One of Amy’s students gave her a compilation of Johnny Cash songs. She plays it in the car sometimes, on the way to or from work. Truman digs it. His favorite song is “Ring of Fire.” He pretty much knows all the words, too. He always asks for “that fire song” and then he sings along. Awesome! 🙂

I’ll have to get some video of him singing it and post it here…

Tru likes to draw on my Palm. The other day Amy was laying on the couch and I asked Tru to draw a picture of Mama. This is what came out…

Part of Tru’s bedtime routine consists of me laying down in his bed with him and telling him a couple of stories. We always read a few books out in the living room, but when it’s time to lay down, I usually go with him and tell some made-up stories. Often times, when I’m done telling stories, he’ll want to tell me some. The stories he tells are usually the same ones that I just got done telling him, but he puts his own spin on them. The other night I told him a story that included a train engine going to another town to pick up donuts for the station master. When Tru told the same story, he changed the donuts to ‘free cucumbers.’ Kinda says something about his awareness of the seasons, since our garden has had cucumbers out the yin yang and we’ve been giving them away. 🙂

Tru was going pee sometime during the weekend and I was helping him. He was pinching the noodle a little too tight and squeezing off the flow. I advised him to ease up a bit, which he did and everything was fine. When he was done, he kinda sighed heavily and huffed “I don’t want a penis!” (can’t wait to see what kind of search term referals this post brings!)

Tru’s got a bedtime routine. It generally goes like this: bath, jammies, two or three books of his choosing (more on this another time), and then off to bed for a couple more stories that I make up about dinosaurs or other adventures starring him. I started reading him some stuff that I remember being read when I was a kid and two poems have become favorites: Beautiful Soup and The Jumblies. No matter what other story I tell, he usually wants to hear both of these. Beautiful Soup always sends him into fits of laughter–probably because of my falsetto duing the refrain. And he often recites the refrain of The Jumblies as I’m saying it.

Just ran across an old picture of Tru. Figured everyone might dig it…again.

Tru’s figuring out how to navigate the mess that is the English language. The other day he told me that mama could drop him off at daycare and I could drop him on. Makes perfect sense, eh? I remember when my nephew, Benjamin, used to refer to yesterday as “lasterday.” This is a super fun stage–I’ll try to regularly record the funny things Tru comes up with.

Slapped up a few new pics of Tru this evening. His “aunt Amy” came to see him over the long weekend and they had some fun together–the pics are kinda lame, so you’ll have to take my word for it. Tru, unfortunately, got some fever-thing going during the weekend. He went as high as 104°. He was mostly lethargic, punctuated by his usual rowdy self whenever the Motrin broke through. I don’t think the fever had anything to do with aunt Amy, but who knows. I heard she made boys feverish back in the day–maybe she’s still got the mojo. 😀

There are also a couple of pictures of our new purple door. We’re too cheap to buy real paint for the front door, so we used leftover floor paint from the upstairs. Yeah, that’s right. We’ve got a purple floor upstairs.

Here’s a funny little story, not about Tru, but about his cousin Benjamin. Since Benny has a new little sister, his mom and dad needed a little time alone with the baby. So we watched him for a few hours on Saturday. One thing we did was ride bikes to the park down the street. When we got there, Tru and Benny started playing on the equipment, along with a half dozen other kids. Pretty soon I see Benny push another kid over by a slide–typical boy stuff. The other kid kinda stopped and stared at Benjamin. Next thing I know, the kid’s dad is running over there saying “No, no, no, no…” I go over and ask Benjamin to apologize to the kid, which he does. Everything is better and the kids keep playing. I started talking with the other dad, who turns out to be a pretty cool guy. He tells me that his son (who is also 4, like Benjamin) has been taking karate lessons and is a yellow belt. He ran over to the slide yelling “no” because he was afraid his son was going to take down Benny! 🙂

Benny doesn’t know any karate, but if he did, I think it would be pretty funny to watch a couple of four year olds throwing down the full-on kung fu action at the top of a slide in a playground…