Just returned from a trip out to Phoenix for five days, many expenses paid by my work, so that we could attend the Scottsdale Arabian Horse Show - the Sloan brothers (my employers) had several different horses entered, and had the best showing of any group. Nice going guys.
Colin got to hang out with his cousins quite a bit, particularly Lily. They were joined at the hip whenever they were together, and Colin knows everyone’s name. The mere mention of Lily brought forth a huge smile and a stream of “Yeeyee, Yeeyee, Yeeyee!!!” (stringing multiple L sounds together is still a bit tough for him - give him a break, he’s only 1.5).
The weather was ridiculously nice - it hasn’t rained there in since October - and we got to spend some quality time with friends from work and the family, so I think a good time was had by all.
Everything was somewhat overshadowed by the prospect of the company moving out there, but things are still somewhat up in the air on that front…time will tell how it plays out.
There’s really no substitute for getting to watch the daily development of a child. You just can’t get a sense of how quickly they pick up concepts and knowledge unless you can see the day in and day out changes, truly mindboggling.
So that’s my high brow preface to a decidedly low brow story, but the point applies.
We’re having dinner a few nights ago (so far we’ve kept to our resolution of eating dinner together without any distractions every night, with very few exceptions - never any TV on, although Colin consistently points to the radio and yells “ON!”, so we indulge that one), and Colin was hard at work on a few pieces of cheese. Usually he’ll play with one piece of food, casually eat another - he takes a while to eat.
Not this night, he was on a mission. I hardly had to distract him to get him to eat, he was wolfing it down as fast as I could give it to him. After he’d polished off a big chunk of this cheddar, and was continuing to nibble on it while we ate, Jess let me know that he’d downed a lot of cheese earlier in the day, as well as a few other “binding”-type foods, to which I replied (to Jess of course):
“He’s not going to poop for days”
Without missing a beat, Colin yells out:
“GOOD!”
Classic.
Sentences are forming…Colin is really pushing himself to communicate more effectively, it’s incredible to watch. He and I went for a walk the other day and as we walked down the driveway past my car he said “Da cah”. I couldn’t have been prouder.
He’s also following in his cousin Curt’s footsteps as a climber. He figured out how to climb up on the coffee table and now he’s working on the couch (still a little short for that one).
Babies everywhere for our friends - Jess’ former co-worker and one of her college friends are both due in March, and my buddy Robert just had his second child, a son named Thomas. We’re waiting to hear when Colleen and Ian are preggers, should be any day now…