Best Friends

Atti woke me up the other morning (he slept late enough that his Dad was up before him, and on those [rare] mornings, he gets Atti up) and told me I was his best friend.

Awwww. Sweet. I thought 'learnt a new phrase from Rio or daycare I guess, I wonder if he actually knows what it means'. We use 'friend' a lot in signing, but I didn't know how well he got the concept.

Nope, he has it down. And initially he changed his mind about who was his best friend every couple of minutes - at one point everyone I named was his 'best friend'.

In the day or two he has started going through some photos I recently printed (which I need to send to his great grandmother, so I should get them away from him) and he keeps picking out the same two and saying 'A is my best friend' when holding one up and 'best friends' when holding up the other (with a different little boy in it - but when I ask if J is his best friend he says no). 

It is very sweet… even if I question his choice!

I had a friend over with a newborn the other day, and I spent the afternoon listening to Atti sing along with a cd of songs, direct me so he could show me the chickens at Rio's school and 'read' a story with me that night and I wondered… why does anyone like the newborn stage so much? They are so much more interesting and engaging and intriguing as they get older. And funny too. Atti accidentally told the Wook and I a dirty joke the other day and we both collapsed laughing… and he looked so utterly chuffed that he had made us laugh. He wasn't sure why we were laughing (and I really hope he doesn't repeat it to see if other people laugh) but he was clear that he had made us laugh, and so very happy about that fact. It was an amazing moment.

We had another great (if long) moment recently. I picked Rio up from school and we went to visit a friend and her two kids. Atti sees this kids regularly, but not frequently, but when he was a baby he spent a day a week with them. He was gorgeous on the ride down there, telling Rio about the boy and girl we were going to visit. I said something about the boy, and Atti said 'X loves me very much!' - which is totally true. They had this really wonderful afternoon, so much so that we were invited and stayed for dinner, and I basically ran the kids there until bedtime, drove them home and they went straight to bed. All of the kids got along like a dream, they were all beautifully mannered, they all ate like someone else's kids, they were cute and smart and funny and polite. It was fantastic. We should do it every week. Well except for the fact it wouldn't work if I did.

Now, if we can just stop Rio from telling her teachers that the reason I picked her up early from school was to go to a playdate…...