I am daily amazed at the new things these chubby fingers learn to do. On Tuesday Colin helped me make tamales. I mean, actually helped make them. He always wants to sit on a barstool and watch what I'm doing and this afternoon was no different. I plopped him up there and went back to work on dinner, but he insisted on having his own corn husk. "Okay," I thought, "you can have a little piece of one." Then he pointed to the masa and said, "some a that," so I gave him a bit. And then he really shocked me.
He said, "mash, mash" as he smoothed it out, then said, "some meat," took a bit and put it in the middle of the tamale, said "I fold it," folded the thing in half and said "put on pan" as he held it out to me to stack with the rest I had made.
I was absolutely floored! Just by observing me, without any prompting he had completed all the necessary steps to make a tamale! Um, wow!
Needless to say, my little sous chef was hired and got to help for as long as he wanted! I couldn't have been more proud and saved and showed off two of the little tamales to his daddy and our friends when they arrived!
Today, he stunned me again when he brought me this little goose he had been playing with. He had found a tiny piece of paper and had figured out how to make it say in the goose's mouth! He always pretends he is feeding all his animals, but I thought this was so creative!
Here it is with a duck, "swimming" on the water!
Such a clever little man!
He pet a couple of the racoons too.
And watched the fish for a while. You can see partly here his first really fat lip. I'll try to get a good picture of it maybe tomorrow and tell you the whole story ~ let's just say that Colin and I both had a lot of blood to wash off us at church Sunday morning.
Here's a closer picture. I think if you didn't look at him all the time he wouldn't even look that bad from the outside. But it's pretty bad when you look in his mouth still.
At least three dozen times while we were there, Colin said this poem from a book David got him for Christmas. I don't know why I didn't think to record it then, but I did get a relatively decent rendition of it this morning...not as enunciated as he's done it before, but definitely better than his usual silence in front of the video camera lately.
There are a lot of awesome kits (25 actually) that have been entered and if you're curious, you can check them out at the store blog here.
Here it is with a duck, "swimming" on the water!
Such a clever little man!
First time down the hill.
Sled dog?
Michael, Colin, and Faith.
My daddy, working hard!
Explaining to Colin how to sit on this one!
Dad.
Two of the cutest sisters ever (two oldest of my cousin's three girls)!
Showing Colin the first (of many) snowballs.
Braving the toboggan. :)
Thanks Grandpa! What a great day!
Trying to capture the falling snow and the tree.
Mom's beautiful nativity scene, made by my aunt Nola.
Grandpa Kermit reading books.
And my sweet husband.
Taking the first trip down the snow slide we built.
And the snowball fight ensues...
Poor sister!
If you look carefully, you can see a snowball about to hit Colin. He was pretty determined to hit each of us with one too. He'd carefully get a snowball and then get as close as he could and throw it at us! So cute!
