echoes of Halloween at Fashion Square Mall

bb: What are these things?

me: They're called mannequins.

bb: What are they doing there?

me: They're showing us how these clothes look.

bb: Why they don't have heads?

me: I think you're supposed to picture your own head if you like the clothes.

bb: I like those clothes!

me: Well, sweetheart, those are women's clothes...

bb: If we had a zombie, he could take off his head and put it on the mannequin!

Halloween 2008

Ladies and gentlemen, Gargoyle Marcus:





Last year, of course, he was a little monkey.

- papa

a new friend from Notre Dame

Gargoyle Marcus

Benjamin: "What's your name, papa?"

Me: "Brian, but not too many people call me that. What's your name?"

Benjamin: "Gargoyle Marcus."

The boy seems to have 2 categories of obsession: what he is to be called (Tiger, Monkey, Gargoyle) and what everything else is to be called (robot, tractor). Right now he's a gargoyle and everything else is a tractor.

HOWEVER, I'm starting to suspect that he understands the word "tractor" to mean "tool," because I talk about digging tractors, plowing tractors, dirt-moving tractors, lifting tractors, etc.

Benjamin: "That a tractor, papa."

Me: "These are scissors."

Benjamin: "That a tractor for cutting."

- papa

2 years old

Thanks grandma and Jerry for this great photo of the boytiger 2 days before his birthday:

- papa

PS Sammy asks what Benjamin is doing with the stick. Maman informs me that it was his trumpet.

His 2 strongest themes right now are tigers and trumpets.

Why trumpets? Because of Trotro, of course:

Benben se deguise

Benjamin doesn't watch TV on a TV set, but we do let him watch short videos originally from French television that we can download from the Internet. His favorite by far is L'Ane Trotro and right now his favorite episode is "Trotro se déguise" where Trotro dresses up as a tiger and announces "Je suis un tigre!"





Benben has been announcing the same to us for the past few days, in French and English.



When he was pretending to vacuum last night, I said, "I thought you said you were a tiger. Tiger's don't vacuum!"

He replied, "I'm a tiger vacuum!"