Maybe I should stop quoting every clever thing Aiden says and just accept the fact that he talks like a three-year-old (at least, even though he just turned two last month). I mean, I’m still blown away by the complex sentence structure and nonlinear thought processes, but I’m not sure it translates well to the page.

Last night I spent a couple of hours with him and Kylie and David. Tammy is out of town for the weekend, so David is kind of stuck with the two little ones. Not that he minds, of course. He’s the best daddy in the world, but I was happy to absorb some of the toddler witticisms and deflect a little of the energy for a while.

Actually, Aiden was asleep on the sofa when I walked in. It looked as if he’d be out for a long while, but a few minutes after I sat down and started talking to David, he woke up as if by magic and without even turning over said, “Hi, Uncle Mike.” And it wasn’t two minutes before he said, “Will you play cars with me? I have to go the little cars.” And we raced matchbox cars around the living room carpet for a few minutes.

When David went out on the patio to put steaks on the grill, Aiden followed and put a stick on his toy version. “I’m barbecuing a steak,” he told me. “I need to put ketchup and mustard on it. Sit on the bench and I’ll bring you a steak.” It was a long stick, so he sat next to me and ate the other end while I enjoyed my half. “I need more ketchup,” he announced, then got up and got some.

He loves to play with water (who doesn’t?). He said “Where’s my watering can, Uncle Mike?” I pointed it out to him, and he said, “I need to get some water in it. The faucet is stuck. Can you help me?” So I helped him put some water in his watering can, and he said, “I’m going to water the flowers’ mud,” which is a sort of charming way to describe that aspect of gardening.

When I was getting ready to leave, he was jumping up and down on the sofa next to me. “I’m kind of bouncy,” he said, “like Tigger.”

Kylie is getting to the stage where she chatters baby nonsense syllables (whole sentences, actually). She’s standing and walking around the furniture now, but I haven’t seen her stand on her own yet (although I’ve heard that she’s done it, at least once, probably by accident). She gets around well enough by crawling, and she’ll even crawl in my direction, but she won’t quite come all the way. At her age, or a little younger even, Aiden was crawling over me as I sat on the floor. Little sister has a more cautious type of personality, but we’ll get there.