Merry Christmas!

A good time was had by all. A great time, in fact, with Grandma Nancy and Granddad, a visit from Santa and our special addition, the Squirrel Children. The Squirrel Children live outside in our courtyard and are parallel descendants of the Quail Children, who my Grandmama cooked up and I think always gave us one present at Christmas time. Rosemary had no trouble with Santa's visitation, but she had a lot of questions about the squirrels. How do they wrap the presents? Where do they get the wrapping paper? Where do they get the presents? Why do they give us presents when they are so scared of us?

The littler girls enjoyed Christmas mightily. Thanks to Hanukkah they are all trained up on the whole gift thing, and Maggie especially enjoyed passing out other people's gift - maybe unwrapping them just a little on the way, and usually not delivering them to the right person of course.

Recently Sylvia has developed a serious crush on Elmo (without ever having seen Sesame Street, which I can't bear in its contemporary incarnation - barely any puppets! All computer. Why?) She was thrilled with the arrival of her own personal Elmo.

Maggie kept getting art supplies and had to go use them, RIGHT THEN.

 Slippers!

Gorgeous sunset. Chilly day.

Nice bright noses for guiding sleighs.

This was the drawing Maggie made. In the middle of making it she pointed to a line she'd made and said "ssss" - a drawing of a snake!

The Littler Ones

I've been struggling with what to call the littler girls lately. As in the shorthand when we refer to the two of them together, the unit of two. Used to be "the babies," but now they aren't, although they still seem so much younger to me than Rosemary was at the exact same age. (It's the language thing. I think that makes a big difference.) I can't call them "the twins" - that sounds to me like I'm talking about someone else's twins, somehow generic. Can't call them "the girls," because of course that refers to all three girls. This comes up more than you'd think, and I know what you're thinking. They have names, right? How about you use their names? But that takes too long. I'm open to suggestions.  

On the language front, things are picking up speed. Sylvia says whole sentences we can't quite understand, while Maggie tends to say one word at a time, but just the first part of it. Sylvia is getting so she'll repeat things back to you, which could be useful because then we hear how she says it and can (in theory) start to recognize it when she says things on her own. Maggie often shakes her head no when you ask her if she can say something. But I'm pretty sure she said alligator today.  

 

Silver Bells

Oh yes, the holiday concert. Our first of many, many to come, and it came with a sweet surprise. I guess it shouldn't have been a surprise since Rosemary told me ahead of time, "I get to jingle the bells. I'm the only one. Mr. C [her music teacher] let me do it because I'm the best." (No ego issues there.) But, like a lot of kid stuff, it came out only in passing about 20 minutes before we brought her to school. Clearly we are on a need-to-know basis, or maybe even just a oh-by-the-way basis. Anyhow, I guess I forgot, or maybe was distracted by the morning's more pressing topic, which was that about 10 minutes before we left for school Rosemary said she needed to dress up as an owl because she was playing an owl in her class's presentation of old folk tale, The Mitten. An owl? What resembles an owl and is currently in our house? A flurry of possibilities were presented and rejected, and then she decided a basic black sweater with little paper feathers taped to the sleeves would be the right move. The paper feathers looked like cigarettes growing out of her arms. Good choice.

So anyhow, the kids all filed on stage and we were surprised when Rosemary, one of the last to get up there, walked over and carefully, carefully picked up the jingle bell stick and started (rather tentatively) ringing the bells. That's her in black in the front of the group:

You can't see her feathers but they were there. The whole thing made my morning. But this was Sylvia's favorite part of the morning (kind of a repeat of the previous post):

Nothing's Going to Stop Us Now

We should all be so lucky to have someone who digs us so completely.

Baby Fosse and Inspector Small

Jazz hands AND jazz belly:

Sylvia, slightly bigger:

All That She Wants Is Another Crayon

One of the coolest things about being a parent -- or, for that matter, a constant grownup in any kid's life -- is watching that little person become who he or she is. Or grow into herself, however you want to put it. Passions emerge. In the past week, Maggie's love of drawing has reached a new level: she finally put it together that she can climb in a chair (which she has been doing for awhile, I think?), sit at the art table, and with just a little reeeeach... 

 ...can obtain basically anything she wants from Rosemary's art table. In fact, I think we will just have to start calling it the art table, because it is in no way exclusively Rosemary's any longer. Crayons are great, markers are better, colored pencils are still forbidden and have been moved to what little higher ground we have. Our white Ikea chairs are suffering a bit for the cause, but I guess that's why we only buy Ikea right now. Every morning this week, the second she comes upstairs she runs to the art table and sits and colors, colors, colors. For as long as we'll let her. We've been noticing this obsession with art materials all summer, but now that she can reach the motherlode on her own it's become a constant. She is also surprisingly diligent about trying to put the lids back on the pens. And--I'm not sure this is a plus--she indignantly fishes her finished drawings out of the recycling and gives me the what-for for tossing them out. She sounds a lot like an angry squirrel (still not many words).

(Sylvia, meanwhile, is pretty much indifferent to the stuff.)

This series of pictures, taken at my friend Tiff's house, say so much about Maggie, and her fervent desire to squeeze her seat at the table.

A few other Maggie thoughts and pictures:

She shakes her head no like everyone else does, but instead of nodding her head to say yes, she shakes her entire body to say yes - I guess you could say she "nods" with her torso. 

She loves a good seat, especially a small one just her size.

 Cousin Mimi recently visited and Maggie really enjoyed showing her around our little playground.

And she has new, noisy shoes. This was the first time we put them on her. These are the sweetest shoes, though definitely not the most dignified. It is turning out to be quite handy on the playground though. I am awaiting the moment when Sylvia grows into the squeaker shoes, since she's the cat who really needs a bell around her neck.

Making Way for Hello Dolly

This post is a long distance dedication for my mom, who's bravely offered to make Rosemary's Hello Dolly costume for Halloween. Brave, I say, or maybe more to the point glutton for punishment since there's a high likelihood that whatever gorgeous concoction she makes will be roundly rejected. Rosemary's extra picky about clothing, so much so that (snooze, sorry, I've said this before) she often refuses even her most favorite, most comfy old standards because "it! doesn't! feel! good!!!!" (always yelped with much scrabbling and tugging and ultimate tearing off of whatever she has on). Mom and I rationalize this project by saying that even if it ends up not working this year, we have years more of fancy dress up coming in the near future and a sparkly golden dress will definitely be enjoyed.    

And if it's the journey that matters, well, Rosemary is having a ball working on the costume. We went to the garment district in Manhattan on Saturday to get the goods. I do love that area, with shop after shop of wholesale bead stores, then the trimming shops, and then the fabric stores. First stop, feathers and long, white gloves at a trimming store:

The expression at the end is all for me, as she realized I was shooting the video. The mom-arrazzi is so super annoying. The best part, which I didn't get, was the guy at the newsstand chuckling at the whole number, including the eye-roll finish. 

Having said I love going to the area, I should also say I find it totally overwhelming because there are so many, many options just a few square blocks. Even as I find something perfectly good in the first store, I wonder what might be in the other 25 stores on the block. But it was actually a joy to shop with Rosie because she was very decisive, selective but not picky. Now we bundle all the material off to Mom in Bethesda and start working on the song and dance numbers here. 

Some Days the Light is Just Nice