Aiden might be not quite a year and a half old, but he’s already a big brother. And he’s a darn good one, too. He’ll fight his older brothers over any toy in the house, but he treats his baby sister with a tenderness that I didn’t know he had in him. He’s very loving and respectful. And I think he likes saying her name. “Kylie. Kylie. Kylie.” It just might be his favorite word.

Not that his vocabulary is at all limited. He will happily repeat full sentences, and he loves long words. He saw a helicopter on television tonight, and he pointed and gleefully said “helicopter” every time it came on the screen. When it disappeared, he got off my lap and made a beeline for the buttons on the set, trying to find the one that would bring the helicopter back. When that didn’t work, he checked behind the TV, just in case.

He’s been an adrenaline junkie since he was very small, and I think he’s getting worse. He loves to be tossed around, and once you start you’d better not stop. If no one will throw him over their shoulders or slam him down on the couch, he’ll take matters into his own hands. He loves spinning, and making himself dizzy, and then trying to walk and falling down. He doesn’t seem to get tired of doing it, even after it starts making the spectators a bit nauseous.

It’s a really funny trick. And I think he knows it. Besides being a daredevil, he’s also a born clown. He’s a sideshow unto himself.

He’s a little obsessive about some things, too. When David dared to take his baseball cap off tonight, Aiden picked it up and handed it back to him, saying with great urgency and insistence, “Hat on!” What could David do? He put it back on.

Somehow between last night at basketball practice and tonight when he wanted to play rock-paper-scissors for hours (and I was willing, until he started making up his own rules), D.J. has lost a front tooth. When I walked into the house tonight, he told me, “I took my tooth out today,” as if he’d just been waiting for the right day. I’m not sure a week before Thanksgiving is the time I’d be wanting to take my teeth out, but he’s only six and doesn’t have that big an appetite.