Evan at 37 months (Also, his birthday addendum)

Our travels are revealing Evan as mostly a big boy now. He rides well in the car aside from the occasional protest over Matt's song selection. He loves meeting and playing with other kids and displays hardly any shyness with our adult friends and family. While it's still best for him to take a nap each day, he can do without when we need some flex in our schedules and has been sleeping on pallets on the floor as well as twin beds. Most recently, he shared a queen bed for three nights with Tobin in our hotel in Missouri. As it's worked out on this trip, we've put Tobin and him to bed at the same time each night, instead of staggering his slightly earlier. Evan's been brave about swimming and boating, activities he's seldom done up until this summer. He's even trying his hand at playing Uno these days. And he's great about using the potty, finally telling us when he needs to go--instead of just holding it until we took him for a potty break. On the way home from Missouri, he insisted in his very forceful way, "I need to tee tee in the grass!" We chuckled and dismissed him as being silly and dramatic at first. But he persisted, so we exited the interstate and let him pee in a gas station toilet--not the grass--and Matt reported that he in fact had been holding quite a bit.

Evan is still enough a baby that he insists on Dad at nap and bedtime. We also tend to watch him closely around other kids, especially younger ones like Lauren, as he displays more aggression than Tobin ever has. And he doesn't really eat anything in significant amounts except for waffles, pizza and ice cream. Oh, and chips. He'll "ask" for chips by yelling "I need chips!" Tonight, he insisted "I need lemonade! Right now!" when offered his usual water before bedtime. All this to say, he's still just three and learning about regulating his big emotions. We just try to keep a straight face while we help him understand that he can't have everything he wants right now!

This summer, Evan's been interested at each of our stops along the way in hanging out with someone other than his parents. Whether Uncle "Don," Sarah Beth, Uncle Dan, Jacob or, most poignantly lately, Nana, Evan has been insistent on knowing where his favorite person of the moment is at all times. Fielding the "Where's Nana?" question has been hard, and he's sweetly offered possible answers like "Nana's at her house?" or "Nana's at the doctor?" When we told him she was in Heaven, at first he misheard us and asked, "She's at Evan's house?" As I tried to enunciate the distinction, he finally settled on Nana being in "Heaven's house." Like Tobin, he was very interested in looking at the pictures we were going through to display at the funeral. Grandma showed him a picture of Nana and her husband Papa and told Evan they were her mama and daddy. Several minutes later he saw another picture of Papa, who passed away in 2005, and asked Grandma, "Is that your dad?" As he was snuggling with me before heading to bed, he asked, "Where's Nana and Papa?" I told him they were both in Heaven, touched that he so quickly associated Papa with Nana, as we'd probably never really showed him pictures of him before that night.

Nana and Ev were good buddies. She visited Louisville each Thanksgiving and Christmas in recent years and then moved permanently to Kentucky in 2010, so Evan got to see her on almost all his visits to Grandma's house. I love this picture of Nana holding five-month-old Evan. As I recall, I remember us encouraging her to be sure to sit down when she held him because he was pushing 20 pounds and she was 87 at the time. But she was so playful and active that she'd end up carrying him around like this, both of them obviously enjoying it quite a bit.



And then this picture is from our last visit with Nana this past Easter. Evan was so excited to show her the eggs he'd found.



On a lighter note, I've finally caught up with my Flickr uploading through Evan's birthday and you can find the full set here. Hands down, this is my favorite:



There are three videos in the set, but here's the best as it displays the range of emotions so typical of our baby boy right now. Enjoy!