A few funnies from the big guy

• Cole hopped off the potty so I could wipe him. He always likes to look at what he's done and said, "Big poo!" . "Mom, can you eat poo?" I'm laughing by this point but he has no idea why. "No, honey, poo isMe, impatient as usual because I hate wiping, "Yep! Now lean over." Cole keeps looking at the poo and says thoughtfully, "Mom, there's carrots in the poo." I start giggling because he's very serious and it's so funny gross." Not satisfied he asks so innocently, "Can you eat the CARROTS out of the poo?" I'm rolling on the floor by this point.

• The boys were playing with the box of sand on the driveway and I got a towel to put under it to help catch the spilled sand to put back in the box. I laid it down, put the sand on top of it, and Cole says, "We can sit on the towel too! It makes us warm and happy." :)

• I hear him getting upset with Tyson and he says, "Don't break my beautiful train! My beautiful train!"

• Cole woke up one night crying uncontrollably. This happens every so often and eventually he calms down one way or the other. I couldn't get him to tell me what was wrong (not unusual) because he's not really awake, but finally he said, "I want the song about the food!" I mentally searched for what he could be talking about. "The fruit of the Spirit song?" I ask. "Yeeeeaaaahhh", he wails. So I sang it, and he went right back to sleep. Thank you Twin Lakes!

• During the Missions Conference weekend in March the boys were in the nursery a lot so they heard the term "missions conference" a lot as I tried to explain to them where we were. A few weeks later Cole asks out of the blue very serioiusly, "Mom, is the Missions Conference this weekend?" I guess he was trying to decide if the weekend would be a good one or not :).

• I prefer to go to the grocery store by myself, but often the boys are with me. The book "Cars and Trucks and Things that Go" has been a perpetual favorite for both boys, and Cole loves the exchanges between Officer Flossie and the bad driver Dingo the dog who Officer Flossie chases all through the book. For months every time we went shopping he would hang on the side of the cart, then get off when I stopped, and when I started again he would start yelling, "Officer Flossie! Officer Flossie!" and come running to jump on the cart again. I'm not sure quite how the shopping trip mimicked Officer Flossie chasing Dingo, but I heard "Officer Flossie!" many times while winding up and down the aisles.

• The boys' favorite thing about the store is going to see "The Nobbers and The Cobbers." It took me awhile to figure out what this term referred to when Cole first asked me if we could go see them. You're confused as well? It means "The lobsters and the crabs." He can say both words just fine, but somewhere in there the seafood counter has come to be known as seeing "The Nobbers and the Cobbers." I still hear it referred to this way :).

• Cole loves telling stories, and they almost always revolve around animals of many various species and the Natchez Trace. They usually start something like, "Mom, one day last week I was driving with Freeman on The Trace, and we saw a deer eating a fox who was climbing up a tree, and the tree was walking down by the water and the...." and just get yourself a drink and pull up a chair because these stories go on for a looong time. They don't even make sense most of the time, but they're chock full of animals doing all sorts of crazy things, almost always seen while he was "driving on the Trace." The Trace is Cole's Narnia. We HAVE seen some deer and a fox on the Trace, and that has built for Cole a whole world of animals that live on the Trace. One night Thomas was commenting on what was on TV while Cole was playing in his room. "Without a Trace" is on, he said. Cole comes running into the room and goes straight to Thomas and asks very earnestly, "DAD, what did you say about THE TRACE?"