Thinking Great Thoughts

When you’re contemplating this deeply, you don’t have the time to wipe the milk off your chin.

I figure she should have international monetary policy all sorted by the end of the week.  Unfortunately, no one knows what her gurgles mean. 

Child Labor

You know, you ask the kids to do a little bit of work around the house, and do they ever actually do it?

No.

And they give you some lame excuse about not being able to control their neck sufficiently to stand up and do the laundry.

Humph.

Awake

Ellie’s starting to have longer periods of lucidity.*  And, although the midnight until 2 period of wakefulness still exists, it’s not her only awake time.  This afternoon, while Margaret had her nap, Ellie ate and then stared at me for 40 minutes.

I’m not sure she was impressed.

Also, later on we played charades.

So she’s got that down.

*Well no, not at all, really.  She’s not even remotely lucid.  But she’s got her eyes open, which is something.

Another Day, Another Hudge

Although this one was actually more of a lap sitting than a hudge.  Margaret hung out on the couch today with Ellie and me, and behaved remarkably well.

She’s really, really good with Ellie.  Although I think that when she is playing with the cats at her grandmother’s house, she is told “gently, gently” and encouraged to stroke them softly on the top of the head. 

And so that’s what she does with Ellie, which poses it’s own set of problems in that the newborn infant is a bit spongy on the top.  But it’s also really, really cute to watch her do it. 

Spring Training

Margaret’s getting ready for the Cardinals’ next season, though she was very upset to learn that Pujols was leaving.  We’re working through it, though, so I think that she’ll probably get over her upset.

She’s also very into a book right now by Dr. Seuss, but published before he was illustrating his own books.  It’s not top quality Seuss, but it mostly rhymes.  And it’s about teeth, which are important to her these days.

She’s been working on categorizing Ellie as a human being, pointing out that Ellie has eyes and she has eyes and Mommy has eyes and Daddy has eyes, and so forth with hair and hands and feet and tummies and ears and mouths and whatnot.  But she was shocked today to discover that Ellie didn’t have any teeth.  And when it was explained to her that teeth were something you got when you were a big girl,* she was excited by the difference. Because, you know, as nice as it is to know that your little sister is a human being, presumably you want the important differences between you to be observed.

*Which actually must be depressing for most of my male readership, as it suggests that either they haven’t got teeth, or they are big girls.

Hudging

Margaret has gone from not putting endings on words (hot, for example, was ha! for a long time) to the other extreme of putting more ending on words than is strictly necessary.  So bed becomes bedge, sad becomes sadge, and hug becomes hudge.

She has also figured out that hugging works as a delaying tactic, but that’s a story for another time.

Anyway, she loves to hudge the baby.  This is the night I came out of the hospital.

And later that night, both wearing their monkey pajamas.

(And yes, there may have been some minor pacifier theft involved).

She’s adjusting to Ellie remarkably well, and is in fact more upset by the fact that I can’t lift her up than anything else. 

In Which Margaret’s Mommy Encourages Bad Manners

There are two rules about good table manners that were drilled into me as a child, and have stuck with me such that every time I break them (even when I’m alone) it makes me feel like I’m doing something wrong.  They are:

1) No reading at the table.

2) No hats at the table.*

I have to admit that my frisson of guilt at reading at the table is probably spurious, because my mother was trying to keep us from reading at the table when there were other people there, and I only read when  I’m having a meal alone.  And in general, I agree with my mother’s theory that reading at the table when there are other people eating there is rather rude, and thus something that one ought not to do.

But the other day, Margaret hopped up in the big girl chair for some fish,** noticed that there was a book on the table, and discovered a whole new world of wonderful.

I thought about telling her that it was rude (and it was; she had insisted that I sit down with her, though I was having neither fish nor milk.  I feel that in that situation, she has a responsibility to make polite conversation with me).  But also I was very, very proud that books were important enough to her that she wanted to read at the table. And – her mother fondly hopes – she won’t limit her compulsive reading to books alone.  I’m imagining a future of reading the ingredients off of cereal boxes (seriously, does anyone actually know what riboflavin is?), the fine print on junk mail, and whatever else there is lying around the table. 

And so I let her read and ignore me.

On the bright side, she did include me in her reading by demanding, as soon as I out the camera down, that I read the book aloud to her.  So there’s that.

*This rule is completely unimportant to this blog post.  We have had no cause to impose any limits on Margaret’s hat-wearing.

**Which I gave her last week for the first time since she disdained them about a year ago.  Let me just say that her attitude toward the goldfish cracker has altered radically.  She is a big fan.