Fun bath toys

My old spray bottle that I used to use to dampen my hair for styling purposes is now Josh's favorite bath toy. He just loves to spray water everywhere--though, now I have him trained to spray the bathtub walls or the shower curtains only! One night, I used the spray bottle to lure him to take a bath under the guise that I had a new bath toy for him, and ever since then, he's been hooked on it!

Now, Josh even likes playing with empty bubble bath and shampoo  bottles, so I don't recycle them right away, I just let him play with them in the tub! He enjoys filling the bottles up and squirting the water out. These are the simplest bath toys and I didn't even have to shop for them!

Pilot's alphabet fun!

Josh's grandpa has a pilot's license and he flies a Bonanza aircraft (N7745R).  Josh had his first ride in it over Thanksgiving, and he did fairly well. The headphones finally fit him and his ears were well protected (major relief for me, since I was worried about the potential for acoustic trauma).

At dinner tonight, I thought I'd try to teach Josh the pilot's alphabet, so he could learn the code words that stand for each letter of the alphabet. Normally, pilots have to say the code word for each letter, since their letters can get scrambled or misunderstood over the radio. I thought it would be a fun experiment to see if Josh could understand the concept of a code for the alphabet. So far, he is having fun with it. We ended up spelling family members' names with the code and he got a kick out of that! The first one we tried was "Mommy" = Mike, Oscar, Mike, Mike, Yankee. He just cracked up with repetition of "Mike, Mike" for "m, m."

(By the way, this is how to say the name of the aircraft: "November 7-7-4-5 Romeo." Cool, huh?)

So here's the Pilot's Alphabet for you to teach your kids, if you are interested:

Pilot's Alphabet

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A		Alpha		N		November
B		Bravo		O		Oscar
C		Charlie		P		Papa
D		Delta		Q		Quebec
E		Echo		R		Romeo
F		Foxtrot		S		Sierra
G		Golf		T		Tango
H		Hotel		U		Uniform
I		India		V		Victor
J		Juliet		W		Whiskey
K		Kilo		X		X ray
L		Lima		Y		Yankee
M		Mike		Z		Zulu