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).

Adventure Day, continued

The plan was to go to the zoo, but since we had two other moms and their kids (and an extra tagging along) with us, and there was rain predicted (which didn't materialize — it's a gorgeous day), we went to the Museum of Science.

(I'm going to digress here just a wee bit and point out how much I love the fact that the Belmont library lets you check out museum passes! We paid $5 each for the adults; the kids were all under 3 and so got in free. Even counting drinks to go with our lunch and the pricey Boston parking, I got out of there having spent less than $20. Hooray!)

The MoS is way, way cool — everything from a push-the-button exhibit showing basic mechanical principles to race cars to a life-size T-rex (and his footprint, Beth pointed out) to semi-precious stones (Beth looooves picking up rocks, and these were really neat rocks — she thought they were flowers at first!) to shells and butterflies and lots of computers and buttons for little hands to push. Bethie and I spent quite a bit of time talking about what a museum is, how it's a collection of things that are similar to each other in some way, and we sat down at a hands-on exhibit that let kids classify objects: sort them, put them in boxes, write on a small chalkboard attached to each box what it was a collection of. She gets, now, that the collection of shells sitting next to the TV from last week's beach trip is a kind of museum. I asked her, "Beth, if you could go see a museum of anything at all, what would be in it?" and she answered, right off the bat, "Trees. And dolphins." So I guess some of our next Adventure Days will have to be to Habitat and to the New England Aquarium. (I'd love to know what Sarah wants to see, but she's not telling us just yet.)

The best part of the visit was last: baby chicks actually hatching out of their eggs! We stood around (and stood around, and stood around) and eventually everyone else wanted to leave, but Beth and I wanted to stay. I even told the other moms to go home, but they didn't — and eventually we did walk away, to see the monkeys and change Sarah's diaper — and then we came back, and one of the chicks had pushed halfway out of the shell! It was all wet and scrawny looking, and obviously tired (come on, pecking a hole that big and working your way out of your own shell has got to be hard), but it would rest for a few minutes and then wriggle more to get further out of the shell. So, so amazing.

See, this is the kind of thing I want my kids to see. You can read about chicks hatching, or puppies being born, or see pictures of rivers or know that glass is made out of sand at very high temperatures, but until you actually see it up close and participate as much as you can, you don't really understand. This sounds pretty trite, as I'm typing it, but it isn't a very complex philosophy, and that's why we're doing Adventure Day in the first place.

Beach babes

In an attempt to get some sort of schedule going on in our lives, I've declared each Friday to be Adventure Day, and we kicked it off last week with a trip to (gasp!) the beach. I know, I know — the beach is not the first thing I think of when I think of New England. But there it is, and I have the pictures to prove it.

Beth, after some hesitation (and some screaming and crying about NOT wanting to go in the water!), squatted down and started digging in the sand — eventually helping me make quite the rambling sand castle. Sarah, of course, had no qualms about any of it and scootched herself off the beach blanket immediately so she could scrunch wet sand through her fingers. She didn't eat any of it, but she sure enjoyed the texture.

And then we went to Wendy's for lunch — Beth shoving whole fistfuls of fries in her mouth, hungry kid! — and Sarah chowing down on as many mandarin orange bits as I'd give her. They slept the whole way home. I think we may go to the zoo this week, and I can't wait!

Indoctrination, of several sorts

We took the girls to the Bentley football game last Friday, and it was a hit! Beth got her face painted on the way in (a blue and a gold stripe on her cheeks), and she had a sausage sandwich and fry bread while sitting in the bleachers, and she made friends with the freshman guy sitting behind us (and ate half of his pretzel). Sarah got herself adored and held by the three Danish exchange students sitting in front of us. She lapped up the attention. Beamed, actually. She also got her first taste of a frozen strawberry pop, and was INDIGNANT when I finally took it away from her.

When we came in the gates I said, "Look, Bethie! Cheerleaders!" and Scott asked, "Early indoctrination?" (Well, yeah.) After we got settled he pointed out the football players, and the fact that they were actually holding a football and running with it, and Beth was supremely impressed that they pushed each other and knocked each other down. This is big for a two-year-old, I guess.

