One in the hand

Occasionally I'll find Beth wandering around the house with her two little empty hands cupped in front of her.

"What are you carrying, Bethie?"

"Princesses! This is Ariel" — she holds out one hand — "and this is her fish Flounder" — holding out the other hand.

She'll talk to Ariel and Flounder, and apparently they talk back, and all's well until she has to do something that involves using her hands, such as putting on her coat or eating. Then she carefully tucks them into her pockets, goes about her business, and if she remembers she pulls them back out to continue the conversation.

I'm tempted to get her some little pocket-sized Disney princesses to carry around, but I like the imaginary version so much that I think I'll put that off for a while.

"The crocodidle was scary, so I keeped my penny."

That was Beth's take on the Rainforest Cafe. We were walking around the mall today with two other moms and their kids, and the kids were entranced with the animatronic animals and had to go see them. Josh and Kay were fine with the big crocodile and even threw pennies in the water to make wishes, but no way was Beth going to go near that thing. She tucked her penny safely in her coat pocket. But she's in looooove with the gigantic butterfly flapping its wings on the restaurant roof.

The mall walk was a totally impromptu thing that evolved out of a much-needed (and almost canceled) playdate, and it sounds nice and lively and fun (and it was), but there's a darker side: all three of us confessed to being absolutely stir-crazy and desperately needing interaction with other adults. Boston's a great town, but winter lasts For. Ever. and is horribly, bitterly cold. So we all sat there while the kids ate their Chick-Fil-A meals (still the best fruit cup out there in the fast-food world) and told each other how hard it's been. I'm the lucky one: I see my husband every night. (I've also weaned Sarah and have no plans to be pregnant any time soon, so with any luck at all I can go back on my antidepressant/Ritalin cocktail that so effectively managed my ADD. But I digress.) Scott doesn't travel for work, and he doesn't have 80-hour work weeks, and he's usually home for dinner and putting the girls to bed. So I'm not as alone as many of the women I know are. But it's still hard being in a new town where I still don't really feel connected to people yet, and where the weather is a pretty good barricade to getting outside and doing things. The fact that I have two small kids and need twenty minutes of concentrated attention (without Ritalin) to get them ready and outside and bundled in the car doesn't make it any easier.

Someday, we told each other, our kids will be in school. They will be able to dress themselves and feed themselves. They won't climb on us all day long. But until then we must keep each other sane.

Some Sarah pictures, birthday and otherwise...

Sarah decided to take a nap one day at Grandma and Grandpa's house. Just put her head down on a doll and conked out. She loves that doll. It's nearly identical to Baby Josie, the baby doll she got for Christmas. I'll find her sitting in the living room hugging Baby Josie, then holding her out at arm's length, then hugging her again. Like this:


Sarah's birthday party at Grandma's was a hit too...especially the cupcakes!


And the tutu from Aunt Gigi was, of course, delightful:


Last night we finally had a mini-party for her here. She opened presents from Beth (a bathtub book), and Grandma and Grandpa Boss (that's a Raggedy Ann doll getting loves from Sarah),


and a tunnel from us. Both the girls think it's great. Beth crawled in it today and said, "This is my cocoon!"

Parental involvement

Beth is turning three soon (if you ask her when her birthday is, she says, "Coming up in April!"), so I just sent applications in to two preschools. One is run by the local school district, is relatively cheap (about $2,000 for a three-day program — and yes, if you haven't looked into preschool costs recently, that's cheap), and therefore has an abundance of applicants and will be selecting kids on a lottery basis. The other is more expensive, but it's just a few blocks away and is a co-op preschool. I like the idea of a co-op — I went to a co-op elementary school and having my dad in the classroom once a week made things comfortable. He knew my teachers, he knew the other kids, he knew what went on in class. Coming home and telling my family about my day wasn't like telling them about a foreign country.

I bring this up because I know a few people who are much less concerned about the preschool thing than I am. Scott has said a few times that since he didn't attend preschool, it wouldn't even have occurred to him to find one for Beth. As for me, it's been on my mind since I was about two months pregnant with her. I researched preschools in Pittsburgh, knowing that we wouldn't be there when she was old enough to start. I read the Boston Magazine best preschools issue (and hyperventilated at the waiting lists and the prices). I talked to other parents about their preschool experiences. I even wondered (very briefly, mind you) if we should do the Waldorf route and whether giving up TV and our beloved Fisher-Price plastic toys might not be better for the girls in the long run.

