Maybe you don’t understand how much he talks.

When the first rays of sunlight sneak in through the heavy, double-sided, light-blocking dark navy blue curtains, he starts mumbling in his sleep. You’ll often overhear cranky grumblings like “No, no…. Go ‘way.” Or “Jayce. Toyyyy. Noo….” (referring to a horrifying incident where he was asked to share one of his toys with Nina’s baby.)

When he wakes a little more, he begins his plea for milk. Most of the time he doesn’t even bother to stand up, he just lays there and says “Bottlllle. Bottllllle…” in that same pathetic, raspy voice that people use to beg a desert for water.

If I don’t show up with a cup of milk he’ll eventually stand up and complain more loudly, but in the meantime he usually spends some time playing and talking in his bed about lord knows what. Until some certain point when he demands to be picked up, and we start our day.

From that moment on, he talks! Non! Stop! He announces every single thing he’s doing. If he walks across the room he says “Walkin’! Walkin!” If he’s playing with a toy drill trying to fix his toy car, he gives you a run down on every thing he’s doing and mentions 37 times that he saw Pa-Pa work on this very same car not too long ago. Only it’s more like:
Car! Fix it! Fix it! Drill! Pa-pa fix it! Right, here! Over, here! Fix it, door! for thirty solid minutes. Sometimes it’s handy because he’ll rat himself out. He’ll come out of his room carrying a toy snake, announcing: “Snake! Hit! Mouse! Overhere!”

He talks while he eats, pausing only when his mouth is so full that food will squish out if he tries to say anything. In those instances he chews and swallows as fast as a toddler can so he can resume your regularly scheduled nonstop running commentary on everything and everyone.

In the car is the worst. People always seem louder when you’re in a confined space like that, and car travel is! Very! Exciting! Lots of stuff must be pointed out to us, because we’re in the front seat and can’t see anything. Cows! Over here! Laying! Down! Night-night, cows! Night night. Moo! Moo! Cows, over here! Road! Trees! Man! Lady! Lady! Drivin! Car! Man! Car, broken, uh-ohhhhhhh.”

If it’s night and he can’t see what’s outside the car, he’ll regale us with warm memories of some random event of the day. This is where the tattling comes in – or as Kevin calls it, the outright making up lies about the dangerous thing that Daddy did NOT do.

On and on, the exclamations ring out continously through the day until he abruptly falls asleep. Ahhhh… silence. It’s almost like the old days when all we had was quiet evenings with quiet little us and our quiet little dog. Only now we sometimes hear our sweet baby Nicolaus talking! In! His! Sleep!

Every single thing on this car is rusted except the logo emblems and the glass on the windows. I wonder if a Mercedes in this condition still manages to be worth more than my fully operational Corolla?

I just ate bacon for lunch. No sandwich, no eggs, just the bacon. It was an accident… Kevin was making it for later, I kept stealing little bites thinking in a minute I’d make myself a sandwich or something… and then half the bacon was gone and I was too full to eat anything else.

You don’t have to read this. I just want record of how funny my kid was at this age, in case later on down the road he never does funny things. This way we’ll at least be able to look back and say See? I knew he was funny at some point.

This week we took N with us to deliver Kevin’s latest tea infuser to its new owner. It’s a little airplane, and N was obsessed with it from the very beginning of the project – we were worried that he’d be upset when the nice lady took it away. We started preparing him ahead of time telling him “This is Connie’s airplane. Connie is a nice lady. We’re going to go and give it to Connie.”

We met her at a Starbucks and luckily he took to Connie right away. Kevin gave her the box and Nicolaus told her “Airmane here!” and pointed in the box. When she opened the box and was ooing and aahing over it, Nicolaus decided it was his duty to show her all the parts: “Nose! Wings! Button right here! Airmane!”

She paid Kevin, took the airplane and left.

But the CUTE part was later that night after we got home. He had a little box and when he thought no one was watching I saw him re-enact the whole event. OMG the cuteness. “Connie. Airmane. Over here. Look. Lookin’. LOOKIN’. Connie. Take it. AWAY. Airmane. Connie. Take it. AWAY. Ohooohwow tankyoumuch! Airmane. All gone!”

All week he’ll bring her up out of the blue. Connie. Airmane. Take it. AWAY. Connie. Daddy. Muhney!

By the way in case you can’t tell, Nicolaus! Talks! Like! Captain! Kirk!

In the buzzing metropolis town of Quinlan, Texas there are maybe four restaurants other than the Sonic. I’m not slighting Sonic in any way, but “restaurant” for the purposes of this discussion are places where you go in and sit down and order your food without the use of a little speaker.

There’s the new mexican restaurant with giant sombreros on the wall. Meh, it was okay. Then there’s Willie’s Westerant, which gets massive points based on the name alone. There’s the Starlight Cafe with the sign outside that says “Open every day” – only the place appears to be totally shut down.

Finally you have Luigi’s. Really nice on the inside, really yummy Italian food. Incredible quality for such a small town. Mmmmm…

Anyway these pictures were taken behind Luigi’s earlier today. Sorry for the rambling restaurant reviews; it’s late and I’m hungry.