I'm impressed with the measures the school takes to keep students out of trouble on the weekends. Freshmen aren't allowed cars on campus. A shuttle runs hourly to Harvard Square (where the action is, apparently). Football games — although the team's probably just above high school caliber — are a big draw. Admission to the game was free with Bentley I.D., and food (though not drinks or ice cream) were free too. Students with "Bentley Superfan" sweatshirts roamed the crowd giving out white pompoms (Beth was ecstatic) and offering white hair paint. By the end of the evening we also had two little snow globes with the girls' pictures embedded inside.

The cheerleading thing came up again because Halloween is coming up, and there are indeed cute little cheerleader costumes at Target (read: cheap) and although Beth maintains she wants to be a piggy (or maybe a cow), Scott's been pushing for her to wear something exceedingly girly ("Wouldn't she like to be a princess?"). I've been looking online for piggy costumes, and there's just nothing that's really, really cute. Which is a bummer, because I really like Halloween, even as a supposed-to-be-really-jaded-by-this adult, and Sarah's going to be a chickie, and if they were both going as barnyard animals Scott and I could have a really good excuse to go as farmers. But now I have to find her something else cute, and (here's the kicker) convince her that it's what she really, really wants. (And then find myself a costume to go with it.)

In retrospect, I realize that ALL PARENTS DO THIS, and my parents did it to me too ("Are you sure you want to be a cricket?" my mom asked, and I can just picture her thinking, How on earth do you make the legs? And the antennae? "Wouldn't you rather be a ladybug? Ladybugs are cuter."), and it's only about half as evil and manipulative as it sounds.

Beth's sleep troubles are diminishing again, which is good, and I'd like to think I even had something to do with it. For several nights in a row I asked her, "Can you have good dreams tonight?" and she actually did.

I woke her up Saturday morning with, "Did you have good dreams, Bethie-boo?"

"Yes!"

"What did you dream about?"

"Doggies." Pause, pause, pause. "And mommy and baby Sarah."

Then she had to go find her toy football, and run around with it and fall down, and pick herself up, run around with the football again, and fall down again. At one point she dropped the ball and Scott said, "Whoops! You fumbled!" and then she dropped the ball again and said, "Fumble!" Early indoctrination, indeed. Maybe we'll find her a little football uniform for Halloween. In pink, because she'll insist.

Chickies, and sleep troubles

So Scott starting teaching today — he has a Monday/Thursday afternoon class and a once-a-week Thursday evening class, which means that on Thursdays he's leaving by 8:00 a.m. and getting home well after the girls are asleep. I don't think it actually occurred to Beth that Daddy was gone all day today until it was bedtime and he suddenly wasn't there. I think she was more confused than sad, and she spent half an hour crying herself to sleep — though that was probably unrelated to the fact that Daddy didn't tuck her in.

She's had a rough few nights. I think she has night terrors — she starts screaming and crying, and even sits up in her crib, but she doesn't really recognize me if I go in to calm her down. She just stares right through me. This is heartbreaking.

We went to a (real) farm today! (I told Beth about it yesterday, and she's been talking about being a farmer for two days.) Drumlin Farm, operated by the Mass Audubon Society, a little working farm up in Lincoln with a few extras: sanctuary animals that can't be returned to the wild for various reasons. So Beth saw piggies (very exciting) and a bunny rabbit, a skunk, a woodchuck, several owls, some cows, horses, and a whole mess of chickens.

Sarah? I don't know how much of the rest of it she really got. But she definitely got the chickens. They were right at her level, and about her size, and up close — she was fascinated. Completely absorbed. Beth got all excited about the chickens sitting on eggs, and the baby chicks, and had to explain over the phone to her daddy and her grandma about the baby chicks hatching out of eggs. "They come out! Baby chicks talking to me. They say 'peep.'"

She was so excited. And as I'm writing this, she's upstairs crying in her bed — one of those sobbing wails that tells me she's having nightmares but she's not really awake. I'm going to go up and pat her back and tell her everything's okay.

Sigh. Being a mom is hard.

Professor Daddy

Beth has taken to calling Scott "Professor," as in, "Professor, you come here right now!" and "Professor! Professor! Where are you? Oh, there you are." He loves it. We're living in Boston, I'm trying to teach her to say "wicked awesome," and she comes out with "professor." Love my kid.

