Ready or Not!!

Oh my precious first born!! He is coming up with all kids of things these days! He keeps us laughing and sometimes almost brings me to tears with all of the sweet things he says. I want to keep track of all of it so I thought I'd list some of his latest ramblings here.
- My parents' dog is named Buddy and Riley completely adores him. Most of the day he is looking for Buddy, letting him go outside or making sure he has food to eat. Incidentally, "buddy" is also the term of endearment that I (and many others in our family) often use for Riley. We say things like, "Come here buddy" or "I love you buddy" or sometimes we even shorten it to "Can you give that to me, Bud?" I'm sure you can see what's coming. After being here a very short time, Riley's response to that has turned to, "I not Buddy, I Riley!" And he's pretty adament about it too. I've tried explaining it but it does no good!
- When I need for us to quit an activity so that we can do something else, I've found that Riley responds the best when I give him some kind of warning and a countdown. Usually I do the 5 minute and then the 1 minute countdown until we have to stop whatever it is we are doing. So now, anytime I tell Riley we are going to have to stop something or do something else, he responds with, "One more minute, mommy, one more minute." The kicker is that he'll try to say this over and over again and obviously doesn't get how long an actual minute really is!!
- I have been working with him on counting lately. And I've found that he does best when it's in the context of playing a game. He's not one to just sit down and count things with me...he wants to be active! So, we've starting playing lots of hide and seek. He LOVES this game...doesn't really "get" it yet, but loves it nonetheless! Anyway, so the other day he actually counted to 12 or 13 (I've only been working on 1-10) and later that night my mom wanted him to do it for my Dad. So Riley counted to 10 and then stopped. We wanted to see if he could keep going so we said..."what comes after 10?" And without missing a beat, he yelled out "REady or not, here I come!" We just died laughing!! Hopefully by the time he gets in to school, he will know what actually comes after 10!
- And here is the sweetest thing he's said lately. I found out the other day that he knows my name...and Edmond's. I wanted him to say them for my mom one day and after he told her his daddy's name, he said, "I miss my daddy, I love my daddy, He my superhero!" It was really the sweetest thing to hear as a mother! We all looked at each other with tears in our eyes. He sure does love his daddy and his return just cannot come soon enough!
Thank you all for the prayers and words of encouragment during this deployment. It really means alot!