Will is in charge (for 5 minutes a day)

We seem to have a new dinner time routine.  The other night, Will started instructing all of us to put our hands in our lap and “pat pat pat pat” . . . all you Little Einsteins fans will recognize this as the sequence that causes “Rocket” to blast off.  When we all followed Will’s instructions, he then told us to raise our hands in the air and yell “blast off!”  (Again, from the video.)  We all three followed his commands, and the look on his face was priceless!  The poor second child (soon to be middle child) hardly ever gets to give orders that are obeyed.  You could tell he was loving every minute of it.  And ever since, whenever the four of us are gathered around the table, Will leads us all in at least two rounds of blasting off.

Will is also cracking us up with his interesting pronunciations.  He still has trouble with specific starting sounds . . . “cupcakes” are “pupcakes” and “lunch” is “munch.”  He calls Chick-fil-a “Chick-a-pay.”  And he has picked up an accent somewhere that causes him to pronounce “dad” like “dah-yad.”  It’s like a southern accent on steriods, which is bizarre, because I don’t think Noel or I have much of an accent.

Will amazed me today by writing some letters.  The boys were putting in their usual hour at the coloring table, and when I looked at Will’s picture, he had written H’s and P’s on it.  I thought maybe it was by accident, so asked him to write some H’s for me, and this is what he did:

Last weekend, Noel and I travelled to North Carolina to the wedding of one of my college roommates.  While we were in Asheville, we toured the Biltmore with all of its bizillion Christmas trees.  I had never been, and I thought it was just a big house.  Boy, was I wrong!  That thing is a castle!  It was incredible, but I was pretty tired after traipsing all over its five floors!  Noel took this amazing photo:

Today the boys and I decorated our first-ever gingerbread house.  The kids had a blast!  They were very deliberate about what they did, even if you can’t really see it in the finished product.  Christopher also used a gumdrop to put a “shooter” on the front of the house.  I asked what the shooter was for, and he said that of course, you have to have a shooter to get the bad guys.  That’s life with two boys!