Nate's smart little mouth

So a few weekends ago Stewart took the boys to Charlottesville to celebrate Peepa's 78th birthday (I had a prior commitment). I was talking to them on the phone on Saturday and having a choppy speaker-phone "conversation" with Nate. At one point we were talking over each other, then a long pause, and Nate asks me what I was going to say. I told him "I was going to say that I love you and I miss you!" Another long pause, and he replies: "So say it!"

He wasn't trying to be smart, but it had Stewart and I howling.

As a side note, every time we read one of the Thomas the Train books, Jack gets to the page with Sir Topham Hatt and exclaims "Peepa!" I've given up trying to explain. Now Sir Topham Hatt is Peepa. Fine with me.

There was a second thing but for the life of me I've already forgotten it. So I'll go on to write about how it looks like Nate might actually be really smart. It's worrying us. We weren't anticipating it. But Nate keeps stuffing it in our faces, over and over, and we're getting to the point where we just can't ignore it anymore.



In the car a few days ago we were spelling words, one of his favorite things to do. We obviously spelled out Nate and then he asked me to spell out Shane with him (our friend Kari's son who stayed the weekend with us). We did, and then I asked him "What is the only letter from your name that isn't in Shane's name." He thought for a while, and then said "T!" Right on, baby.

Stewart took him on an errand walk yesterday and they were talking about the color of the leaves and Stewart told him that they turn from red to orange to yellow, then die and fall off the tree. Nate totally called him on that nonsense by pointing out the red leaves lying on the ground - that they hadn't turned to any other colors, just red. Genius boy. (He followed this conversation up by narc-ing the leaf-color nonsense out to me and giving me the chance to debunk it.)

He also used a Sesame Street alphabet book to figure out the names of the characters he didn't know - he was able to use the first letter of their names to figure it out (like using "G" to figure out that it was Grover, and "T" to figure out that it was Telly).

And a few days ago he read the word "start." He sounded out all five letters perfectly; he just failed at squshing them together to figure out what the word really said. Progress.