Like a Child

A few weeks ago Rosemary lost her temper because her wooden party cake slid off the plate onto the ground. I said, it's ok, just like Julia Child says, nobody knows what goes on in your kitchen. Just pick it up and keep on serving it. She asked who Julia Child was, and I went to the web hoping to find the clip of her dropping the chicken or the turkey or whatever it was, only to find a snopes.com page saying it never happened. I'm not sure I believe that but we both got distracted by this hilarious link of Julia Child on David Letterman.

Rosemary watched the whole thing two times (that day - we have watched it two times since), and made two observations:

1) They have the same hair

2) Actually, Julia Child is not a child

Unrelated: Rosemary and I were taking the F train home the other day. She made friends with a man sitting across from us who was initially interesting to her because he was carrying 2 fishing rods. That probably seems incongruous, but NYC has lots of coastline, which means lots of fishies. Whether one should eat the fish one catches off the coast of Coney Island is the question. This particular guy didn't have to make that call because he hadn't caught any. Bad day, he said. Rosemary started goofing around, burbling her tongue in and out and making burbly noises at him. He smiled back at her. She burbled at him some more. He finally did it back at her to humor her. Then she turned to me and said, "Why's he doing that with his tongue?" Hm, I wonder.

Rosemary's Favorite Letter

Guess what it is?

May! (Actually April)

I uploaded these springy pix last week and then completely forgot to write a post. The bloom is off the tree already around here, for the most part, but here's one from the Botanical Garden in April:

Swimming! Since I last wrote, we started swim classes. Rosemary was very excited for her first lesson:

And also since I last wrote, we ended swim classes. We went all of two times.

Rosemary likes kicking around with us in a pool well enough, and I figured now would be a good time to start swim lessons just for water safety purposes, but it turned out to be No Fun Whatsoever. And at 3, what's the point of that?

We were doing the lessons at a pool in Manhattan where they have all sorts of cute, energetic twenty-somethings running the place, with a max teacher/kid ratio of 1:4. Way better, I thought, than 10 chilly kids clinging to the side of the pool. At her first lesson, Rosemary strode confidently out to the pool, let a cute boy teacher put on her goggles and a swim cap, hopped right in the pool into her cute girl teacher's arms, and I thought, "This is going WELL! Better than I could have hoped!" Then the teacher asked her to blow bubbles and that was it, tears, screams, etc. Then a friend of mine said she'd read that most kids learn to swim around 5 1/2 with or without swim lessons. I have no idea if this is actually true, but I think we will wait another year or two.

It's been a few weeks but she talks about the swim lessons a lot and yesterday sought out her tinkerbelle cellphone in order to call her teacher Anna to tell her, "I won't be coming to class anymore. Another child can take my slot."

The upside of swim lessons was having lunch with Jason afterward. The pool was close to his office. Here's R after lunch one day at the World Financial Center.

Easter egg hunt at the Urban Meadow:

Horse and Rider in Winsdor Terrace: