A little Brayden update

Oooooeeeee...my little grandson is now almost 3 years old (March 1st!). This little guy changes almost daily -- whether in his vocabulary, his counting, his desire to learn, or his wicked (can you tell I'm from New Hampshire?) sense of humor, every day is an adventure with this child. Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. I'm flattered. This is what Brayden was "working on" today: Yes, I've been knitting socks again. Brayden loves to watch me knit and sometimes sits in my lap and I put some yarn on needles for him to play with. Today he gathered up his yarn and needles, sat on the couch by himself, and "knit" away. I asked him what he was working on... "Socks for Umpa." Awwww... Then Umpa walked into the room, and Brayden promptly pipes up, "Umpa, don't pull my stitches off!" LOL I've mentioned before that Brayden has shown great interest in learning his letters and numbers, so yesterday was our first official 30 minutes of preschool type activities. We read his favorite monkey book, "Ten Little Monkeys" and talked about the numbers, then we did this activity that I found on a great blog called Ramblings of a Crazy Woman. I printed off the five snowman print-outs found here, then put one "button" and the number 1 on the first, two "buttons" and the number two on the second, etc. Then I made little hats with the same numbers, 1 thru 5. I had Brayden count the number of buttons on the snowman, showed him the number on the page, and had him match the hat with that number. It went very well! He understood what I was talking about and easily counted the buttons, and made the match ups with little help. I'll be adding numbers 5 through 10 as soon as he's confident with these and can point out the same numbers in other situations. Mr. Fussy Eater helped me make crockpot beef noodle soup yesterday, but wasn't here at dinner time to taste what he'd cooked. Today I did a bit of extra babysitting so my daughter could work some extra hours, so Brayden had beef noodle soup for lunch. My gosh, he actually TASTED it (which is a huge hurdle with him) and LIKED it and ATE it! There's hope for the child yet! Brayden's Crockpot Beef Noodle Soup 1 beef shank 1/2 stew beef (I cubed up a portion of a chuck steak) 1 cup carrot slices 1 cup diced celery 1 cup diced onions 3 tablespoons beef bouillon powder (or 3 cubes) 1 tsp black pepper 1/2 tsp salt 1 can diced tomatoes in sauce 2 dashes Worcestershire Sauce 8 cups water 2 servings dry spaghetti, broken into thirds Place all ingredients except spaghetti noodles into crockpot, cook on low for 7 hours. Remove shank bone and cut up shank meat and return to soup. Add in uncooked spaghetti and turn on HI for 30 minutes. Serves 4 to 6.