Every day I am amazed at how well the kids are doing with their talking. I think they are probably still a little behind the curve, but their progress over the last few weeks is remarkable. What is even more amazing is my ability to glimpse into their little minds now that they can tell me what they are thinking (for the most part).
And what they are thinking changes about every 3.2 seconds.
And usually what they say is completely unrelated to what's going on in the real world.
I'll give you some examples of our conversations over the last few days:
1. The big one for Sadie is talking about the baby elephants at the Animal Park. There are 3 of them under a year, and one of those was born about 3 weeks ago. Since we've been going there about every other day these last few weeks, we have really gotten to know this adorable little 250 lb cutie. (I can also tell you all about the reproduction, health, and care of elephants since I chat it up with the zoo keepers when we are there, and who are on
another pregnancy watch). Sadie
always has to state out the fact that this littlest elephant likes to roll in the dirt. (The elephant did it
once. Once, out of the 10 times we've seen them). Not only will she point this out on the way to and from the Animal Park, but she'll talk about it in the morning when she wakes up, during dinner, and right before bed as well as various random times during the day. Interestingly, she doesn't really care about the baby elephant once we're there looking at her. Overall, Linus doesn't seem nearly as interested in the dirty baby elephant as Sadie is.
(Brian did take out our pictures from Thailand to show the kids this morning, and apparently they were a huge hit. If you would have told me then that the pictures we were taking would be hugely entertaining to our toddler twins 3 years later, I would have had a heart attack).
2. Linus' big interests are trucks and jeeps. This makes for very animated conversation whenever we drive anywhere. And since we are always in the car, and there are always huge trucks on the road as well as road construction just a few hundred yards away from our house, Linus has been in heaven. But, he and Sadie never point out a jeep without referencing Daddy's jeep and the fact that it is green. They seem to ignore the fact that they have never seen it driven and that it's just sitting in the garage collecting all of the junk we have, but I guess that's not the point.

3. Whenever Sadie gets on the phone to talk to grandma, the only thing she says is "shopping". Shopping for what? Your guess is as good as mine. She did, however, bring up shopping out of the blue in the car yesterday. When I asked her what she wanted to shop for, she said "food". When I asked her what kind of food, she said "chicken, hummus, grapes and milk". OK then.
4. Apparently, our new favorite color is yellow. Sadie will only wear yellow socks, and since we only have 2 pairs, this requires either a lot of laundry or she just wears dirty socks. This obsession with yellow has carried over into our new favorite topic of conversation:
5. The potty chair. Yes, I have decided that we should probably have a couple in the house. No, I am definitely not starting the potty training thing with them, but they (OK, mostly Sadie) have a huge interest in anything dealing with the GI tract these days so I thought we might as well experiment. I ordered them online since I just wanted a basic model and couldn't find anything around here that didn't have lights or sing songs, and I let the kids pick out the color that they wanted. So we have 2 yellow potty chairs arriving next week - you'd think they won the lottery they are so excited about them. We'll see how they feel after they try to sit on one. I mean, Linus was excited about the prospect of a bubble bath and we all know how that played out.

6. Also related to all things yellow, is that teaching the kids about colors has been fun but really confusing at the same time. This is because Linus calls Sadie, "Blue". It's very cute and I'm starting to think that maybe she actually will be a Blue when she gets older (which is what I imagined when we named her in the first place, but it didn't really work out that way. What do you think? Sadie or Blue?).

Anyways, this definitely creates confusion. Just last night we were talking about toothbrushes while we were getting ready for bed, and the fact that Linus has a blue one and Sadie has a yellow one. But, Linus doesn't like to mention the noun in which is he referring to (in most situations), he just skips right ahead to the adjectives. So he kept saying: Blue, yellow (aka Sadie Blue's toothbrush is yellow). I thought he was saying his was blue and hers was yellow, but his frustration and anger showed me that I was grossly misinformed. We finally got it straightened out and all was well with the world. For now.
7. The latest funny one happened at the Animal Park today. We were sitting eating our lunch and watching a hummingbird right beside us. Apparently it wasn't a hummingbird, but a "hummus"-bird. Anything to the contrary was just wrong. At least they could point out an Okapi a mile away.

And I'm sure there will be plenty more to come...