Bugs

Sammy's birthday is coming up, so we've been talking about his cake. He wants chocolate with chocolate frosting, his favorite, so I decided we could make a bug-and-dirt cake. I ordered some bugs and gave them to him on Friday when we were talking about his cake. They're a hit. He keeps them in his little orange backpack, and so far has taken them everywhere - for scooter rides, outside, to grandmas house, to bed... In fact, on Saturday he woke up at 5:30, put his bugs in his backpack, and headed down to play. I found him next to the baby's crib with his backpack on telling Max to be quiet. I asked Sam what he was doing up, and he brightly said "It's morning! I want to play with my bugs!" I told him that it wasn't, and that he should go back to bed, but when he turned his reading light on and started playing, I sent him and his bugs upstairs so Max could go back to sleep. Funny boy! (this early morning escapade ended in him crawling in my bed at 6:00 and falling asleep AFTER playing for an hour or so in a large dirt pile - at least it was Jared's side!). He is a little concerned about the bugs in the frosting, but I promised him we would wash them (before and after!) and that nobody would eat them. He's thinking about it....

He and Pearl play "Bugs Life 2" - this morning he told her "what makes me special is playing bugs life 2 with you" - I think it means he likes it when she plays with him.
One thing I have noticed with the bugs are some amazing math skills. The past few months he's been able to do simple addition and subtraction (he likes to count how many of us there are, and if we're picking dad up for lunch he'll say "but I don't want a four person date! I want a three person date) but he's amazing with the bugs. He knows there are 12, because he counted them. His one to one correspondence counting is 100% accurate, (I remember trying and trying to teach Pearl 1:1 correspondence, what a nightmare!) and he can tell me how many he's missing. The first time, he came down and told me he was missing two bugs, I didn't think much of it, but the second time he did it, I watched him count up 8 bugs, then tell me he was missing 4. Genius! I guess he comes by it rightly, his Daddy and Grandpa Hulbert are natural math brains. Me, I had to work at it. I guess he's slated to be a fourth generation engineer after all!