David & Ruth’s son Nathaniel David

He loves to pray for the food at dinner.  Tonight I served him his dinner, and we prayed for it, and then I brought my food to the table, and he wanted to pray for that, and then we had to pray for his dessert too! He folds his hands, and then chimes in an “amen” at the end of the prayer.

Clifford is his favorite tv show, and he can say Clifford and tv.  He has even started laughing when Clifford does something he thinks is funny.

His favorite pastime is playing with his trucks and cars.  They go pretty much everywhere with him, and he gets very excited on trash days because he can see the trash truck!

He is very polite, but says thank you when he means thank you, and thank you when he means you’re welcome, which makes for an amusing conversation:

Mommy: Nathaniel can you bring me that toy?
Nathaniel brings Mommy the toy
Mommy: Thank you!
Nathaniel: Thank you!

He knows and can say the colors yellow and blue, and he is pretty good at identifying green and red, even though he can’t say them yet.

He can say the names of almost anyone important in his life, although sometimes it is an amusing pronunciation, (Uncle Bryan = BryBry, “Aunt” Kristin = Kristie, Grandma = Ama, Grandpa = Papa)

He loves to help Mommy with the wash.  He puts clothes into the washer and the dryer, and then hands Mommy hangers to hang up clothes.

No matter what he does, he’s always a blessing, and Daddy and I are very thankful for such an amazing toddler!

Nathaniel learns a new word or two pretty much every day, but I’m not always sure he knows what the words mean.  One of his newest words is “hot,” but I think he thinks hot means any sort of temperature extreme.  He’ll call green beans off the stove hot, and then the next day, he’ll call them hot when they are straight out of the fridge.  It’s pretty funny.

Daddy shows Nathaniel how to use the cell phone

The cell phone is more interesting than goofy Daddy

Yes, I climbed on top of the coffee table by myself!

Daddy and Nathaniel

Hmm, sand?

Oh, I see how this works!

This is our back yard–like our ugly orange fence?

Nathaniel’s starting to pick up a few new words finally.  For a while all his works were derived from quack (cracker, sock, and truck all sound pretty similar). But, yesterday he started saying water (wawa), bath, and bubbles.  We didn’t even know he knew what bubbles were!

Nathaniel gets a haircut (not his first one):

On Monday nights during the school year, I go to work and Nathaniel and Daddy have fun playing while I’m gone. Tonight they managed to get some fun video taken.

Dinner time:

Play time:

Time to clean up:

Well, the only problem with having a geeky Daddy is that he likes to do lots of fancy things to the blog, which sometimes makes Mommy confused.  So, if you tried to see larger versions of the zoo pictures and failed, they are linked now!

Daddy and I took Nathaniel to the zoo for the first time Friday! Nathaniel had a blast seeing all the underwater animals, and saw lots of other jungle animals like giraffes, elephants, and monkeys. Our zoo has a butterfly and gardens exhibit next door, so we also spent a few minutes there “smelling” the flowers. We joined the zoo for the year, so we’re looking forward to going back lots over the summer. In a couple weeks, the zoo is getting some koalas on loan, and I am excited about seeing those again.

We taught Nathaniel how to color tonight with some colored pencils, and he had a blast!  He managed to not color on anything but the paper, and he was very sad when it was time for bed and the pencils got put away.  Perhaps we have a budding artist in our midst?