Mater love

Alex loves him some maters - tomatoes, that is. We're buying two packs of the cherry tomatoes each week. We keep them by the fruit bowl, and his eagle eye can spot them from his high chair. He starts to shout "Ma! Ma!" and won't eat anything else until I slice him some. We've literally never reached his limit - a heaping bowlful disappears inside of two minutes. Then he picks up the bowl and slurps down the seeds and juice.

Jonathan, who still shuns vegetables outside of soup, wants nothing to do with Alex's tomatoes. But for Christmas he got his very first movie in his stocking - "Cars," (of course!) starring Lightning McQueen and Tow Mater. We let him watch it and he was enthralled. However, my dislike of too much TV for the boys persists. Jonathan gets very obnoxious after he's watched TV, and has a genius for picking out the irritating phrases. After a day of "Stop talking!" and "Are you kidding me?" the DVD went into cold storage. He's doing much better with a new heap of books on CD, cracking himself up as he reads along.

Of course, if you're an old Latin student, you're reading "Mater" with a short a. We had some Mother love too. I spent the Christmas season with a bad back, and after a few days in bed, Jonathan decided it was time to fix me. He came in very seriously with two shoelaces draped over his ears. He informed me these were his "Pergots" and he was going to make my back better. This involved gently poking me with the ends of the shoelaces in my eyes, teeth, cheeks and ears. Mater love at its finest.