Yesterday morning I caught her trying to feed Sarah toast. She'd broken off bits and was trying to shove them in Sarah's mouth (Sarah, of course, wasn't complaining in the least — her expression was more "Lemme at it!" than "Toast? I don't think so. Not yet, anyway.").

"Bethie, Sarah can't have toast yet. She can't chew it. She doesn't have any teeth."

A moment of worried concentration, then: "We'll buy her some!" Aha. The solution to all of our problems. I love how her mind works.

"No, sweetie, we can't. It doesn't work that way. Let's feed her applesauce, okay?"

Then Sarah took a morning nap (maybe her fifth? Ever?) and Beth and I were out on the front deck blowing bubbles. (This is hilarious: She can't figure out how to blow just right, so she either spits at the bubble wand or breathes at it.) Eventually I told her, "We're going to have to go wake up baby Sarah and go to Costco."

"And buy her teeth!"

Wow. Oh, just so you know: we didn't really look hard, but we're pretty sure Costco doesn't carry false teeth. At least not for babies.

Tuesday's splash park debacle really needs more explanation.

I'm trying to make friends, really I am. So I'm taking her to the ward playgroup, and the e-mail that went out about it said "splash pool," and I assumed (wrongly) that "pool" meant "pool" (as in short-person wading-style pool) instead of "overgrown sprinklers." She was terrified. Sarah would let me get her feet wet before complaining about it, but Beth just flopped down on her towel in sunbathing stance and screamed and cried when I even suggested going near the water. I kept my cool, though, and on our way out of the park I sat down with her on the grass and said, "This wasn't really a pool, was it?"

"No."

"Tell you what. Not tomorrow, but the next day, we'll find a real pool, you and me and baby Sarah. Okay?"

"Okay."

So (this being "the next day") we went. She had an absolute blast. The local pool is insanely, cliquishly, wonderfully local: you have to be a resident of the town just to buy a day pass, the red-suited lifeguards all look like they grew up swimming there in the summers, kids have to pass a swimming test to go in the deep end, and by late afternoon the place is chock-full of kids playing "Marco!" "Polo!" and swimming underwater and throwing beach balls around. Plus, it starts at just a foot deep, which is great for little Bethie who's only about three feet deep herself. We went this morning, slathered on sunscreen, put on hats, and spent an hour and a half walking around the kiddie half of the pool, coming back to our towel for snacks, and going back in again. Sarah finally lost it around lunchtime, so we came home, ate lunch (what's more appropriate for a pool day than PB&J?), took naps (all of us — I was wiped out), and went back. This time she was an old pro: she didn't need to hold my hand every minute, she went in up to her chin, and she even slipped while she was climbing down from the side of ramp and fell in. I thought it would be the end of things, but no — she kicked and splashed for a few moments while I hauled myself (Sarah in tow) from where I was sitting on the pool floor and righted her.

"Are you okay?"

"Yes!"

"Was it fun?"

"Yes!"

"Do you want to do it again?"

"Nooooo...."

Sarah, by the way (and I feel terrible that so many of my comments about Sarah are "by the way"s — she's tremendous, and calm, and tough as nails — "quietly determined" would be the right words for her), is a total water baby. She stood up in the pool, holding onto my hands; let me swing her around on her back and her tummy in the water, and played beach-ball catch with an older boy (six? seven?) who thought (correctly) that she was a cutie. She also has the cutest baby swimsuit ever. It's a purple patterned halter-style tank suit with ruching on the sides and red and orange beads on the halter tie. I want one for me.

Beth played catch with three kids. She wants to take swimming lessons this fall. She pled with me to let her stay when I told her it was time to go home for dinner. Yay!

Brilliant kids, spacy mom

Sarah's almost, almost crawling. She'll get up on her hands and knees, rock back and forth, study the floor in front of her, then flop herself down like a little inchworm to get her hands farther forward. It's working quite well. I expect her to actually figure out how to alternate hand movements within, oh, a week, at which point we're going to have to buy baby gates to keep her off the stairs. Yikes!

It's been such a week.

Saturday was just awful. One of those days when I shouldn't be allowed around heavy machinery or loaded weapons or small children. It was hot (90-plus degrees), humid, and I had no ability to focus whatsoever. First, on my way out of the house to the grocery store, I actually backed the car into the deck (itty bitty dent on the bumper, no damage to the deck). After battling two children, cramped aisles, long checkout lines and Beth crying most of the way home because she wanted to drive (but wouldn't actually climb in the driver's seat while I was loading the groceries — it was "Too hot! I burn myself!"), I clipped one of the side mirrors trying to pull into the garage.

