Animal Lover

I did not get a picture of the moment before, when Sylvia tore up to this goat, grabbed his face with both hands, and stuck her face right in his. Noted here for posterity though.

June

A few highlights, notable/notorious moments, and sweet developments from the last weeks:

Rosemary can swim! This is in spite of swim lessons, which she has started and loathes. But in addition to the lessons, we got a family membership to the Y for the summer and she has gone swimming with Jason or me one or two days a weekend, and in the span of two weeks she was able to ditch the floaty. It's been amazing to watch her confidence grow so rapidly. At first she refused to wear the floaty altogether because for a year plus she's had an unproductive addiction to a red life vest with the words FULL THROTTLE written in neo-gothic lettering on the back - a sort of bad ass font that doesn't fit a girl clinging with all ten fingernails to her parents and scream-begging not to be left with the two very nice boys teaching swim class. But a few weekend swims later, and she is already dog paddling around on her own, getting stronger and more confident each time. That said, she still refuses to put her face in the water, but that said, I scuba dive but still plug my nose when jumping in (when I'm not scuba diving, not wearing a mask). I hate the feel, so I guess I get it.

The goal of course is to get Rosemary confidently swimming on her own so that we can bring the two littlest mermaids in and all swim together. I doubt they will have the same fears as Rosemary, especially given how out of control and splashy their bathtime is. But for now they are landlubbers, busying themselves getting into the garbage cans, emptying kitchen drawers and cabinets, moving around the furniture, etc. 

Maggie especially loves to paw around on Rosemary's art table -- so much so that we bought R a bigger, slightly higher one. Apparently it hasn't completely worked. I saw this sign taped to Rosemary's new, shiny red table this morning. 

Translation: "No Maggie You Will Not Do." I don't know if she left it open ended on purpose or just got distracted and figured nuff said.  

Maggie, art table invader, frequent accessorizer: 

I think Maggie's curiosity about the art table has something to do with how much she really loves drawing. A few months ago she started enjoying using Rosemary's drawing board -- a magnetic thing sort of like an etch a sketch but with a pen on a string. Sylvia on the other hand wants to put the pen in her mouth and fix you with a big imp grin when you tell her not too. Ditto crayons. Maggie will sit and scribble, Sylvia will sit and put them in her mouth even as she's shaking her head no. 

At the park, Maggie seeks out out the tiny nubbins people leave behind and tries to work with them:

Guess what Sylvia does with chalk at the park? How did you know? In fairness, Maggie tries to eat it too, after she's tried drawing with it. Multisensory experience, I guess. Here's what Sylvia is mostly doing at the park instead of playing with the forbidden (for her) chalk. Look for her in the window in the little house.

She goes around and around and around, and is actually really good at swerving around people and things, and at executing perfect three point turns with broken down toys with bad wheels. This particular park we go to, where I took both those videos back to back, is built for little kids and is full of left-behind push toys. They are by far her favorite things to do there. She does the same thing at home still with her lady bug not-a-push-toy and basically anything else she can scooch along the floor. This this seems to me to go hand in hand with her obviously good sense of balance. She almost always seems to know where she is in the world. I'd say - and I think most people would agree - this comes from Jason, not from me.

While we all love going to little kids' park, we of course also spend loads of time with all three girls at regular playgrounds. Sylvia and Magnolia can manage even the big play structures now, going up the stairs (not ladders), avoiding the drop-offs (please, please) and sitting down at the top of the slide and going down backwards on their belly. Maggie in particular is a slider. This is good, because these ladies are fast and usually take off in opposite directions.  

