It's Jeff's Fault!

See, the good pictures are on his camera or on his hard drive, and he hasn't been blogging much lately. The extra step of actually getting the pictures off his hard drive--that's just waaaaay too much for me to deal with. Forget that the hard drive is smaller than my wallet. Somehow just getting that thing up the stairs to my "office" in our bedroom--way too much work for me.

So we will post pictures of Zack's birthday and other various gorgeous shots. In the meantime, here's one from yesterday. I picked Zack up early from daycare, and we strolled over to the fire station. The guys there were so nice.

And for some reason they had this thing there. Cute. Note the rubber ball placed over the highly dangerous spear on the side.

Today I had a meeting to discuss Zack's evaluation at daycare. They do a very elaborate binder with tons of pictures and all these categories that they evaluate. So there was, for example, a section about "problem solving" and there was an anecdote about how Zack wanted a toy that was on the other side of the fence, in the pre-school area. When he realized he couldn't get the toy over the fence, he played with it through the fence. And then, there was a picture of him doing this. Every category was similarly illustrated with stories and pictures. In the part about how he could name all the shapes and colors, there was a little picture of him looking at some shapes and colors. I was so touched by how much Zack's teacher notices about him, and how she really put so much work into this binder. Too bad I can't take it home. It was really wonderful.

Also I loved how the evals were more story based--just a way to illustrate specifics about what your kid is doing, but not number grades or anything. She did mention that he knows all the colors, shapes, and letters, which is somewhat impressive, I guess. She was slightly concerned that he plays by himself a lot. But he's apparently been more social lately.

Too bad his best friend moved away to Chicago! I am sad every day when I pick Zack up now that we don't see Brandon, but all in all, I just love Zack's school.

I think all of you on the East Coast will be amazed at how much Zack says these days. He put on my sunglasses a couple days ago and declared himself, "So glamorous!"

But maybe these things are not a surprise to people who have already had kids and seen all this progress. For me every day is still unbelievably amazing. We went to Target yesterday, and Zack said, "Excuse me," to everyone we met. And he also said, "Thank you," to the cashiers.

We got his hair cut (and yes, we'll post pictures) and he HATED that. Cried and cried. And then we got his teeth cleaned and that was much, much worse. But still, at the end of both of those horrible experiences, he said, "Thank you!" So polite. He also likes to say, "Thank you so much!"

Some of his language stuff is still very funny, because he says what he hears in certain contexts. So if he falls, he says what he hears people say to him. So he sits there crying and says, "Are you okay? Are you all right?" When he wants to play chase, he just starts running and says, "Iiiiiiiiii'm chasing you!" It doesn't really matter who is chasing whom. Just the act of chasing means we hear, "I'm chasing you!"

The other funny thing about Zack lately is that me must have a car with him at all times. When he wakes up, he asks immediately for his car. He will not let go of it at school, so Jeff writes, "ZACK" on it. And now Zack loves that and says, "That says ZACK!" When he eats, Zack will put his car down, but it will still get covered with food because he plays with it all during his meal. So I have to wash his hands and his car. If we go out, we'll say, "Zack, we're off to the park," and Zack will quickly grab a car or two and head out the door. And...I guess this is becoming a bit of a "thing" in daycare--the only touchy issue at our meeting today--so we've been asked to pry the cars away when he arrives. We'll see how that goes....