Funny stuff

Carter's uncle: "Did you learn anything at school today?"
Carter: "No, but I farted a lot at nap time."

Baby chicks

Carter's auntie got some baby chicks for the three kids. She only kept them for a few weeks, and then gave them away. But Carter got to temporarily adopt one, which he named Zachary.

Parent-teacher conference

I had my first parent-teacher conference yesterday. I was kind of thrilled about it, too, just like I'm thrilled about all the new milestones we're hitting lately. Kindergarten tours, Carter learning to read, all of it. He's just such a big boy now.

Anyway, Miss Sarah said she doesn't test Carter anymore because there's no point, he just knows everything already. She asked why I didn't put him into kindergarten early, and I said I wanted to keep him with his own age group. Boys in particular don't do well jumping ahead.

But she gave me some funny examples of how Carter surprises her. She talked to the children about Martin Luther King a few weeks ago and told them about how he was assassinated. She was a little worried about telling them this, but she said it didn't matter because no one really knew what she was talking about. Later, she saw Carter drawing a picture of Martin Luther King getting shot. We see a lot of this at home, he just seems to absorb things so quickly and lets us know in funny ways.

Sarah also said she asked the kids to write the alphabet in capital letters. No one could write the whole thing except for Carter, and then he decorated all the letters with smiley faces inside them. That made me laugh.

Anyway, one area where he does need help is in writing numbers. He writes three of them backwards sometimes. So I've been working on this with him at home.

He loves to write Dad's name and a face sticking its tongue out at Dad. Thinks it's hilarious. And as you can see at the bottom, he has an ongoing obsession with infinity. Wants to know why we can't tell him what the number is right before infinity, and why we don't know what the halfway point is between zero and infinity.

When I try to explain, he doesn't understand and says, "That blowed my mind."

One last thing about Carter, she said, is that he's very sensitive about getting in trouble. When he gets in trouble at school, he acts like it's the worst thing in the world. Maybe it's because he doesn't get into trouble much at home -- he doesn't really do anything bad -- and he can't handle it at school? Who knows. There's not much I can do about this right now. Maybe he'll grow out of it.

Bike riding along the canal

We just discovered how close the canal was to our house. Literally at the end of the next street over.

We all went bike riding today for about 20 minutes.

Carter wanted to go home halfway through!

Minifigures

Here's something that should come as a surprise to absolutely nobody: Carter is obsessed with Lego Star Wars minifigures. He has a TON of them (mostly handed down from his dad) and loves to play with them and act out scenes from the movies. We'll hear random phrases like, "You were like a brother to me!" when he's playing.

At night, I go through a few pages from this book with him:

The rule at home is that if Carter can't sleep when it's time to go to bed, he's allowed to sit in bed with the book light and read as much as he wants. Usually he picks this one and looks at the pictures for about 15 minutes.

One of his favorites: Darth Vader with light-up lightsaber.

So sweet

Carter said the sweetest thing to me today. I came home from getting my hair cut and he said: "Mommy, when you're gone I send kisses in all directions so one of them will find you."

I love this kid!

Happy new year!

Time again for one of my favorite annual posts: Carter's new year's eve picture. This started in 2006, when he was a mere 11 days old and still up at midnight. Now, it's a tradition (although we push the clock forward instead of actually keeping him up to midnight).

Here it is... happy new year everyone!

Six New Year's Eves...

Christmas cat

Christmas cat:

And Christmas Carter:

Two games I miss

Carter is off to Legos and Wii games now, and I miss the old games we used to play. Two in particular:

1. Acting out scenes from "Cars." I practically had the entire script memorized (that's no exaggeration, either) after all the times we acted out the movie with Carter's toys. He loved it.

2. Playing "baby" with pillows. Carter would hide under the pillows and pretend to be various babies hatching out from eggs. Baby snake, baby turtle, baby chicken. I would be the mommy and wait for my baby to hatch. He played this almost until age 5.

Now, this is playtime: