, took out the egg, cracked it on the bowl and opened it... in your lap. I was pretty impressed that you knew what to do. It would have been perfect if you had held the egg over the bowl instead of your lap but that's okay, it is how you learn. I ended up getting out another egg and you watched me intently as I showed you how to open it over the bowl.

Your love of gardening is right up there with cooking. I am pleasantly surprised that your plants are still growing and not a single one has died! I think we need to get a bag of dirt and plant them in a larger container since they are growing so big. I need to start reading about growing herbs and vegetables so that we can grow things that we can cook with because I know you would think that was just the coolest thing ever!

Yesterday, out of nowhere you counted from one to three. Then all day today you had to count before you would do something except you went back to using "1, 1, 1, ready go!" You would count before you would get off a chair or before you went and hid behind the curtains. Your favorite game now is to hide from us. You've been enjoying hiding for a while but your hiding places are starting to get more complicated and you pull stuff out to hide behind instead of just hiding out in the open with your hands covering your eyes. It's really neat to see how your thought processes are growing.

Bugga, I love you to the moon and back!

Mommy

Tomatoes for Lucas and Kisses for Grandma

One of our local movie theaters has free showings of kid movies during the week and since our playgroup for today had been canceled I decided to try the movies. They were showing Jonah a VeggieTales Movie and I couldn't wait to watch Lucas realize that his favorite characters were on the big screen. He was so excited when he saw his pals Bob the Tomato and Larry the Cucumber. He sat still for an hour before we got tired of sitting so we left. Lucas had fun at the movies but I don't think we'll be going back to the free movies. They were full of daycare kids (not that there is anything wrong with daycare kids) and they were able to reserve seats and take over the theater (I think it should be first come first served) and the the adults with the daycare were REALLY rude and kept talking LOUDLY on their cell phones. The kids were all well behaved, too bad the adults were not.

We decided to go by my parents house again since we were close by. It was lunch time to my mom sent Lucas to see if there were any fresh tomatoes on my Dad's plants. He picked
a nice sized one and before the tomato made it inside he took a big bite out of it followed by a loud Mmmmmmm! He ended up eating half of the tomato before he made it inside. I think next year we are going to have to expand from a few flowers in pots on our porch to a few tomato plants.

Before we left Lucas sat on his Great-Grandma's lap and talked to her and gave her hugs and two kisses.

Fresh Flowers

Dear Lucas (94 weeks),

Today we weren't able to go on our normal morning walk because my alarm clock didn't go off like it normally does, and by alarm clock I mean you. For the last few months you have been getting up by 8:15 AM or 8:30 if I am really lucky. You never sleep in past 8:30 anymore... not even when I wake you up at 11:30 PM because you are throwing up in your sleep and don't get you back to sleep until 2:00 AM like this past Friday... even then you were up by 8:30 AM on Saturday. I never ever set my alarm anymore because you are just that reliable, except for this morning. You woke up at 9:29 AM... one minute before we were supposed to meet everyone to go walking. Since there was no way we could get up and ready and drive to the park in 1 minute we stayed home. It was one of those stay in our PJs all day kind of days and I cleaned and did thousands of loads of laundry while you watched way too much TV (which is ironic since yesterday I was telling your Grandma just how little TV you watch.)

When I was pregnant I read all those studies about how kids under 2 should NEVER EVER watch TV and I made up my mind that you would NEVER EVER watch TV until you were at least 2 years and one day old... then I actually had a toddler and realized that along with my other "I will nevers" things change when you become actual parents. Hey, in our defense you didn't even get interested in TV until after you turned one and your cousins Steven was watching a movie and that is where your love of Veggie Tales was born. Besides normally you only watch a few minutes of Veggie Tales or Sesame Street a day. I quickly learned that it is a whole lot easier to put on makeup when you aren't trying to get to it so you can eat it!

Don't worry, we haven't screwed you up yet. You still LOVE to go outside and you would rather be outside doing anything than sitting in front of the TV. Even if we have just come in from spending all day at the park you will run to the door and ask "Mama, side?" and if I tell you not right now you will throw yourself at my feet as if I was about to put you to death and you are begging for your life. Just so you know, before you came around I liked to spend my time in air conditioned places but now because of you I get more than my share of fresh air and sunshine.

The only thing that will cheer you up when you are not allowed to go outside is if I let you "help" me do something, especially if that means cooking. I think you have helped me make at least part of our dinner for almost a week now. Mainly I give you things to pour or stir and you know to stay away from the oven because it is hot. If you see me going to put something on the stove you remind me "mama, hot!" and blow air to cool it off. You aren't a big fan of the actual cooking process though because you don't understand why you have to wait for things to cook.

To distract you while we wait for dinner to finish you've become quite the coloring connoisseur. Just a few weeks ago you had no real interest in coloring, you would scribble for 2 seconds just so we would clap our hands and cheer for you and tell you how "pretty" your picture was but that was it. Now you will sit for quite a while and color. Sometimes you will grab my hand and take me in your room and ask for "colors" and not let go of my hand until I sit down next to you and color one side of your coloring book while you color the other. When you want to color alone I set up your little desk for you and you happily sit down and get to work

Even though you start out coloring at your desk you never stay there long. You always end up taking your paper or coloring book with you and sitting down somewhere else with your book stretched across your lap and your toes peeking out from the top. Personally this doesn't look comfortable to me but it is how you seem to do your best coloring.

Another cool thing you started doing this week is matching up pairs of animals from your Noah's ark. Usually you just liked putting them in the boat and dumping them out or pitching them across the room at poor Jadie but today you started matching them together. I think you thought they were Mom and baby pairs because you would call one of them "baby" and hug it before you set it next to the matching animal.

Bugga, I love you to the moon and back,

Mommy