Our 2 yr old...

Wow, it's been a busy summer. We've been so busy entertaining guests and trying to take advantage of the great weather that I hardly realized we hadn't updated this in months. This summer Grant got to spend loads of time with his family when my entire family came to WA at the end of July. We drove up and did the Olympic loop and had a great time. This is a picture of Grant, "Rampa", Timmy "TEEH" and Taylor "TAYY" at Marymere Falls. Grant loved being in the backpack with Grampa. It was great having everyone here and Grant loved all the attention.

A week later Granny who has now been named either "Gigi" or "Gaggy" (though we think she prefers the former, arrived with her friend Brian. They were with us for 3+ weeks and we traveled up to Victoria, B.C. Grant loved the ferry ride and overall was a really good traveler on both trips. After a long day of traveling around we stopped alongside a lake so Grant could have some fun paddling in the water and throwing rocks. Amazingly he kept mostly dry!

A week after Granny and Brian returned to New Zealand we celebrated Grant's 2nd birthday. It was fun to see him actually "get" the whole present thing. He is a very lucky little boy and received some really fun gifts that he really loves. That afternoon we went to the circus. Grant was his normal squirmy self but he really seemed to like it. I, on the other hand am not sure how I feel about the circus and found myself flinching with every whip crack near an animal. I'm not sure why that was surprising to me but I certainly didn't think much of it when I was booking the tickets. It's been a long time since I've been to a circus.

We also took Grant to the Puyallup State fair for a late birthday present. He had a great time and LOVED going down the huge slide with Peter. He's still talking about driving his own little car and going down the slide.

And he also started a little preschool program that runs for and hour and a half every tuesday and thursday. His little friend Kyle is in his class and he has really taken to it. He LOVES it. They have a big mirror in the room that's one sided glass and linked to an observation room. So while I could go and get something done in the 90 minutes he's there it's way too much fun to stay and see how he interacts when I'm not around.

Which brings us to the present milestone. Grant got his first "big boy" bed on Saturday. We decided to just put him directly into a Twin bed rather than mess with the toddler bed. We started talking to him about it during the week and telling him he was going to get a big boy bed with a big boy pillow. He seemed to be quite excited, mostly by the pillow. He was so, so excited while watching Peter put the bed together but that night he seemed a tiny big scared when we put him down for bed. He slept through the night with no problem and hasn't looked back. His bedtime routine has always been reading 2 bedtime books and then Peter lifts him into bed and we tuck him in. 3 nights with his new bed he started to walk over to Peter to be put in bed and then hesitated and turned around and walked over to crawl into bed himself.

This parenting thing is very weird. You push them along and cheer on every new milestone and when they show an inkling of independence you're suddenly struck with a bit of sadness at the fact that they don't need you anymore.

Wow, so that's inspired me enough to keep up with the blog more often. So much has happened since July, I really need to be better about updating. :)

-misty