Happy almost birthday

Someone turns two day after tomorrow and my mother is hard at work spoiling him from afar. What a lucky kid! He's getting an awesome train table made by Melissa and Doug. It's awesome and was easy enough to put together after a few false starts. The only downside is the size. Granted, this was my idea, but the darn thing is huge! I've been doing some rearranging in the basement to make it fit. Purple Heart is coming this week for a pickup so we took this as an opportunity to sort through some old books and games to make a pile to give away. By the end, the pile was pretty huge. We love books (and have tons of them), but getting rid of some of the old ones is a good feeling. We also found some gems in the racks, including a book of Swedish rhymes that Andy is going to love! Now I just need to keep Andy out of the basement tomorrow evening so he doesn't see his new table. I have a feeling he's really going to love getting to spread out and play with his train set.

Right now, I've got a couple of sets of the Ikea train pieces. They're similar to Brio, but more basic with just wooden tracks and trains. My goal is to include some Thomas or Brio sets to complement the plain tracks. I went to Target tonight during our bizarre, brief snowstorm only to find out they had neither. They sold Thomas stuff, but it was plastic and said in the small print "not compatable with Thomas sets." Um, what? Turns out they have a "travel" system that is different than the wooden stuff. Glad I read that or things might have gotten complicated. My mom also got him some cool Melissa and Doug food that he can cut. Should be interesting to see how that all works. He adores his kitchen so I think he'll really get a kick out of it.

Andy is getting more vocal and verbal every day. It's just amazing to listen to some of the stuff he says. He now asks for "dots" when he goes to bed, which turns out means he wants the curtains open so he can see the stars. He can say stars, but for some reason he calls them dots. Go figure. He's also starting to throw his weight around to get what he wants. Last night he insisted on going for a ride in the wagon. When we were half way on our route, he decided he wanted cookies (crackers) and HAD to get out and proceeded to wander into other yards. I finally strapped him into the wagon and he screamed at me for maybe three blocks. Then he was happy again and chirped at me the rest of the way.