Lucas Camilo

Cha-Cha the penguin was Lucas's favorite house-warming gift

Saturday was our Seattle house-warming party and it was a great!  Thanks to everyone who stopped by and brought gifts.  It was especially “warming” to know that we actually know lots of people here – from family, to elementary/high school school friends, to people we’ve gotten to know through organizing, to recently-encountered neighbors, many of whom also stopped by.Lucas was a bit overwhelmed by the party at certain moments, especially the abundance of little kids running around, but overall he was a great sport.  And it was nice for us to introduce him to more people.

We continued to be awed by Lucas’s intelligence, creativity, and sense of humor.  Sometimes it’s a wonder to see the mind of a two-year old at work.  A couple recent examples:

* Krista was on the phone with Aunt Megan and Lucas was growing impatient with the chit-chat.  Megan let out a belly laugh, which sounded almost fake, and suddenly Lucas lit up and said “Heh-Heh-Heh!”  Krista and Megan stopped talking and asked Lucas, “did you just laugh like Aunt Megan.”  Lucas’s response?  A huge smile and then “Heh-heh-heh!”  Now he’ll do it on command, and when everyone in the room cracks up he’ll smile and repeat “heh-heh-heh!”, pleased with himself at being the life of the party.

* Lucas loves letters and words and has come up with various ways to enjoy and explore them.  People who have seen him in action know that he can spell “p-e-n-g-u-i-n” with ease, signing the letters as he also speaks them.  The penguin feat is memorization of course, but now he’s starting to actually sound out words and understand how letters go together, predicting vowels after a consonant starts a word (even if he often gets the vowel in question wrong at first.)  He also really loves saying long words and has whole sections of books memorized.  One of his current favorites is actually an adult book about inter-species friendships.  He can tell you that there exists an elephant “sanctuary” in a place called “Hohenwald, Tennessee” where an elephant and a dog, “stepping over social traditions,” became best friends.   Finally, our friends Sha and Alexis recently enticed Lucas during a skype chat to attempt repeating various tongue-twisters (thus the title of the post) and he loved it.  Because of Lucas’s low-muscle tone and respiratory issues its still often hard for most people to understand what he’s saying, but the effort, excitement, and intensity with which he goes about exploring letters and words is really awesome to witness.

* The other day we took a great walk in Discovery Park and as we were heading back to the car we put our arms around each other and asked Lucas if he was having fun with mommy and daddy.  He looked up at us and said “love!”  Lucas’s concept of love derives primarily from his favorite penguins Roy and Silo, two male penguins that fell in love in the Central Park Zoo and eventually raised a chick together (with the help of the zoo keeper.)  Upon seeing us hugging like Roy and Silo Lucas suddenly made the connection that we too were in love.  We asked him if mommy and daddy love each other.  He said “mommy-daddy… loovvve” and then commanded us to hug again.  We did and he got a big smile on his face, and when we tried to wrap up the game and continue walking (it was a bit chilly that morning) he exclaimed “hug!” again, and then sat back to watch, admiring his work and how happy he had made us.

Of course, he can still be completely stubborn and exhausting to be around at times as well.  For example, despite Lucas’s apparent literary pretensions the top book on his reading list right now is one called “Charlie Clownfish and Annie A.”  We have piles of inventive, colorful, funny children’s books around the house and he picks the totally senseless and absurd one… to read over and over again.  Yesterday his nurse must have read it at least a dozen times, with Lucas insisting “AGAIN!” each time the book was completed.  Oh well…

A walk in Seward Park, near our house in Seattle