A lot has happened since our last post! It's been a very good, very busy year so far. Some fun first time experiences - ice skating and strawberry picking - and nice trips and visits with family in Texas and North Carolina. We spent a fun, cold weekend at Colonial Williamsburg with Jim's sister and her family in January and are currently on a more exotic trip to eastern Washington for the marriage celebration of dear friends from graduate school. It's been fun to hear Sylvan tell friends and teachers at school that he's going to Washington STATE. Thankfully he's a good traveler so the 5 hour flight and drive from Seattle through the mountains is an adventure, not a curse. Developmentally we are plowing through the milestones! After months of gentle suggestion Sylvan volunteered to give his pacifiers to a friend's new baby, who somehow hadn't found any that she liked so well as Sylvan's. And similarly, after more than a year of suggesting, cajoling, and dabbling, he made a clean break from pull-ups and diapers, with only a single accident in the last six weeks. The big lesson for us is that this boy is immune to the arts of persuasion and bribery when it comes to big decisions. He'll make a move when he's good and ready! Now if only he would decide he wants to sleep in his own bed... We continue to marvel at Sylvan's creativity and imagination. He's very good at entertaining himself, and the stories and scenarios he invents are pretty fantastic. They often relate to something he's recently learned at school or experienced with us (for example, he recently built a series of piers out of Legos after a visit to DC's new Wharf development), but the characters take it to another level. His current imaginary friend is his "ice friend," which we think is derived from one of the fairies in Fantasia (yes, the old Disney film from the 1950s). He still loves ANY sort of vehicle and especially fire and emergency ones, so his stories often involve complex mixes of his parents or his "babies" participating in a daring rescue or preparing for one - he's big on fire safety. He's recently started talking about what he wants to be when he grows up - current plan is Daddy Dentist, but we'll keep you posted!