Please and Thank you and other words

James is of the age when it is time to begin emphasizing some manners and general social niceties. We've started with "please" and "thank you" with mixed results. Sometimes the interactions go like this:

James (ordering command voice): "toast! honey!"
Katharine: "how about we say 'toast and honey please'"
James: "yes"
Katharine: "say, 'may I please have toast and honey'"
James: "yes"
Katharine: "no, you say 'may I please have toast and honey'"
James: "toast, honey-- please"

It comes and goes.

For some reason he loves to thank someone after you say "bless you" after he sneezes.
Maybe its because the constant rounds of colds give him so much reinforcement, but whenever he sneezes and we say "bless you James" he pipes up with the sweetest, most heartfelt "thank you momma" or "thank you daddy". I have told him repeatedly that this will earn him super duper adorable bonus points with his grandmothers when he sees them next.

He is continually linking words into phrases and occasionally into recognizable concepts. Mike reads him a naptime story and I read stories at night, and now he will say at bedtime:
"Daddy won't read stories...bedtime"

He has also started asking questions, but without the all-important question words. So we get a lot of:
"Baby Will doing" or
"Keska doing"
without intonation, when he wants to know WHAT baby Will or Keska is doing. Ghost is pretty much always doing the same thing (sleeping) so it doesn't come up as much. Actually baby Will is almost always sleeping, too, but he's just more interesting.

We had a meeting with a second realtor last week. It is the guy who had such luck selling the other half of this place for our neighbors. Our neighbors told us before we met with him that they'd talked to him and he had a real interest in helping us rent it (not our goal). Well, he looked into it and apparently the type of mortgage we have does not allow us to rent the property out, it is meant for owner-occupiers only. That is fine by us, as we don't want to rent it -- we'd rather sell. However, he came over and was super negative about our place, which we in afterthought ascribe to the fact that he only had an interest in it as a rental property and not a sale property.

He just acted really strange. He kept pointing out what wasn't finished, to an understandably frustrated Mike. Mike had to say to him, REPEATEDLY "imagine that all of these things are completed", and THEN what do you think it would be worth. But this man just could NOT imagine anything. At first we were very disappointed, but after he left we talked about some of the strange things he'd said.
For example, he said ' you shouldn't rent it because from America you'd have a hard time collecting rent from the occupants, and the kind of occupants who would rent this place wouldn't be the type who would pay"
We were planning on marketing our place to people like us, because it would be furnished-- i.e. short term international academics at the University, so... not sure what he meant by that. Not exactly an untrustworthy or shady group as a whole.

He estimated that we would lose money on our mortgage, but said, if you're not planning on living in the Netherlands again in the future then you could just default on the remainder of your loan to the bank. NOT KIDDING. This is the advice he gave to us. I said very succinctly "we would never do that"-- and left it at that.

He acted as if we'd paid too much for this place and not improved it at all. It was strange. But I am terrible at quick thinking, and only later after thinking about it felt reassured as I remembered that when we bought this place we SCOURED the market for a solid place, with potential for renovation at a low price. There were two houses in decent neighborhoods meeting those criteria, we looked at both and this was absolutely the better of the two. Whether or not we have improved it is not a question for us.

We had a neighbor that we trust come over that night and talk to us about it. He was really reassuring and noticeably shocked by what this guy had told us. Now we feel that we are not crazy, and maybe he is a little offbase, or maybe just doesn't like Americans? It is hard to say what his motives might be. We have decided to contact another realtor, but this time we will make the house ready before we have him (or her- we'd prefer a lady this time) over to see it. We do realize we cannot depend on the imagination of the realtor. That is good to know. This also means that though my pregnancy leave is over, I am now taking holiday time to help out with the kids while Mike does the majority of the work-- though he is finally letting me help a little. Not sure what this will mean for our return home... we have to complete this before we leave, but we will keep our plans updated here.