Thanksgiving and an Attack of Courtesy

We had a nice Thanksgiving. We spent it at Tina's house (I realized in my last post that I called her both "Tina" and "Nina"--well, to clarify, "Nina" is the Alex-version of her name. Mystery solved, not a typo!) with a big crew of people-Tina, her three boys, her brother and his friend, her fabulous friend Larry (who is so fabulous that he actually had his name legally changed to Larry Fabulous...not kidding, I've seen his passport!), another friend named Teddy, and the couple that rent an apartment from her. Plus us. That was quite a few people, and we wiped out two turkeys and all the various T-Day fixin's. It was nice. Even nicer was that although I helped clean up, it was not my house that had to be cleaned up. And as much as I like Thanksgiving leftovers, I am glad that our fridge is not stuffed with them. That was a great deal :-)

In other news...Alex is turning into quite a polite little boy. We have really pushed "please" and "thank you" and have even managed to get him to say these without prompting most of the time. He has even picked up "no, thank you." I think that was by imitation, though. I don't really remember teaching that one, although when he offers you a slobbery cookie or a grape that has been pre-chewed that he wants to share just because he loves you so much, it is actually kind of hard to say "no thank you" because you want to encourage sharing as well, even sharing of slobbery cookies.

Today Dan asked him to pick up a banana peel that had mysteriously found its way off the table and onto the floor. Alex looked at him and said, "No, thank you, Daddy."

Ummmm...I don't think he was offering you a banana peel, Alex, he was asking you to put it into the trash. I guess we'll need to work on this usage a little bit :-)