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):