Bonfires and Guitar Lessons - Luke is a Hippy!

The most exciting thing that happened this week was the BEAUTIFUL weather on Monday!  It wasn't just warm, it was, dare we say, hot.  Oh yes, you actually could feel a little sweat beginning to form on your body if you were outside too long.  And what did we do with this lovely weather?  Well, bonfire on the beach with friends of course!  Yes sir, our little family trekked over to Golden Garden's Beach and had a great time with some friends grilling hot dogs, eating our body weight in potato chips and inventing a new way to eat smores - put the marshmallow between two chocolate chip cookies!  Luke was particularly excited about the "waty" and had fun making Amit chase him up and down the beach while he managed to get his only pair of clothes soaked.  Fortunately we had a sweatshirt and some friends had some very girly extra pants he could borrow.  But hey!  It's Seattle, no one even looked twice at his clothing choices.

WATY!!!!

So many new places to explore...
So much mud to get on my clothes!

What Daddy?  I'm a toddler!
I'm suppose to get myself wet when you didn't bring any clothes for me!

This week Luke started saying his friends' names all by himself! At daycare he said "Bye bye Marcus" while leaving one day, and another time he said 'Chloe!' when he saw his friend Chloe in the hallway. And whenever we mention his friends' names he repeats them to us with a little smile. He's even started doing this with adults (or almost adults). One of the young men in our ward (Noah) watched Luke for a few minutes during church last week. Now Noah has a small but loyal fan club forming. Luke saw Noah setting up the Sacrament today and kept saying 'Noah!' over and over again. He also started saying it in the middle of church like the crazy boy he is sometimes and made Noah a few rows ahead of us turn around trying to find the person calling him.  Luke also leaned over the pew and kissed the toddler girl behind us on the mouth!  Sure she was leaning over her side and she might have been the one instigating the kiss, but this boy is kissing girls in the middle of church!  *sigh* clearly we need to work on proper church behavior.

Another one of Luke's milestones has been identifying letters and numbers on pages of books, even on some of our books! He was looking over Marinda's shoulder and saw the number "2" on one of the pages and was confused why the number would be in mommy's book.

YAY!

On Wednesday, Marinda and Luke went to the library and got some truck books for Luke. He's been reading them non-stop for the past several days.  His favoriet one is about how a highway is made using trucks - he'll literally ask to read it 10 times in a row.  The Seattle Public Library should probably not plan on getting them back.

"No daddy, it goes 'square circle triangle'. No wonder you're getting that seg fault"

Luke's also really been into yoga. Just check out that downward dog! He sees us exercising, which sometimes included yoga, and he wants to be just like us. In fact, Luke is our little drill sergeant and wants us to do things the right way. If we don't have the yoga mat, he makes us get it before we can keep exercising. And once we get the yoga mat, he wants to be the one to unroll it!

Downward Dog!
Usually he does this move and then shows how he can do it with no hands...

Luke's latest musical adventures have centered on the guitar. Or as he says it, "GHEE-tar". He goes over to the guitar case, says 'guitar', makes Amit get it, and then points to the exact spot on the ground where we wants the case. He and Amit get out the guitar, he strums a little bit, tries to play with the pegs, runs around and a minute later says "away, away." Then he helps put the guitar away, including helping carrying the guitar back!

Com'on Dad!  Let's ROCK!
A one, two, three, FOUR!

In sad news, Marinda got food poisoning Wednesday night. Our best guess right now is that it was from a malignant tomato. Either that, or Amit and Luke have iron stomachs. But unfortunately for Marinda, the week only got worse! The first night she wasn't able to sleep from the food poisoning.  The next night she couldn't sleep from the neck pain from throwing up the day before.  Then the next night she couldn't sleep from her arms hurting from rubbing icy/hot on her neck!  So what we're basically saying is is that Amit is the best dad ever for taking care of Luke while Marinda endured this affliction.  Marinda and Amit did manage to go to Marinda's harp student Gwen's Middle School orchestra concert on Thursday even though Marinda was still feeling pretty week.  Marinda was glad she went though, Gwen did amazing!  Afterwards we went to go get some Pho from one of the 563 thousand Pho shops on The Ave - and after food poisoning it was perfect.

In happy news if you Google Amit Misra he is the FIRST ONE at the top of the list!  Take that Amit Misra Cricket Player!  As further proof that Microsoft is evil, if you do the same search in Bing our Amit is still a couple entries down.  Marinda also spent quite a bit of time working on the two websites she is webmaster for - check them out and tell her how awesome she it!  www.ahsseattle.org and www.ucscuic.org .

Enjoy General Conference this weekend!