Mad skills

Sarah's swimming! I put her down today within visual range of Beth's wagonful of blocks and she managed to squirm herself over to it, bat a bunch of the blocks out with her arm, and then play contentedly with the blocks. Hooray! She's learned a new skill. She's so determined. And so determined to be self-sufficient!

She's also started to play peek-a-boo. If she's sitting in her car seat or bouncy chair with a blanket, she'll grab the blanket with both hands, pull it over her head, and then pull it back down under her chin. That's when the big silly "I'm so proud of myself!" grin shows up.

We're cleaning things out as we're packing, and Scott found my big makeup case full of, well, makeup. Old makeup. There were five or six pieces I wanted to save (including my vial of Lip Venom, yum). The rest of it got tossed — but not before it was thoroughly inbethtigated.

Beth loooooves makeup. Part of our morning routine includes the two of us putting on lip balm together. So she had to go through every single tube and pencil, take off the cap, and probe around. She ended up with lipstick and eyeliner all over her face, and she was very, very serious about the whole process. This was important stuff.

'Course, I'm not about to let a two-year-old run amok with makeup. I left her with a bag of makeup sponges, a brush, and two new tubes of lip balm. And the big boxlike makeup case, which zips shut and has a mirror in the lid. She's thrilled. When Scott was putting her to bed she pled with him, "Want makeup!"

"The makeup's downstairs, Bethie."

"No, put makeup in crib!"

So she either wants to sleep with it or put it on in the middle of the night so she can (mad skills alert) climb out of the crib, open the door to her room, and sneak out to hang with her delinquent friends. (Okay, I'm just kidding about the sneaking out part. But she can do the rest.) Sigh. We'll try to keep a lid on this makeup thing until she's, say, thirteen. But it's cute.

Beth the acrobat

After being an acrobat at the backyard circus a few weeks ago, and literally dozens of Mommy-assisted somersaults, she finally figured it out on her own! (She went over to hug my friend Margaret after her first somersault at the library this week, but she's had plenty of hugs for her own family since.)

Share the joy, people. Here you go:

Life's rosy! And pink.

Two things:

1. Scott defended his dissertation today...and passed! (I know, I know — no one's surprised. But it's such a great milestone that we have to celebrate it.) Things are looking nice and rosy for our little family of four: a completed and defended dissertation, imminent graduation, then a move to a Real House and a Real Job.


2. I took Bethie and Sarah to the pediatrician's office today. We all (and I mean all) have pinkeye. Glargck. We've been fighting off this awful unrelenting cold for nearly a week, with its sniffles and migraines and sore throats and swollen glands and fatigue and general malaise, and now on top of it we all have drippy itchy eyes and a few rounds of antibiotics. So, so gross.

Independence Day

Bethie celebrated her own independence by holding not one but two sparklers at the picnic we went to. It was a solemn little celebration: Beth and a sparkler and a few tentative waves of same. But a celebration nonetheless. She ran around with the other kids, chased the puppy someone brought along, slid down the slide into the wading pool (after the splashing big kids got out), asked for and received a chocolate chip cookie and a sippy cup full of grape soda.

It's kind of a week of firsts. We took the girls to see Ratatouille on Monday night, their first movie at a theater. Sarah nursed for a good chunk of the movie. Beth said "Uh-oh!" during the scary scenes and cried during the sad ones. (Beth, incidentally, loves popcorn.)

Tonight she got on the phone with her Aunt Gigi and told her about the movie: "I saw movie! There was a rat. He cooked cookies! And his friends." If you're going to cook, her reasoning goes, it might as well have chocolate chips involved.

The circus!

My friend Brooke, who has more good ideas eight months pregnant than most of us have when we're in fabulous physical and mental shape, organized a backyard circus for the kids. It was darling. And hilarious. Beth was an acrobat (she did Mommy-assisted somersaults and then climbed Daddy) and Sarah was a clown (strictly a sideshow act, but boy did she look cute).

Beth's buddy Eleanor did a magic act (soooo cute to see a two-year-old do magic tricks!) and had this fantastic moment of "Oh, wow, people are paying attention!" when she got applause. There was a brief flirt with being shy about it...and then she just lapped up the attention. What a kid.

(Tangent: My mom sent Beth another round of books and Grandma-reading-books-on-tape, including a really cute one about Gossie and Gertie, two little goslings who are best friends and do everything together. At the end of one of a whole bunch of readings of the story, I asked Beth, "Do you have a best friend?"

Well, duh. "Eleanor!")

Back to the circus. There was an elephant trainer (with a daddy as the elephant), and an unintelligible but quite dapper ringmaster, and a few trained monkeys, and a trapeze artist, and even a tattooed strong man (those tattoos looked suspiciously like Crayola marker, and I heard several remarks about the incongruity of a CTR tattoo). Afterward there was homemade ice cream, and kids running around the backyard, and the sun hadn't even started to go down when we left at 8:00. Ah, summer!