Grr.

The mirror was still (mostly) attached to the car, but I figured the universe was telling me to stay inside for the rest of the day. So later in the afternoon, I got domestic and homebody-ish: I decided to finish cleaning the oven.

(The oven was absolutely grimy when we moved in. I don't think anyone's cleaned it since it was installed eight years ago. And this is a self-cleaning oven. All you have to do is set it to the clean cycle and wait four and a half hours. But I digress.)

I ran a cleaning cycle a few weeks ago, and while it mostly worked, it also left some still-icky spots that I figured I'd get with some spray-on oven cleaner. So I took the pizza stone out of the oven, picked up the blue spray can, covered the inside of the oven door with foam, recapped the can, and looked at the clock so I'd know when my two hours of soaking the grease-encrusted mess would be over. And then I thought, "Wow, that oven cleaner really smells good," and I looked twice at the blue spray can, and realized that I had just covered the oven door with spray starch.

Grr, again. I wonder: Should I include stories like this in the article I have to write about our family for the ward newsletter? "Libby likes to read, play the violin, and have completely spacy days where she does everything — everything — wrong."

We got new cell phones, which is a source of endless wonder for Beth. "Is that Mama's new cell phone? I want to hold it. I call Aunt Gigi?" Last night Scott was trying to set up his new Treo (ooo, the tech geekiness we exude!) and had the instructions laid out in front of him on the living room floor.

Beth marched over and picked up the paper. "I have to read it," she explained, and proceeded to peruse the instructions. After quite a bit of deliberation, she gave the paper back. "It says 'cell phone.'" And she walked away.

(For the grandparents who are convinced of her budding brilliance, it didn't. She can't read. It said "smartphone," and it had pictures.)

But today after our wearing trip to the park, where Beth was afraid of the sprinkler-type water play area, and another grueling grocery run (don't ask — it's too painful to tell — but it involves me forgetting to change Beth out of her swim diaper before putting her in the shopping cart), we still had to stop by the tailor shop to pick up Scott's pants that we'd dropped off yesterday morning. I found a parking spot a few doors down from the shop, hauled the girls out of the car, and told Beth, "We have to find the tailor shop. Can you help Mommy?"

"It has a number eight on the door," she said.

And so it did. I'm going to let her park the car next time.

Farm girls

We went to a farm! The ward playgroup was held at a farm out in Natick today. Beth thought it was glorious. As soon as she heard we were going to a farm she started talking about piggies.

(It's not really that kind of a farm. It's a pick-your-own-apples kind of farm, but lucky for us there's a petting zoo section with a single placid cow, some ostriches and emus, a big collection of sheep and goats, and a solitary sleeping piggy. Beth was afraid of the ostrich, and when confronted with the big ugly guy's head shrank back and said, "I don't know him.")

She got to pick her own apples off short apple trees, and ride "trains" (a long motorized peoplemover thing, plus a kid-sized caterpillar one), and pet the goats, and play on a playground, and have lunch with some new little friends who are just older than she is.

Sarah sat up in the front seat of the stroller and watched everything: the animals, the other babies, the apples. She wasn't really thrilled about the stroller — Sarah would much rather be practicing her hands-and-knees maneuver right now — but she was patient with our needs to get out of the house.

On the way home Beth had to sing "Old MacDonald Had a Farm" over and over and over. (She was pretty creative with it, too — used a bunch of the animals she'd just seen — didn't resort to kitty cats for several miles.)

Late September is apparently Asian pear season, so we'll be back for that. And we saw pumpkins nestling low in their big leaves, so we'll be back for that too.

Yes, all the synapses are in working order

Grandma was taking pictures of the girls and their baby cousin tonight when the itty-bitty digital camera slipped out of her hands. Something was obviously wrong with it — she couldn't turn it on or off — so I said, "Let's try reseating the battery."

At the word "battery," Beth's ears pricked up and she toddled off toward the kitchen. We fussed over the camera and she reappeared a moment later holding out a big D-cell battery on her open palm. "Here you go."

Smart cookie, that.