Good little traveler

Carter is such a good traveler, and we're constantly amazed by him when we go on trips. Today he took his 63rd and 64th flights as we headed up to Kansas City to catch a friend in a musical version of A Christmas Story ("You'll shoot your eye out!") in a pre-Broadway run. He knows exactly what to do on airplanes, and he will basically sit in our laps and hang out. He likes to watch the take-off and landing, and talks about flying "into the clouds" and "up up in the sky". He will talk about the airplane ride for days afterward, which is really interesting. He's still talking about our Disneyworld trip. I know he's at the age where some memories might start to stick, but it's interesting to start seeing him really remember things that happen day-to-day.

We're just here for tonight and will be heading home tomorrow, so it's a quick trip. It's pretty cold, but cold means cute bundling up:



We had lunch in a chain Italian restaurant, the sort where they cover the tables with white paper and bring the kids crayons. Happily, Carter is now at an age where he wants to color and draw with those crayons, rather than eat them. This makes it a lot easier to entertain him while we're waiting for the food to come! He will request that I draw certain things, and I do my best. I'm getting good at trucks, trains, and bikes, now. :-P

I decided to write down random letters of the alphabet to see if he could identify them, and to our surprise, he could identify about half of the alphabet, along with about half of the numerals between 1 and 9. He's soaking things up so fast it's hard to keep up! Almost every day he'll surprise us with a word we didn't know he knew. He has a huge vocabulary, but he's just now starting to string together more than 2 words at a time. He's also using phrases like "I'm ___" and "I'm not ___" to describe what he's doing. Like he'll fall down and say, "I'm fine", or he'll get in a corner or something and say, "I'm not stuck." He's also using plurals and singulars very consistently, and it's so cute to watch him make sense of it all. He'll see two bottles of water and say, "two waters", for example. He seems to use double negatives a lot too, as in, "No no go" or "no no help".

When we got to the hotel, we had a bit of a wait while Doug checked us in, so I got him out of the stroller and let him walk around the lobby. When it was time to go up to the room, he wanted to pull a suitcase like everyone else, so we gave him the lightest rollaboard, and he pulled it all the way to the elevators, then down the hall and into the room! A little later he and I took an empty suitcase for a walk, and he completely charmed everyone in the lobby by pulling it all around and saying, "I pull suitcase!" I got a bit of this on video with my phone:



So cute! He was okay, btw. He was just frustrated that the suitcase got stuck going around the corner.

I have misplaced my camera, and so I won't be able to post cute snow pictures until I find it. We just got about 20 minutes of snow, but enough for Carter to go outside and see it!