Now, does this make me a) responsible and forward-thinking, or b) hovering, pushy and over-involved?

Before you go ahead and say, "Libby! Gosh! Of course you're responsible and forward-thinking! Not a weird helicopter parent at all!" consider this: last night there was an open meeting at the local elementary school about various elementary-school-related issues, including the full-day kindergarten proposal and the town's plans to build a new elementary school to replace the one where the girls will go (which was originally built as the high school in the 1930s). As soon as I heard about this meeting, I planned on going to it. To find out who is for and against the full-day kindergarten, and why. To find out what the school construction timeline looks like, and (if it will overlap my kids' attendance at the school) where they'll be sending the kids during construction. To put in my two cents about things, if I felt so moved.

And the only reason I didn't end up going — and ended up making a much-needed Costco run for diapers instead — was that I realized it was just a bit silly for a parent of a not-quite-three-year-old to show up at a meeting about issues that had already been decided (face it, most public meetings are for information-sharing and grievance-airing, not for actual decisions) and decided in a way I was pretty okay with. Beth (and probably Sarah too) will do fine in full-day kindergarten. We need a new school, and chances are that if it's built while my kids are there they will be well taken care of. There are architects' plans already on file. People in the neighborhood have been thinking (and presumably arguing) about these things for years.

Mind you, once my kids are in school, I'll probably be the parent who shows up at all the school board meetings. I'll just wait until they're school-age so it doesn't look quite so weird.

"Because it's there"

Sarah is a CLIMBER. Maybe, instead of the butterfly tunnel I'm planning on giving her for her birthday (party delayed until ??? due to the fact that we're still getting our heads around being home again), I should just take her to an REI and let her have at the climbing wall. 'Cause she'd have a blast, and she might even break some records getting to the top.

She climbs everything — us, her dolly bed, the stairs (up and down — ulp!), and now she's discovered Beth's stepstool that we keep in the kitchen so Beth can help me cook.

Which goes like this: I'm making lunch, and Beth says, "Mama, I want to help you!" and then we go through the process of dragging the stepstool over to the correct counter, and she climbs up on it, and then she gets to "help." This does actually take the form of help when I'm baking — she dumps in the pre-measured ingredients: a teaspoon of vanilla, or cups of flour. More often, though, she just has tastes of whatever I'm cooking. Cheese for sandwiches, say. One of her favorites, for some reason, is salt. Today she got up on the stepstool while I was putting away the groceries, and she ate a bunch of salt without asking, and the sheer quantity she'd consumed made her gag and cough. So maybe she's learned a lesson....

Anyway, Sarah can climb the stepstool too, all the way up to the top and back down. It's only two steps, but they're big steps, and they're open at the back, and I remember being terrified of ladders and steps and such when I was a kid. Not Sarah. Today she discovered that there's a purpose to the stepstool — it lets her get to the counter. So she stood there and played, gleefully, with a container of mixed nuts, a sippy cup, and a few recipe cards. She'll be hitting us up to fund her K2 expedition when she's about nine.

Baby Moonbeam

We all went to a baby shower Saturday for some neighbors, and it was fabulous — Bethie found a four-year-old to glom onto, Sarah flirted with the other babies, and Scott and I got some much-needed adult conversation with people who don't already know all the boring daily stuff about us. And the food was great, and the people were smart and interesting and had fascinating jobs and amazing kids, and Beth and Lily (the four-year-old, a bit chagrined to have a curly-haired parasite) helped Ana and Jeff unwrap all their presents.

Ana and Jeff have been calling the baby "Moonbeam" for a while now, and we passed that info along to Beth via the nametags at the shower. ("See? Ana's wearing a sticker that says 'Ana,' and her tummy is wearing two stickers that say 'Moonbeam.'") And this morning I got a phone call that Ana had had the baby, six weeks early. (Yikes! But he's fine, nearly six pounds, a whole pound bigger than Beth was when she was born.) So I told Beth. "Bethie, guess what? Ana's baby came out of her tummy. His name is Miles."

"No," she said, quite serious. "Her name is Moonbeam."

And that's where we are, as far as Beth is concerned. I figure all's well as long as she learns to say his real name by his first day of kindergarten.

(Congrats Ana!)

