Ethan's Baby GPS abilities are something well known and documented in our family.  If we go to karate he can tell us the minute we turn on to Airport Road.  If we venture out to Panera, he can spot it literally a mile away.  It is pretty delightful to listen to him ask us questions about where we are going and then a few weeks later have him put those answers into action and announce our destination well before we get there.

Recently though Ethan and I were riding back from karate when I decided to ask him about his X-Men-level ability.  His answer stunned me and proved, beyond a doubt, that Ethan is one smart little booger.  Here is how this conversation went:

Me: Hey Beeth, how do you figure out where we are going?
Beeth: Trees and Wires and Poles.
Me: What?
Beeth: Daddy I see the trees and wires and poles with wires.

After a second or two I figured out what he meant.  Because he is still a little dude, he can't really see all that well when in the back seat and jammed into a car seat his view is not great.  But he can see tree branches, electrical wires, and telephone poles.  The thing that really blows me away is that these aren't the most unique items to use to get your bearings.  I can only imagine the memory horsepower necessary for Beeth to figure out where we are going this way.  Even crazier?  He can do this when we are many, many miles away from home, as far away as Worcester. 

That's a lot of tree branches in a little guy brain. 

Thanks to a weirdly long time between Thanksgiving and the first of December we went to Edaville the weekend after Thanksgiving.  It was cold, of course, but not bone chilling cold.  There were a number of upgrades (including a Chik Fil A truck) and the boys all had a ton of fun.  Beeth was still too little to ride Thomas’s Runaway Coaster, but he could do almost everything else.  We opened the park up and left at closing, making it seven hours of frigid amusement park fun.

We did two train rides, hitting one during the daylight and another at the very end of the evening.  On that last ride we secured the highly coveted caboose second story with all four boys (and their Poppa Dom) riding in the super cramped space.

Beeth, Myles and I rode the scariest ride in the park, the Ferris Wheel.  It was cold, windy, and dark—a perfect Christmas time in New England evening.  As things wound down we spent a perilous half hour in the play area where Bro Bro had to literally carry his brother through the course.

It was only AFTER we finished did Mom and Beeth reveal that Beeth had done the course on his own prior to Isaac’s arrival.  The last few minutes of the evening were pictures.  Here is one of all four cousins:

Finally, it wouldn’t be a trip to Edaville without Ethan racking the Beeth:

Merry Christmas! And WE LOVE EDAVILLE.

No we aren't on a charades kick at 53 Hancock St.  No, we are in the phase of language acquisition where Ethan is sucking up new words faster than we can throw at him.  I have had to bust out the big guns with stuff like a grocery store line discussion of the differences between "omnivores, carnivores, and herbivores."  At some point, like with Isaac, we will stray into taxonomy because all of my normal-use big words have been explained.  Pachycephalosauridae anyone?

This past two weeks has Ethan fixated on two words: bro and dope.  Yes.  You read that correctly.  In part it is because his big brother, who is infinitely cool, drops those words like gray clouds drop rain.  But it is also because those words work in so many different ways.

But the funny part of this is that Isaac himself was obsessed with the word "dope" (as in cool or interesting not either the dumb person or the drug).  But Isaac swore for probably three or four weeks when he first heard the word that it was "doke."  I tried to softly redirect him to the right word and I tried to show him examples of it being used.  But until his friends corrected me, Isaac assumed that I was an out of touch, geezer. 

Now Ethan is laboring under a mispronunciation.  Its not dope or even doke, its...wait for it...dofe.  What?  How did he get that out of the letters d-o-p-e?  Well, it doesn't matter because, for now, Ethan thinks it is dofe.  Eventually, I am sure, he will hear Captain Cool (Isaac) say it correctly and all of a sudden he will not yell and scream when we tell him that it is dope. 

So you, two words, sounds like DOPE.