More Chitty Chitty

Whenever Saben is really focused on something like legos or drawing, he hums "chitty chitty bang bang" non-stop. NON-STOP. Over and over. For hours on end. Really - hours. I am dead serious and not exagerating.

If you think this occaisionally drives me batty, you are incorrect. It drives me always batty and I always find it running through my head even when he's not around. I shudder when i realize I am humming it to myself while weeding out in the yard. But how can you tell your son to quit humming happily while he plays? The only remedy I've discovered is turning on some music. Except then I get busy and we listen to the same CD 4-5 times in a row and that drives me batty too.

For the record, if I had a rapper name, I would want it to be "Chitty Chitty".

crazy neighbors

So last night, kyle is out cutting wood in our garage at 10:30 pm when he hears this banging outside. On the garage. He goes out into the alley and there are drunk kids there and a bunch of them are ON THE ROOF of our garage. It used to be a carport, so the roof is flat.

Seriously? Who gets drunk and then thinks it would be fun to climb onto the roof of someone else's garage? And why? Kyle was so mad at them.

Then another guy comes a minute or so later and tries to go into our garage to look for his friends. Kyle tells him to leave and then he tries to go in our gate to see if they are in our back yard. So I guess the next house project is sticking some barbed wire on top of our garage. Sheesh.

So today, Annika & I have all her dolls around our little kids table in the kitchen and are pretending to serve them lunch with her toy food, dishes, etc. After a while I realize its now time for our lunch. I get hummus & pita out for annika and set her at the table with all her dolls & their plastic food. Then I decide to really quickly call a glass company before I eat my lunch.

After about 5 minutes of phone conversation, i return to the kitchen to find hummus mashed all over the dolls faces, clothes, heads....Like someone had tried to murder them with a spoon full of hummus. "Eat the hummus dollys! Eat it! Don't make me shove it in your mouth, in your eyes, rub it on your head.... Come on, why aren't you eating this, its delicious!"

Its also in all of annika's tea cups, smeared like frosting on a plastic donut and is now all over the couch pillows we'd used to prop the dolls up to table height.

Will I ever learn? I just thought it'd be fun for her to have lunch with the dolls.

Just like Daddy

Saben: Mommy, will I be like Daddy?

Mom: Sure Saben, you'll probably be like him when you grow up. Do you think you'll be like Daddy?

Saben: Yes, I will.

*Pause*

Saben: I'll have really really long hairs all over my body, just like Daddy.

What I love about Saben

I am so completely in love with my sweet boy. I love his curiosity, the endless questions about absolutely everything. I love how he will one minute be struggling to understand the concept of adoption, asking deep questions about why some people aren't ready for babies and then, when he's had enough, suddenly switches to something mundane like "And...why is our rug brown?"

I love how he always tells me that papa Ken knows A LOT of things, he knows everything. "I'll ask papa Ken, he knows....you don't mom." I love that I can teach him absolutely anything and he'll be excited and into it. This morning we watched a youtube movie about how bees make honey and he watched the whole 7 minutes enthralled.

I love how Saben loves collecting bugs as much as he likes picking flowers. Lately he has spent hours outside, searching for potato bugs, beatles, "ear pinchers" and anything else creeping in our garden. He puts them in his cage and I love how he has such great pride in the fact that "I take really good care of my bugs mom". He always puts the cage carefully back in our closet (an outdoor one) so it doesn't get too hot in the sun, gives them spoonfuls of water & fresh leaves. But he also likes to step on ants or anything else I tell him to smoosh and giggled uncontrollably when he got two ladybugs to crawl on his arms simultaneously.

Saben is holding a hollow stick "tunnel for my ants to play in". They also have access to balance beams for their amusement.

Looking at Saben's bug collection

I love it when Saben makes bouquets for me. Most of them are dandelions & buttercups, but when I let him, he loves using flowers from our garden. The other day, we had picked one bunch of purple lilacs on a walk and Saben told me he wanted to go outside and pick a few more flowers from our garden to go with it. We have flowers of every color out there, but somehow he came back with this ridiculously beautiful combination. I couldn't believe it.

I love love love how much Saben loves to draw. For quite a while, he's been just drawing rockets with occasional family portraits, etc. Then suddenly he started busting out cars on his drawing board. These are a few of the first ones I took a few weeks ago, but they have gotten much more elaborate since then.

Race car number "101" with another car following it

Race car "21" with a driver and smoke billowing out the pipes in back.

More elaborate pipes with smoke. I have no idea where he got this idea of pipes with smoke on race cars but it is awesome.

I love Saben's attention span (what mom wouldn't) and how he can spend hours building with his "new" lego set. We recently pulled down Kyle's old legos, which just happen to be a bunch of space rocket/moon explorer themed kits. Him & kyle have built a ton of them. They make a mess, but he loves it.

I love Saben's hugs goodnight, his special nose kisses and the way he still loves to cuddle in my lap. I even love how he still insists on describing each and every bowel movement he takes to me. "Look mom, its in an "S" shape!" I love riding bikes with him and how excited he gets when he makes skid marks from braking fast. I love watching him workout how to get along with other kids, especially ones older than him who hurt his feelings. I love watching him be ridiculous with his preschool buddies, singing the "Daddy Pusher" song, pushing eachother and wrestling around .

Don't worry, plan to do Annika too. Might take a while, its been busy. Two weddings, an anniversary and a family reunion in May - we were gone 4 out of 5 weekends. We are also rolling on our basement again - working hard on getting everything ready for carpet by the end of the month. Well Kyle's working hard, I'm actually writing in my blog for once. (so much for taking a break till fall, the carpet went on sale, so we plunged ahead.)