Christmas aftermath

As requested, Beth got her kitchen. Sarah got her dolly and a cute little bed for the dolly to sleep in. Thanks to grandparents, a whole mess of aunts and uncles, neighbors who for some reason love our kids, and the fact that I'd been saving things back for a few months ("Sure, they need hats and mittens. Let's give 'em to them for Christmas!"), there were a LOT of presents under the tree. We'd consciously tried to keep the craziness to a minimum, but we and Santa were greatly outnumbered by everyone else who loves us. (Hooray!)

This was our second Christmas at home — so relaxing — I highly, highly recommend it. Now that we're that much farther away from family and have to pay for three seats on the plane, it's getting less and less practical to travel. We warned our families that we aren't traveling for major holidays any more, and instead of spending Christmas with my parents we went out for a week and a half in mid-January — just in time for Sarah's first birthday!

So I guess the real story here is Sarah and her ceremonial destruction of a Mrs. Backer's cupcake (yum, frosting!). Cute kid! She dug right into it, spread frosting and white cake everywhere — in her hair, on my parents' dining room carpet, all over the antique high chair, and definitely all over herself. (This was quite unlike her big sister, who daintily picked frosting polka dots off her first-birthday cupcake, plucked off the rest of the frosting with her thumb and first finger, and then declared herself done.)

Sarah's vocabulary now includes a back-of-the-throat "She she!" that either refers to her Aunt Gigi or to any photo pasted to the fridge (we're not sure which, because my mom was pointing to pictures of Gigi on the fridge at the time). And just as we got home last week she started saying "Mama!" She reaches out her arms and curls her fingers in over and over when she wants us to pick her up. She's almost, almost walking — just needs a finger or a wall or an edge to hang onto — and she still grins like a maniac and lights up when anyone pays any attention to her. (She got a lot of that at Grandma's house, and is letting us know how much she misses it now that she's back home.)

We also got to see a ton of friends and relatives, some of whom we haven't seen since our wedding six and a half years ago. (And then there was the girls' cousin Chloe, whom we haven't seen since April, but those nine months are a big chunk of the girls' lifespans. Beth kept commenting that Chloe is now a "big girl" because she can walk. Is that all it takes?)

Sarah went for her birthday checkup this week, and the news is fantastic. At her previous visit three weeks ago she'd gained two pounds and an inch in five weeks — out of the underweight danger zone — and now she's gained another pound, putting her squarely in the 15th percentile for weight (whew!) and around the 45th for height. She's learned when to stop eating when she's full, too, which means fewer throwing-up incidents: good news for all!

Beth says:

Scott, to Beth: "I remember when you were so little that I could hold you in one hand, like this."

Beth: "And what were you holding in your other hand?"

More about gingerbread

We finished the gingerbread house last Saturday:

Like it? We do. Bethie was soooo proud of herself helping hold up the house pieces while the icing dried, and helping to put on the roof tiles, and planting gumdrop bushes. (She was also so, so sick after eating tons of candy off of the communal candy table! She came over to where I was working on the house, climbed up in her chair, and said, "Mommy, I throwed up." Poor kid. I felt horrible not letting her eat any more candy...but....)

I mentioned to the girl who'd organized the whole thing that I thought the concept of a gingerbread house party was hilarious — she said, "Oh good, I'm glad somebody got that!" Apparently mine isn't the only warped mind in Belmont.

On Christmas Eve we made more dough — for eatin' cookies this time, not construction cookies — and cut out dozens of gingerbread men, Christmas trees, candy canes, angels, stars, snowmen, holly leaves...any Christmassy cookie cutter Beth found, we used. That afternoon we decorated them with royal icing and goodies (red-hot buttons and holly berries, raisin eyes, lots and lots of sprinkles). Beth set out a plate for Santa. Glorious.

I love love love having a two-year-old who's just learning about Christmas! She's terrified of Santa (but intrigued), wants nothing more than to help me bake cookies, and is impressed with the ritual of it all. Happy stuff!

(Oh, and the cookies are GOOD. Really, really good. We took a bunch of them to our downstairs neighbor, and Santa ate three, but I've been snacking away at the rest...unfortunately.)

Some things I've learned about gingerbread in the last 2 1/2 hours:

Bethie and I are going to a gingerbread house party tomorrow (which I think is endlessly funny: it's a house party, right? But it's a gingerbread house party. What tunes do you bring to that? The elves be gettin' funky, yo) and after dinner tonight we started making pieces for our gingerbread house out of the dough I'd oh-so-thoughtfully made and chilled last night.

Alas, I'm a novice at this. But, thankfully, a quick study.

