Max is a train lover. Every morning he drags us into the dining room to turn on the lights so he can play trains.
He is just starting to be able to make tracks fit together and he gets frustrated quickly when they don't fit.
He also loves to make "long long" trains by connecting lots of cars.
And he likes to sit on the train table. Always.
Ella: Max, I am going to get you ready for bed. Do you want a Mohawk or a Malfoy?
Max (grinning): A Malfoy!
Max is generally a cheerful, grinning little guy but he also has a pitiful personna that he adopts when he wants something. Usually it is more of a food that he wants, most famously hot dogs as one evening at dinner after eating one whole hot dog, he asked for another and upon being denied, he sat at the table looking pitiful and moaning "Hot. Dog. Hotttt doggg" over and over (and over again. For a good 10 minutes). Today, his pitiful expression and plaintive pleas were focused on kettle corn we got at the beach farmer's market. I don't love his whine, but his pitiful face is awfully adorable.
We recently moved around some rooms with the net effect of now having our downstairs guest room (on the kids level of the house, or as Dash calls it "Kid World") now having a bed and a couch in it and, crucially, no longer serving as my home office. The kids couldn't resist the temptation to move into the clean, spare space, and after a day or so of fort building, sleeping, and playing in there, Ella told me that it looked like a teenager's room. I have no idea where her notion of teenager rooms comes from and I suspect it gets a lot worse than this. But for now, we have our own version of a teenager's room in Kid World.
For Father's Day, Josh wanted to take a walk in the woods. So off we went to the Duke cross-country trail where the heat and humidity were mostly blocked by the tree canopy, and the kids discovered that running down really steep hills is awfully fun.
