Ben’s Blog

1 turtle

1 baby snake

1 frog/toad in a hole

1 deer (who did not want to talk with me about the destruction of my bean plants)

countless squirrels, birds, and roly polys

1 very happy “country” boy

Hey, bugs shaped like toys! I can’t really blame him for wanting to gather up all of them and bring them to me.

Ben hopefully put his easter basket out again tonight… just in case.

Ben’s Uncle Brent got him an awseome huge dump truck for Christmas. Ben loves to fill it up and push it around the house, but sometimes he gets carried away. This morning he was using it to terrorize the dogs, so I put it away.

He was upset for a little while, then he hopped down and went to play. He got out his little people, and soon I heard this exchange:

green guy: whine whine..moooommy
yellow guy: go go go (walking away)
green guy: fake crying

It is not possible that he is almost three. Here’s what’s going on in Ben’s world at the ripe old age of two and three quarters.

- He has two hamsters. Their names are Ow and B. Guess which one bites.

- He is seriously into helping. He’ll get his little broom and sweep the kitchen floor, wants to help load the dishwasher, will wash plates in the bathroom sink (cause that’s the one with the stepstool, so he can reach it). He is also very interested in hamster care; will get food for their bowl, get out their exercise balls, and put down a barricade so they don’t roll down the steps.

- When Ben is big and has a beard on his chin, then he will use the potty. This is also when he will start cleaning up cat puke and mowing the lawn.

- He will eat anything if it comes in a little single-serving plastic container.

- He has started learning a few letters. Besides the standard ones, he has a few funny names for letters he can’t say. When he points to these letters, he says his special Ben-version of the letter name. M = mommy, D = dada, U = mine, S = wsswss (snake).

- We play trains. A lot.  When he’s not playing with one of his three train tracks, he makes me sit under the dining room table and pretend to be riding on a train. He brings me snacks and “stamps” my ticket (by putting the imaginary ticket on the floor and stamping on it with his foot).

- He finally has all of his teeth. Thank goodness, I am so done with teething! At least when we go through this again in a few years he’ll be old enough to understand what’s going on.

Ben has always liked music, but lately has been relentless in his requests for the same five songs, over and over. So we got Ben one of these . The 1GB red one is on sale for $20 if you know someone who might be interested. Not designed for toddlers, but his seems to be holding up ok. Takes a AAA battery, which doesn’t last nearly long enough, but the little speaker on top works surprisingly well.

The thought was, if he’s able to control his music maybe these songs will wear themselves out and we can move on. At the very least, we can load in a few new, acceptable songs and work them into his repertoire.

It came preloaded with some crap I’d never heard of. Brian left a few of those on (to torture me, I’m guessing) but added the wide variety of Ben-approved songs. I’m hoping Brian will respond here with a list of what he loaded onto Ben’s new magic music machine.

Also on the music-variety front, we’ve been listening like crazy (when not listening to the shaker) to Spare the Rock, Spoil the Child, podcast archives are here. It’s a nice mix of tolerable kid music and kid-friendly adult stuff. Everyone wins.

In leiu of a “2008 summary” post (the short version: we put all of our stuff in a really big truck and moved 400 miles away) here’s the annual “Ben with Bear” photo.

2009

2008

2007

I got this bear when we were waiting for him to come home…well, actually I got two bears because I didn’t know they were going to be huge and I was planning on sending one to him in his foster home in Guatemala. When I saw how big the darn thing was, I thought I’d use it to take photos to show how much he’s grown every month. Yeah. Well. Turns out I’m only able to really make that happen about once a year, so it’s become our New Year’s Day tradition instead. Here’s this year’s photo, and the ones from years past. He was harder to photograph this year because he insisted on being the one to *take* the picture.

In an attempt to convince Ben that there is, in fact, a holiday between Halloween and oh-my-god-santa-brings-me-presents, I launched a turkey craft campaign for most of the month of November. Here are a few highlights.

Paper plate turkey

Turkeys eat (candy) corn

Turkey cupcakes (yes, I have no shame).

Ben’s turkey cupcake. We enlisted the help of a few friends for this one.

Rebecca’s turkey cupcake

Emily and her… um… vampire turkey pumpkin head. I think.

Oh, and it worked. Ben is now really excited about turkeys.

So we rounded out the month by writing a letter to Santa: