"Not our house"

We play this game in the car when we get to our neighborhood: We point to each house and say - "is that our house?" and Kyle or Owen answer "nooooo!?!?" When we finally get to our house they say "our house!". I am sure lots of parents do similar things, after all, we want our boys to know which is their home.

We also do it with driveways when we take walks. "That's not our driveway..." (which really means, 'don't go walking in there, stay here with me'). It's morphed into everything - that's not our dog, this is my mama-papi, is that our car, etc. It must also be some developmental stage, since they seem to have nailed the concept of "mine" (although they don't quite have sharing yet, but they're not too bad about it).

We were driving home from the pharmacy after picking up antibiotics on Tuesday and before we arrived at out neighborhood Owen started with "Papi - that's not our house" for pretty much every house we passed. That's a lot of houses and he insisted I answer "that's right Owen, that's not our house" for each one. When we got to our house he was thrilled, kicking and thrashing in his seat (see note below about being 'sick'...) "our house! our house!"

And the thing that really zings me is that they get to say "our" - after all, "ours" means so much in so many ways.