Let me tell you about my kids

The other day, Ryan wrote himself a couple of todo lists and posted them on the kitchen window. He wrote the whole thing himself without asking how to spell anything. This is exactly how he wrote it:

I have to bo this in the mornen

• breakfast
• get drest
• teeth
• hair
• then you can play

I have to do this in the evnen

• homework
• eat dinner
• then you can play
• have storys
• go to bed

Some other little things about my kids that I don't want to forget as they get older:

• When Ryan was just learning to speak, he said his own name "yaya". When Nicholas was learning to speak, he called himself "nick-is" and pronounced Ryan "I-yan".
• When Ryan was about 2, we got a babysitter for him so that Gail and I could go out. The girl next door, Lindsay, arrived as Ryan was finishing his dinner. She sat down beside him and said hi. He stopped eating, looked at her for a few seconds, and then told her matter-of-factly "You don't have a penis". Without blinking an eye, she confirmed his suspicions, and he continued with his dinner, apparently satisfied.
• When both the boys were babies, they would sit in their high chair with their legs crossed.
• When Gail was pregnant with Nicholas, we narrowed the list of boys names down to two - Eric and Nicholas. We asked Ryan to make the final decision, and he chose Nicholas. We picked Sean as a middle name just because we liked it. The girls name we had chosen (before Ryan was born) was Amy Catherine.
• When we first brought Nicholas home from the hospital, Ryan kept forgetting his name, and called him "that guy" for a day or two.
• The word that took the longest to say correctly was "garbage". Ryan always said "gar-jib", and when Nicholas was learning to talk, he learned to say "gar-jib" too. Ryan started saying it correctly just a few weeks later, but Nicholas kept saying it incorrectly for another year and a half.