Nicholas and Ellie speak

Kent was teasing Nicholas about wanting to eat him.  Nick's protest? "But I think I'll taste like old fish."

I was looking at a picture of a baby on facebook. Nicholas saw the baby's chubby belly and asked, "WHAT?! That baby has a baby in his tummy too?" I tried to explain that babies just get chubby sometimes, but Nicholas kept asking me what "chubby" meant. I finally decided to pull out a picture of Nick when he was a baby:

"Oh!" he said, "Chubby means cute!"

Drinking a Sunny D for the first time in his life: "This tastes like every fruit in the world!"

One night he took a pair of clean underwear from the laundry pile, arranged it into a little heap, stepped back, tilted his head to examine it, then declared, "It looks like an eagle crying."

"I'm as tired as a tumbleweed!"

"I'm glad we're getting a baby instead of a puppy, because babies don't bark." 

One morning I asked the kids what we should do that day. Nicholas answered without looking up, "Eat teeny bites of stuff."

A few days after watching Pocahontas for the first time, Ellie found a wide shiny string and wrapped it around her wrists.  Then she started saying something about the bracelet.  It took me a long long time to decipher the word, but I finally realized she was saying, "Look Mom, I'm like a savages!"

She came to Relief Society with me at Church one Sunday (she's kinda really attached to me and still won't go to Nursery alone.) The Sunday School teacher was leaving the room. He saw Ellie and gave her a big, sweet smile and waved at her. She shyly waved back, then turned to me in delight and said, "Mom! That man is President Monson!"

While talking to my sister Sarah one day, Ellie stopped mid-sentence and said, completely unrelated, "Sarah. Feel my hair. It's really warm!"

I was explaining to the kids that they needed to clean up their toys, then eat their lunch, and then we could go to the park. Ellie looked up at me in surprise and protested, "But I can't drive!"  
Had I asked her to?

And finally, what has become our new family motto: 

"Don't freak out!"