Two Stories...Come on and What?

There are so many things to get done in the holiday season and if you start at the right time you can manage to do everything you want to! I've been preparing my Christmas cards for a while it seems. Collecting any addresses I don't have and addressing the envelopes with the ones I do have. It's not too big a task if you do it in increments. I have more than 40 addresses and only 5 of those I'm not related too. That's what happens when you have large families. Sorry Dad, but sometimes I'm glad you are an only child. For a more selfish reason I only had to share my dear grandmother with 2 people! But anyways, Zachary has become very excited about writing and even though I try to work on writing the letter Z with him, he typically gets frustrated and wants to have nothing to do with it. However, he has become and expert at writing the letter H. Unfortunately I don't need to mail any letters to an H. He was sitting with me as I wrote on the envelopes and he says, "Mom let me write too." I say to him nicely, "I'm sorry Zachary, but this is Mommy's stuff and it is kind of important. I appreciate your help, but Mommy wants to be the one who writes on the envelopes." His next remark, "Commmme onnnnn, let me write something." Totally drug out and as persuasive as he could get it. I fell over laughing and I had to call Tyler to share the story with him. It was great. The first time I left the room to check on something I brought the pen with me, but I failed the second time and returned to an envelope with a perfectly drawn 3 inch tall H. Ooops! It was probably my fault more than his, but he knew that he had done wrong since mommy asked him not to draw on her envelopes. Luckily it was blank and I hadn't yet addressed one to my in-laws, so they get stuck with the extra H. I was nice however and complimented on how wonderful he had drawn his H, because it was hard for me to get too mad. After all, I was the dumb one who left the pen on the table. And yes I offered for him to draw on something else, it just wasn't as exciting as doing what mom was doing right?
This next story might be hard for me to tell (as in you understanding it), but I really feel that I must tell it. Although Zachary is still only 3 he comes from a long line on both sides of mumbling folk. Mittelstaedt girls are well known from their mumbling even though we inherited it from our father, but Tyler if you can believe this is WORSE than I am when it comes to mumbling. So Zach got it more honest than anyone could. We have a tendancy to say WHAT? like 10 times trying to understand what in the world Zachary is saying (thank goodness not ALL the time, but quite frequently). And of course he can speak clearly, he either is speaking too quietly (gets that one from me) or too mumbly (gets that one from Tyler). And most of the time he is in the back seat of the car and we are desperately trying to understand him and usually round 5 we finally get it, but man it's not easy. It happens so often that I think Zachary thinks the word what? is a common response when people are talking. We will tell him to do something and he'll reply, "What?" So we repeat ourselves and again we hear a, "what?" After he says what to us 3 times we give up because we know we are talking very clearly he is just choosing to say what. For the first however many months of him saying, "WHAT?" to us I would get very frustrated. Now, it has become somewhat of a laughing matter because it happens so often. It clicked the other day that the reason he probably says it to us is because we say it to him more often than not. Of course we have a specific reason why we are saying it. I'm not quite sure yet if he does. Now anytime I say, "What?" to Tyler more than once he says to me, "Are you turning into Zach?" But of course other times I say it continuously to Tyler just to make him laugh because around here it has become very funny. What?