Still the puzzle man and the engineer

Tyson doesn't really care about puzzles too much. Cole still loves them. Here he's putting together his "Harry the Dirty Dog" puzzle.

Every now and then I give them some chocolate chips with their peanut butter-smeared waffles. Tyson just scarfs a handful of chocolate chips down. Cole likes to put one in each hole, and tries to convince me that he should have one for EVERY hole in his pancake, no matter that that would be 1/2 a cup of chocolate chips. He likes things precise.

A funny story: Cole has had croup several times in the last year. The first time we wound up in the ER because we didn't catch it early enough. If you know about croup, you know that at the first sound of the "barking seal" cough you wisk them into the bathroom and steam it up with the hot water on full blast and the door closed, then out into the cold night, then back again and so forth until they're not wheezing anymore. It almost always happens in the middle of the night too. We've had to do this probably 4 times in the last year so we have it down to a science. Unfortunately if it's not cold outside you have to find another source of cold air. The freezer is a good one, but convincing a sleepy, wheezing 3-year-old to stick their head in the freezer can be impossible. So a few months ago when our latest bout of croup hit at 3AM we steamed up the bathroom and had to go the freezer route. I decided the only way to get him to look in it was to interest him in what was in there. So I asked him to name everything he could of what was on each shelf. Surprisingly he obliged and we went through the whole freezer, then back to the bathroom, then back to the freezer for another round, then back to the bathroom. I was exhausted and so was he, but while walking back to the freezer he croaks out, "Mom, this is fun!" Glad someone was enjoying it :).