Kid Stuff

We ate at our favorite Chinese restaurant last night (which, by the way, is a really good place to take a large family - and none of that nonsense about kids' meals - cheeseburger, pizza, chicken fingers or corn dog no matter what the restaurant, argh!) with the whole family. We really had a great time and the kids were amazingly well-behaved (we do give them a little reminder before we enter a restaurant - no running, no yelling, no jumping, etc.). We did laugh a lot which, fortunately, didn't seem to bother the others in the "banquet room". One lady, who had been sitting behind us, stopped by on her way out to compliment the family. What a sweet thing to do. Moms, especially, can tend to feel so conspicuous in restaurants.

Anyway, back to the laughing part. The funniest thing was "Frank" putting a chopstick in his water glass, thinking it was a straw, and then acting exactly like he had just had a sip when he pushed the glass away. "Kate" said something extremely funny just before the chopstick incident, but now I just can't remember.

"Kate" is just funny in general right now. She's one of the few morning people in our family. She goes to bed kicking and kranky, but wakes up with the biggest, brightest smiles imaginable. Here are a few of her funny sayings... the dog kennel is a "dog tunnel" and "Ria"'s crutches (which she's, thankfully, done with now) were "crunches".

By the way, I don't think there's anything quite as precious as watching an extremely eager almost-two-year-old try to learn and repeat the sounds animals make. "Frank" was so darn cute last night - especially when he was arguing with me about whether a cow said "Mmmmmmm" (which he insisted on) or "Moooooooo".

Well, we're off to the local Geography Bee today. "Ria" had a lot of fun last year and is looking forward to going again. "Gus" is ecstatic. He's been waiting for this for a long time and is finally old enough to participate. He's also enjoying the fact that he has four more chances to participate after this year.