London tells it like it is

Sorry for the looooong wait between posts. Between traveling for job interviews and working on the dissertation, I've barely had time to breathe lately.

The best part of my day is at 5:00 when I get London from daycare and we go for a walk "round da block". We usually head outside and once we're on the sidewalk I say, "Okay, London, where are we going?" He leads me all over the neighborhood. Lately his favorite route is to go down to the library, read a book about trains, go outside and play on some decorative rocks (these are low, round, and surrounded by gravel, so it's much less dangerous than it sounds), then go to the park.

At the park London is completely fascinated by the "waterbridge". He likes walking over bridges. He likes watching the water. He likes it all so much that he usually cries when it's time to leave. I bribe him with the promise of playing trains when we get home. "Play trains, Daddy! Daddy, play trains!"

Along the way we pick "bendywions" (dandelions) and blow their seeds away. For the first week or so of bendywion season, London kept getting the head too close to his mouth and he'd get his tongue all covered with dandelion seeds. Since then, he's more cautious about blowing, and often just waves the dandelion back and forth in the air to dislodge the seeds. It's great fun.


Here are more of London's words:

London says goodbye to everything. "Bye bye house. See. Next time. House."

"Bye bye bus. See. Later. Bus."

Sometimes when we are out on our walks we see "amimals". One day at the park I showed him a slug on a leaf and now he is completely fascinated by "swugs". A trip to the park is just not complete unless we find at least one "swug" to look at. Fortunately, that's not hard in Northern California in the spring.

Milk comes out more like "moke". And London hasn't learned the word 'drink' yet. So if you ask him when he's drinking milk, he'll say, "I eat. Moke!"

Also, "I eat. Sippycup. Appajuice."


If you fix London's train tracks, he always thanks you. "Daddy fix train. Thank you, Daddy." The other day our friend Patrick came over to babysit. One of the first things he did was sit down and start putting London's train tracks back together. London hadn't caught his name, but he knew that Patrick was a man, so he said, "Man fix train. Thank you, man."