I’m usually the first person awake during weekdays. I’ll make coffee, have a bowl of cereal and read a bit, or check email, etc. Lately, Truman has been waking up kinda early at least once a week. A couple of times he’s stumbled out into the living room mumbling something. When I ask him to repeat, he says, “Dad, would you hook me up with some corn flakes?” So I do.

After work I picked up Truman at his friend Ethan’s house. When I got there, Tru and Ethan and their friends Emma and Mykel were having a little jam session. Tru was on drums, Ethan on the trumpet, Emma on some kind of whistle and Mykel on guitar. It was caucaphonolicious. When they were done, I asked what song they were playing. Emma identified the song as “I’ve Been Working on the Railroad.” Truman and Ethan immediately objected. I asked them what the song was and Truman piped up, “The Knowledge Airplane Airplane of Knowledge.”

I have no idea what that means.

Today Truman got a little frustrated that I wouldn’t read to him on command. So he said he wanted to learn to read. We sat down for a few minutes and worked through some stuff. He’s not bad at reading the letters and sounding things out. “Elastigirl” might be his favorite word.

Well, anyway, this evening we went out and got some ice cream at the store. Mint Chocolate Chip to be precise. Tru wanted to know what we bought and I told him. Then I asked him to spell “mint.” He was just sitting in the backseat, not looking at anything and he sounded it out and came up with m-y-n-t.

He amazes me daily.

(ps: new pics up today)

Been meaning to write this for days, so it’s a little overdue. Last Thursday Truman decided that it was time to take the training wheels off his bike. I performed the requested maintenance and Truman hopped on and rode away. He’s a two wheel bike boy now!

I’ve got some video of the event and more of the next day when we went to the church parking lot down the street (where he learned to ride the two wheel scooter). I’ll get that stuff up here soon.

Now that Tru’s a two wheel guy, he hangs out with the bigger kids who ride the parking lot. One dude asked me how old Tru was. When I told him ‘four’, his eyes got big.

“Four?”, he said, “I didn’t learn how to ride a two wheeler until I was eight!”

“How old are you now?”, I asked.

“Nine.”

That seems to be the general response. I’m not too surprised, considering his good balance, but I have to admit, he does look like he belongs in a circus sideshow…

Yeah, Matt, next up is a skateboard… 🙂

Tru learned how to ride a two-wheel scooter today. Check it out (3.2mb .mov). In order to keep the file size small-ish, I chopped the framerate down a bit so the vid looks a little choppy. Probably a better way, but I’m still figuring out iMovie.

Anyway Tru’s been kinda working on the scooter for a few days, but today it really clicked in. He was stoked enough about it that he asked if we could go home and get the video camera. Next step: skateboard!

Let’s see, what else…oh yeah, we ordered a poster from Qoop.com and got it today. Look here. And this is the portrait of Tru heading out the door for his first day of preschool yesterday. He did pretty well at preschool, apparently. Only two fights and he won both. I think watching all those kung fu movies is really paying off… 🙂

Tru’s temper has been getting a little quick on the draw when he thinks someone is making fun of him. So today we tried working on alternative strategies for when he knows he’s getting mad. His base reaction is to stick his tongue out or spit at someone. That’s bad enough, but his “spider sense” about when people are making fun of him isn’t quite fully developed. Either that or he’s paranoid.

Anyway, I was coaching him on learning to stop when he felt himself getting mad, and then telling the person he’s mad at to “please stop because it’s hurting my feelings”. I told him that I was going to tease him and make him mad and that he had to try to stay calm and ask me to stop.

Instead what I got was, “Please stop or I’ll have to call you underpants head!”

Truman just told me that God can eat 100 waffles without throwing up.

We had this conversation because I’d eaten two waffles and he was checking into how many I could possibly eat. He asked if I could eat eight waffles and I told him that if I ate eight waffles, I’d probably throw up. That’s when I was informed that God has no such limits.

We were in Redmond over the weekend. Amy was teaching for the university, so Tru and I hung out a bit. He’s got a pretty nice cast… I took a few vid clips with the camera, which I’ll post later…

We went to see that new Winnie the Pooh movie today. It was Tru’s first time at a movie theater and he was a little bit in awe. We went with my sister, two of her kids and our friend Heidi and her daughter. The best part was that we had the whole theater to ourselves!

We kinda talked about the whole experience with Tru when we got out of the theater. We said, “That was a big screen, huh?” Tru said, “Yeah, it’s bigger than God!” 🙂