World's Youngest Granny & The Alphabet

This past weekend we went to visit Granny and Grandad for Granny's surprise 50th birthday party. Today is her actual birthday, so Happy Birthday to the youngest, hippest "Granny" I've ever met :) The boys had a blast riding their bikes all around Granny and Grandad's huge driveway. They impressed Grandad with their curiosity in wanting to know (and being able to identify some of) the letters on the license plates on the cars. They were also able to correctly identify Granny, Grandad, and Uncle Patrick! Before our visit we spent some time brushing up with one of our wedding photos, and I think that the boys are developing a pretty solid long-term memory as well.

Both boys now call us "Mommy" and "Daddy". It is very heartwarming. Joshua even says "Mommy, I do!" which I'm pretty sure means "Mommy, I love you!" He has a big smile and looks so proud every time he says it, and sometimes it's accompanied by a kiss, too :)

These days the boys are completely fascinated with the letters of the alphabet. They can say about a dozen letters and can identify most of the others. Sometimes they mix up the pronounciations for "M" & "N" and "B" & "P" but they get the general idea. We haven't pushed them to learn their alphabet at all. After all, we never would have guessed they'd even be remotely interested in learning the alphabet before age 2. It all started with the boys pointing to the text in their books and asking "Da? da?" which means "what is it?" At first we'd just tell them, "Those are words" but they would get increasingly frustrated with us and we eventually realized they wanted to know what the individual letters were called. Last week we got them a simple wooden alphabet puzzle and it now seems to rank among one of their most-played-with toys. When we're out running errands the boys will see different letters on store signs and read parts of them to us. For instance, today we drove through a BB&T bank parking lot and Caleb shouted out "B!" And the other night we were at Safeway and Joshua saw the Y at the end of the big sign in front of the store and shouted out "Y!"