Circus Animals

We went to the circus with some friends on Sunday. The Carson and Barnes Circus comes to Allen, TX every year. They'll even be in Mississippi in the next few weeks.

Things started out a little rough -- Sam had no interest in sitting down and waiting for the show to start, so we walked around until it started. Once they started playing the music and flashing the lights, he was absolutely mesmerized! He jumped and clapped and ooooo'ed and ahhhh'ed.



They had lots of high wire acts, clowns, and animal acts.



Sam's favorite was the elephants. They had a petting zoo outside the circus with donkeys, llamas, yaks, zebras, and goats. They also had elephant, camel, and pony rides. We were watching the elephants when the inevitable happened -- elephant poo. Now when we ask Sam if he saw the elephants at the circus, he nods his head yes and says doo-doo.



We've been really cleaning up the house to try to get it ready to sell, so we've moved all of Sam's toys into shelves/organizers in his closet. We leave the doors open so he can pull them out and play with them when he wants. So, the other day he saw his Halloween pumpkin at the top of the closet and insisted on playing with it. It still had all his Halloween stickers in it.



Sam was scared of stickers at Halloween, but he's started liking them over the last month. I found a bunch of stickers when I was cleaning out the desk last week. There were a couple of days in a row where the only way that I could convince Sam to go to day care was to put a couple of stickers on his shirt and tell him that he needed to go show them to everyone.



We've been trying to involve Sam in anything that we can. He loves to get on his stool in the kitchen and "help" make dinner. Tonight he learned how to butter bread.



He did a pretty good job and even sampled several pieces.



Sam is so independent now. He wants to do everything himself and he rarely wants help. He's more likely to do something he doesn't really want to do if we let him do it himself (like getting undressed to take a bath). Here's a video of Sam having trouble getting his jacket off.