My Name Is

We are getting ready for polite society. Rosemary's Grandma Max taught her to introduce herself formally. This means she now refers to herself most often in the third person, first and last names both. It always makes me think of that old Saturday Night Live sketch where Norm MacDonald plays Bob Dole on the Real World: "You're sitting on Bob Dole's chair...That's Bob Dole's peanut butter you're eating." Who's yogurt is that? Rosemary Sanders's yogurt! Fancy.

Movies are hard to get these days because more often than not the funny thing she is doing or saying before I whip out the camera disappears and is replaced by please to hold and play with the video camera. I just deleted 70 three-second videos. That is apparently the time it takes for R to push the record button twice, once for start and again for stop.

In other news, she does the alphabet song in full (slurring through the middle part) and counts to 13, although she doesn't point and count yet. She also uses 13 to indicate the distant future, like the other day when I was trying (over her protests) to cut her fingernails. I asked when she'd like me to do it instead and she replied "13 o'clock."

Parkour

Every toddler's favorite, fashionable activity. (And an homage to the Office). She will improve in time, I'm sure.

At the Risk of Putting Too Fine a Ring On It

Thanks to Leo's mom Dara for sending this article in Time magazine about how toddlers love that Beyonce song. Golly. There's a link to a couple of other youtube kiddos dancing and this one is pretty mindblowing.

Pure Glee

One Year Ago: Hello, Crazy Harry

An important milestone for any infant.

All Shakered Up

Rosemary's been spending a lot of time at museums lately but this weekend's trip to the old Shaker museum near Lenox, MA had them all beat hands down. Reason number one: the presence of Bea Tucker, 8 months older and wiser than R. This weekend was the museum's annual county fair, so we spent more time roaming around outdoors than looking inside all the historic buildings. I did peek into one and it's true what they say, those Shakers did know their way around a built-in. Nice cabinetry. The round barn (which you can see way in the background in both these pix) is pretty amazing and made more so when filled with cute animals and fall sunbeams. Also, Rosie hit her share of sandboxes this summer but this year's best by far was the one someone (recently, therefore presumably not a Shaker) built here. It was filled with unpopped popcorn instead of sand and it was near impossible to get Rosie out. Bea meanwhile was kicking around in a big pile of hay nearby, but somehow we didn't get a picture of that. A few pix of the whole weekend here.

Brighton Beach

We've got this board book called "Good Morning New York" kicking around here and on one of the pages they go to Coney Island. This morning Rosie was looking at it and she started talking about going to the beach and kicking in the water (specifically she said "Beach. Kick. Yes."), which seemed kind of remarkable since the last time we went to the beach was on vacation in February. So later on Jason suggested going there -- a fabulous idea since it was one of those Indian summer enjoy-it-while-it-lasts days. We drove out to Brighton Beach. (Coney Island stayed so near yet so far. We could see the Parachute Jump and all the rest just down the boardwalk, we never made it all the way down there.)

It was kind of late in the afternoon so I didn't bother with a bathing suit for her, which in retrospect was kind of silly since 1 1/2 year old + 1 ocean = sandy wet 1 1/2 year old, no matter what time of day it is.

R and J joined by classic eastern seaboard beach-goers: a guy and his metal detector and (too far in the background to really see here) a bathing beauty wearing a hot pink bathing cap.

Much splashing, still looking pretty dry:

We ended the day at Cafe Glechik, a Russian-Ukranian place on Coney Island Ave that has really good dumplings. A New York Times review described the potato ones as being "as light as carbs stuffed into carbs drenched in melted fat can be." Rosie preferred the pickle platter, which had cucumber pickles but also something more exotic: pickled watermelon.