It's hard to understand what life is like with a four year old unless you have one. It's like imagining what life might be like on Mars--you can look at all the pictures you want, but it's just not the real thing.
I get up with Eli 4.8 on the weekends and we go to eat breakfast. Here are some comments from a two-hour period on Sunday morning.
Eli needed to go to the bathroom while he was eating his breakfast, so off we went. While we were in there, he told a story about something that had happened to him at school. I said "That's pretty funny, little man."
"Daddy, it WAS!" he said. "I laughed and laughed. Well, I didn't ACTUALLY laugh. I just cracked up into my head."
Five minutes later, he was back eating his pancakes and started laughing. "Daddy, that piece of pancake just EJECTED from my mouth!" he said.
After breakfast, we went to the grocery store to buy some yogurt, and while we were there, we decided to look for Go-Tarts, which is kind of a half-sized Pop Tart. We couldn't find them, and after we finished looking on the cereal aisle I said "Maybe they're not on this aisle. They might be somewhere else."
"That's right," Eli said. "They might be somewhere else. Like ENGLAND."
We go to this grocery store because they have a self check-out lane, and Eli loves to scan all the items. So he does, and we pay, and when we're done, the automated female voice said "Don't forget to take your bills" because they have the bill dispenser and coin dispenser in different places, and it would be very confusing the first time you used the machine. I picked up the bills, and we started getting our bags together. About every ten seconds, the voice would repeat the message--"Don't forget to take your bills."
After the third time, Eli said "LADY, we TAKED the bills!"