I’m studying for my final finals this weekend, but wanted to take a second to post a few quick pictures I took of Brenden around the house this past Friday morning.

He is absolutely in love with cars and trains all of the sudden.

Honest,  he climbed in by himself! He does it every once in a while and I’ve been trying to catch it on camera, but he usually sees the camera and jumps out to grab it. I told Patrick we should use this one on our Christmas cards this year!

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Brenden has discovered the joy of washing dishes. Now every time someone washes their hands in the kitchen sink he thinks he needs to pull a chair over and stand there to wash up all his cups.

He also loves to throw trash into the trash can. One day he found a piece of trash under our recliner and ran as fast as he could to the trash can to throw it away. If asked to throw something away he generally will.

For about a month or two now whenever asked if he needs his diaper changed he will go back to his room where the changing table is. Of course once there, he usually gets distracted by a toy, but hey.

Here is a picture of him washing dishes. Note that the water MUST be left running just a smidge.

And here is his best Minnie Pearl impersonation. My Mom bought him this hat for our upcoming vacation and he wore around the house tags and all. It is hard to tell, but he is actually hanging on to the tag in the picture.

We had a fun weekend. We had a playdate with a friend and his son on Sat. and the boys actually played together a little.  They are about 6 months apart, Brenden being the younger. I don’t want to rush a minute of Brenden’s growing up, but I did start to get excited about some of the changes that may be coming soon!

Sun was a birthday party for 5 year old in Patrick’s family. It was fun and loud and Brenden enjoyed it until he got too sleepy at the end.

We’ve been working hard over the course of the weekend to try and eliminate the bottle completely. I know I know, he should be off it by now! I’ve been going back and forth between feeling bad that he’s not and feeling like I know my child better than everyone that has picked some arbitrary age kids should suddenly not need a bottle. But his pediatrician said by 18 months was the hard deadline and that is at the end of Oct, so I gotta get crackin’. Plus, his bottles are starting to become hard to get really clean and we are going to travel mid month so it would just be easier. He’s taken a cup with meals for a long time, but the rest of the day has always wanted the bottle. It’s gone fairly well and I know any difficulties we are having are because of bad habits we allowed. He’s getting much better about taking the cup even when it isn’t meal time. I got him a set of cups with straws and lids and that seems to be helping him.
I do remember that I promised to have a video soon, and just as soon as I get time to edit it, I’ll get it posted.

The boys hard at play on Sat.

Brenden getting in on the birthday party action.

Sleepy boy about to crash.

Patrick actually had a lot of pictures on his phone, so I thought I’d share some fun ones.

Brenden and squinty on top of Mt. Evans.

One of the 3 Mt. Goats Gruff.

Waterfall we saw before eating lunch.

Like mother like son-Patrick snuck a picture of Brenden and I sleeping in the car on the way home. I didn’t even know he’d done that until I was looking at the pictures tonight.