Fireman

B: "I'm a fireman!  I'm going to get my firetruck and drive it."

V: "You might want to get off the potty first.  Also, you should probably put some pants on before you go to fight fires."

We Moms are very practical when it comes to these things.

--Victoria

Alphabet Solar System

B:  "Mommy, I made the solar system!"

V: [doesn't see anything except the alphabet on the fridge, like usual...] "Um... that's great honey.  Can you show me?"

B: "The yellow letters are the sun.  These letters are the Earth because they are blue and green.  The red letters are Mars."

Wow.  –Victoria

Pickle Truck

"Look Mommy!  I made a pickle truck!"

"That's great Benji!  Why is it a pickle truck?  I mean, what makes it a pickle truck?"

"Uhh... because it's driving."

As you can see, he was EXTREMELY please with the pickle truck.  --Victoria

Conceptual Building with Blocks

Lately, Benji has been spending a lot of time with his duplo blocks.  This time, he told me, "look Mommy, I built a FIRE!"  Apparently a crane truck was needed to keep it under control.  --Victoria

Nap Attack

It caught up with him again.  This time, we moved him to his crib instead of letting him stay where he was.  --Victoria

playdate with Xavi

Xavi visits us every Monday after daycare for a playdate with Benji.  We feed both boys dinner, then they play, and sometimes they have a bath together before we take Xavi back home.  Last Monday, I wasn't planning to give them a bath.  Apparently, they had other ideas...  --Victoria

Visiting Friends

We visited Aaron's college friend Maritza and her husband last weekend.  They have three daughters:  Aria is 6, Ava is 3.5 and Karina is 2.5.  Benji had a fabulous time playing with the girls.  --Victoria

All Dressed Up

Like many children, Benji hates getting water on his face and in his eyes when we're rinsing the shampoo out of his hair.  So I bought a "shampoo visor" to try to keep the water from running down his face.  It looks like this:

It turns out that he hates the visor even more than he hates getting water on his face, so it usually sits in his basket of bath toys, unused.

Until a few days ago. 

I turned away for a minute and then I heard him exclaim with delight, "Mommy, I'm all dressed up!"

He was wearing the shampoo visor like a tiny skirt and grinning from ear to ear.  I almost fell over laughing.

–Victoria

Benji Discovers the Solar System

One thing leads to another . . .  We recently got a book called "Thomas on the Moon" in which Thomas the Tank Engine takes schoolchildren to a Space Fair and they learn about the solar system.

Benji has been learning about the sun and the planets and he kept asking me whether we could "put them (the planets) together" and why that wasn't possible.  So we watched some youtube videos about the comparative sizes of the sun and the planets, and about how the planets orbit the sun.  He became more and more fascinated, so I got out a puzzle of the solar system that I had found a while ago and set aside for later.

He is now in love with the solar system and you can see just how happy he was to complete this puzzle.  In the third photo, he is literally jumping for joy, and in the fourth photo, he's doing a happy dance so fast that he's just a blur.

I love rediscovering the universe with him.

--Victoria

Fourth of July

Our friends Nate and Katherine had a BBQ, although we all stayed indoors due to the heat.  Benji lounged in his patriotic red, white and blue Hawaiian shirt, eating pretzels and drinking juice, then played with his farm animals on the stairway.  --Victoria

Lego Airplane