1. The great elastic-band-over-the-rolling-pin-to-roll-dough-out-to-the-perfect-thickness slide thingies that you gave your husband 'cause he's enamored of That Man and His Cooking Show? They're great. Just have the husband put them on the rolling pin, 'cause they have a mean snap.


2. Don't try to roll out large construction-ready slabs of house and then transfer them to the cookie sheet. Roll everything out on the back of the cookie sheet. Or, better yet (I love this solution), use the elastic bands on the rolling pin and roll out the dough on a Silpat, cut the dough, and transfer the Silpat to the cookie sheet.


3. After you learn Rule #2, above, make sure to redo the first gable end piece you cut out, somehow peeled up off the counter with a pastry blade (which you own thanks to the husband and his Food Network obsession with That Man), and baked. Sure, it looks nice, but it's an inch shorter than it should be. Getting it onto the pastry blade squished it.


4. But the squished piece doesn't have to go entirely to waste/waist. It happens to be just the right size to cut two trees from. Even with a rather dull-edged plastic cookie cutter. (We now own a set of eight Christmas-themed cookie cutters, a dollar store find. I have quite a few more dollar store finds that are going to make it into the girls' stockings. Beth was sitting in the cart playing with the 30 or so tins we'd picked up to put homemade hot chocolate mix in, and Sarah's oblivious to everything but trying to kick off her shoe, and I snuck lots of good stuff onto the bottom part of the cart without them noticing. I think.)


5. A pizza cutter doesn't leave messy edges like a serrated knife does. (And it contributed to a major flashback to high school sewing class, when I first used a rotary cutter to cut out a pattern. Bliss.)

And I knew this one before, but:

6. Gingerbread dough ALWAYS tastes better than the cookies. Mission accomplished, then, because I introduced Beth to gingerbread dough and she loooooves it. "Can I have another window, Mommy?"

Okay. Off I go to take the right-sized gable end piece out of the oven. And to cut out a door, and some more trees, and some chimney pieces.

Two-year-olds, and logic

"Beth, why is the jingle bell ornament on the floor again?"

"I was using my imagination."

I thought I heard Christmas music!

Remember the video that made its way around the Internet a few years ago? Some guy in Ohio rigged his Christmas lights so they'd sync with holiday music he (considerately) broadcast on low-power FM so people driving by could hear it.

Well, apparently Ohio doesn't have a monopoly on tacky. This afternoon I could hear Christmas music, and I knew it wasn't coming from my house, and my downstairs neighbor is away for a few days. I finally looked out the window — and, well, it's pretty awful. I took this from my deck a few minutes ago:



If you turn up the volume, that's "Jingle Bells." I'll try to get a daytime video of this tomorrow. They're amateurs compared to the Ohio guy, but imagine having this on your street!

I'm pretty sure this is a federal offense, but...

Last week I had Beth write a letter to Santa: she told me what to write, I wrote it, and she drew the pictures. It's darling. Something along the lines of "Dear Santa, I need a kitchen please" and going on from there. She's been a good girl, so has baby Sarah, and baby Sarah wants a dolly.

We then folded this up, placed it in an envelope, and let it sit around the house for several days. Last night we finally put a "stamp" on it (a Christmasy stamp-shaped sticker that came in the piles of junk mail) and this morning Beth drew a picture of Santa on the front (a few red and brown squiggles) and helped me put the letter in the mailbox.

I then told Scott it was his responsibility to take the letter out of the mailbox before the letter carrier came — you BET I want to save my kid's first letter to Santa! — and the girls and I headed to the mall to do some Christmas shopping.

Well, the husband forgot. And the mail came before I got home (at top speed, racing up my quiet suburban street hoping to beat the mailman). And it just broke my heart, and I told Scott it was his job to call the post office to see if maybe, just maybe, there was any way we could get the letter back.

"They won't do it," he said. "There's no point in asking."

"Just ask," I said. "I don't care if they won't do it. I want you to do everything possible to get that letter back."

(I should explain, too, that I'm royally pissed off with Scott for forgetting this, and that he's likely to be sleeping on the couch tonight regardless of the outcome.)

But Scott was teaching a class, so I figured I'd have a stab at the post office (with Beth safely ensconced in front of The Wonder Pets! and me upstairs feeding Sarah her pre-nap bottle), and I finally got through to the little post office in my town and explained (in a whisper, in case Beth wasn't as glued to the TV as I hoped she was) what I needed. They couldn't have been nicer. "We keep all the letters to Santa right here," the woman on the phone said, "until it's time to, um, deliver them to Santa." But she didn't have the one I was looking for. Everything was addressed to "Santa, North Pole," or something similar — nothing with just two-year-old scribbles.

"Is it possible that you don't have all of today's mail from the letter carriers?" I asked.

"Oh, you want today's mail? They're still out. Let's see...what street do you live on?"

So I told her, and she looked up the carrier on my route, and called him on his cell phone, and it turned out he'd just put the mail from my street into the outgoing mail box, and Beth's letter had gone in with it because it looked like it had a stamp on it. But he was perfectly willing to go back and (get this!) dig through the outgoing mail until he found the letter. Which I'm pretty sure is a federal offense.

"Thank you, thank you, thank you," I told the postal clerk. "Tell him to ring the bell when he comes by and I'll have some cookies for him." Cookies! I could have kissed him. I will never, ever, ever complain about postal workers again. No more jokes about mail traveling by postal squirrel.

Scott, as it turns out, felt guilty enough that he called the post office right after his class let out (without checking his e-mail, where he would have learned that I already had the letter back). They told him he was a few steps behind the game. Bethie's letter is safely tucked away in a file drawer, and when she's about twelve I'll tell her this story.

Winter blues

We're all sick: runny noses, sore throats, grouchy temperaments. And it snowed really wet thick snow, which is now icy and frozen-0ver-ish on the top. And my car, which wouldn't even start yesterday morning, is in the shop, probably to the tune of several hundred dollars. And on top of everything else, Scott got an e-mail from a creepy ex-girlfriend. Ick.

I suppose I should be grateful for a bunch of things: my awesome next-door neighbor Kiersten who's more than willing to trade babysitting while I run the car to the mechanic and she goes in to work for random things; having a snow removal service (even if they don't come when we expect them to); getting the last mostly-full bag of ice melt at Home Depot (and getting a discount on it); getting the Christmas tree up and decorated; the fact that my kids, even with colds, are mostly healthy and happy. But I just hate the onset of winter, and how much more difficult it makes everything. I mean, going to the grocery store should be a snap, right? But worm two kids into winter coats, and troop out to the car, and get your feet wet in the process, and then bundle them into the shopping cart, unzip the coats so they don't overheat in the store, wipe their noses while you make your way around the store, bundle everyone and everything you just bought back into the car, and then try to get it all inside without leaving puddles all over the kitchen floor. Yeah. Things are much easier in the summer, which is why I think everyone should live in Southern California.

(C'mon, what were those Pilgrims thinking? They couldn't head farther south? Couldn't steer the Mayflower a little to the left and wind up in, say, South Carolina? These guys were seriously into martyrdom, if you ask me.)i

I'm just not ready for winter, even if it does mean Christmas and hot cocoa and teaching Beth to make snowballs (if I ever get the will to go outside with her). Think I'll go turn on my halogen lamp, and bask in its nice bright sunny light, and pretend I'm on a beach somewhere.

On another worrisome note, I took Sarah to the doctor last week and she's all of 15 lbs. 4 1/2 oz. (that last 1/2 oz. was her binkie, I think, but let's just let it be) — which puts her off the bottom of the chart for weight. I'd be okay with it if she were even in the fifth percentile, but off the chart has me worried, especially because she eats constantly. Where does all this food go? So I'm gradually weaning her onto formula, and we'll see how it goes. She's obviously healthy, developmentally speaking. She waves, claps, raises her hands over her head and throws herself at us while giggling. She says "hi" occasionally, and this morning Kiersten swears she said "Oggie!" when she saw the doggies next door.

A few of my favorite moments from the last week:

• Jeffrey crawling into bed with us one cold morning, huddled between our knees like a sleeping puppy, with his blanket over his head.


• The girls in their hammocks at the USS Constitution Museum


• Beth and Eleanor "taking a nap" one afternoon (oh, the decibel level on the giggling!). I heard Beth get out of bed at one point, and when I went in to wake them up (they did finally fall asleep), Beth's doll Baby Margie was in the crib with Eleanor. I guess she decided her friend needed a doll to snuggle with.


• Snuggling sweet baby William


• Rub-a-dub dub, three kids in a tub

• The "We did it!" moment when Brooke and I got to the Children's Museum on the T. I've already written about this, but wow! were we impressed with our cool streetwise urban mommy selves.


• Bethie and Eleanor giving each other hugs, over and over, and falling down almost every time.


• Discovering the Danish Pastry House with Brooke ('cause I never would have gone in by myself). Cream-filled marzipan frogs...yum.


• Radio Jeffrey: all talk, all the time.


• The morning our friends left, when Scott was pushing the trundle under Beth's bed, and she wailed, "Where's Jeffrey going to sleep?"


• The chaos of the playroom


• The Swiffer Brigade, in their newspaper hats!

Some growing up...

Sarah actually started real hands-and-knees crawling the day after I posted the video clips of her scootching around the kitchen. She's getting terribly fast, and is even more daring with her standing-up maneuvers: pushing her belly into the back of the pew at church so she can lift up her hands and grin at the people behind us; attempting the same while leaning against the bathtub (she nearly went over backward that time); actually trying to climb in the bathtub to get to the rubber ducks inside.

Oh, how she loves those ducks! Beth loved them at this age too (her first word was "Huckies!"). Sarah's dragging them with her everywhere, and rolling around on the living room floor with them, and stuffing their rubber heads in her mouth.

Bethie and I both got haircuts today (serious short cut for me, a trim for her) and she got lots of attention from the orange-haired old ladies in the salon. "Oh, look at that curl!" "We used to look like that, huh?" Beth sat atop two cushions in a salon chair, a cape with pictures of doggies on it thrown around her little shoulders, gnawing on an Italian sesame cookie someone had given her. This haircut was serious, grown-up business, not to be taken lightly.

She speaks! (Kind of)

So, this morning I was getting wiggly little Sarah dressed, and Bethie came over to say hi, and as her head got close to Sarah's, little bitty Sarah exclaimed, "Beh!" With major glee and excitement and obvious pleasure. Sarah loves her sister.

I think she knows her sister's name, and she just has to work on the "th" sound ('cause, you know, even Beff can't say it yet). That's my story. And I'm sticking to it.

Five kids, two strollers, and a trip on the T

My friend Brooke, and her three kids, and (until yesterday when he took a train down to Philly) her husband Brian are staying with us this week, and it's been a whole heap of Adventure Days in a row. Beth is thrilled. Exhausted and all, but thrilled. She has two friends to run around the house with, which is what they've done for HOURS — they run shrieking and chasing each other around the loop in the house. It's going to be Very Lonely when they leave, and I'm not looking forward to the tears and the hangdog looks. (Beth may handle it fine. The tears may be mine.)

Today we took them to the Boston Children's Museum, and we had the extra-brilliant idea of doing the trip on the T. We are INSANE. And it was FUN. We walked down to the bus stop, wrangled the strollers onto the bus, got off at Harvard Station, took the Red Line down to South Station (the view as you're crossing the Charles is gorgeous), got off, found the right elevators to get out, and walked three blocks to the museum.

Silly us — today is Veterans Day, and every kid who was out of school was at the Children's Museum, and the Boston Ballet was doing a special Nutcracker presentation. The museum was packed. We holed up on the upstairs floors, avoided all the little ballerinas standing in line for the performances, and had ourselves quite the good time. I think Beth's favorite thing was playing with the gigantic chess set. And we're going to have to take Scott back just so he can see the Japanese house (shipped in pieces from Kyoto) they have on the third floor.

On the way home we piled all three girls on the double stroller, and since they'd played hard and hadn't had naps, they all conked out. That's a successful outing!

To the tune of the Yogi Bear theme song...

Sarah Bear is smarter than the average bear
Sarah Bear is always pulling Mommy's hair
Sitting in her high chair you will find her there
Stuffing down more veggies than the average bear

Beth-Beth is Sarah's sister and they're in cahoots
They giggle at each other and it's really cute
Sometimes a girl gets jealous, but it's always moot
'Cause when they work together they know they get more loot

Mommy's here to try to keep our girls in line
They push their bedtime back until it's after nine
Sure her job is tough, but you won't hear her whine
'Cause she gets hugs and kisses, and that suits her just fine

(If you've seen the High School Jim "Yogi Bear" video on Cartoon Network's Boomerang, well, that's what got us going.)

This is what we've been up to lately....

Sarah's scootching everywhere using her arms to propel herself forward. She's FAST. Fast enough that she got around me Thursday and fell down the stairs, but that's another guilt-ridden story. On nice non-carpeted flat surfaces she goes like sixty:



She's also walking around furniture (and, in some cases, walking with the furniture, as seen below).