Last weekend, we ventured up to the Berkshires for the first time since Thanksgiving. This was with some trepidation, since one of the babies broke a ceramic bowl in our first ten minutes there on that last visit. With toddler twins, it's hard to visit anyone else's house since - even with two parents around - there are bound to be moments when one parent is in charge of both babies, and it only takes a second for things to head south. We did manage to mostly baby proof the kitchen and dining room, which could be shut off at the dining room door, but there were still surprises. There was one time when I was doing something with Maggie and I heard a suspicious shhh--shhhh sound. I looked up to watch Sylvia pushing an Italian ceramic urn, about the same height as she is, past the doorway in the other room. (see previous paragraph re. push toys). It did not break. We also lucked out with good weather:

Magnolia, sand box worshipper.

The pool, the pool!

Cinematic Sylvie.

(We have the best hand me downs in the world. Both babies are wearing Jason's baby clothes, and Rosemary is wearing Beth's daughter MacKenzie's dress, handmade by Beth's mom Barbara.)

Back in NYC, would you believe that this girl, so grown up, so sensible...

...stuck a bead up her nose the previous day? I'd always wondered if/when this would happen to us. I thought we'd dodged it, at least with Rosemary. But no, I got a call from her school on Wednesday saying that she had apparently gotten curious during rest time, stuck a bead up there and then, of course, spent the remainder of rest time desperately trying to get it out. Fortunately her doctor could deal with it and we didn't have to head to the ER.

In other news, Sylvia got a stark summer hair cut. She can see again!

On a rainy day this weekend we headed to the New York Aquarium, which is at Coney Island. It only recently reopened after Hurricane Sandy, which pretty well wrecked it. The babies loved the fish (and I think were a little baffled by them). Afterwards we went over to the beach - hard to believe that that sand we walked on was (I think?) all replacement/replaced sand, brought back in by FEMA. All in all it's hard to see traces of the hurricane, which I think is a testament to a lot of hard work putting things back together. Even the Cyclone was up and running. We did not go on it...  

Collecting shells in front of the Cyclone and the Wonderwheel.

 ...but we did at least visit Luna Park, where the rides are. This is notable, since Rosemary has been terrified of carnivals and in particular Coney Island for I think 2 or even 3 years. The sounds of bells ringing and balloons popping and all else just sent her into hysterics. But this time she strode right on in and picked her ride of choice (we had said we'd just try one that day).

For better or for worse, she picked a bit of a doozy, the kid roller coaster. Even as we stood on line for it, I thought maybe a floaty boat ride might be better, but she was so set on the roller coaster that it seemed best to just go with it. She hated it! It looked tame but it did kind of go sideways and definitely jerked around a lot. She cried silently the entire time and then after the fact declared angrily that it was "boring! Really boring!" Ok, so not a raging success on one level, but I was so floored she even got it that that alone felt like a solid development. I rode it with her and Jason was juggling babies, so we didn't get any pictures of the actual ride.

Maggie, Love

Proud, sweet climber of small chairs.

She thinks she's Isadora Duncan

We made our first trip of the season to Governors Island. Rosemary and a few other kids took advantage of an empty stage and a little ambient music. The video quality on this is so poor and she's so far away, I don't think it will translate just how fully in her own world she was. She is in a red dress in the center, moving at half the speed of everyone else. Anyhow, it was a beautiful, perfect spring day. My folks were visiting, the babies got to run around on a huge lawn (and Rosemary too, somehow less exciting), and while we picnicked we got to watch a old timey baseball game with old timey baseball reenactors. We also bumped into Henry, one of Rosemary's oldest pals. I know I have a post to this effect every year, but I continue to be totally charmed by this place -- so easily accessible with a short walk from our house (though some might call it long and hot on certain days) and a free ferry ride. Central Park and Prospect Park are great, but somehow Governors Island always has something unexpected and magical happening.

Leave Everything to Rosie

The other day, in a (mostly successful) effort to cheer up sick Sylvie I found Bye Bye Birdie on television. Music always works wonders with her and movie musicals are even better. Rosemary--who will plop down like a stone statue and watch anything except the news, and sometimes even the news--caught the end of Bye Bye Birdie and then stuck around for Hello Dolly. She didn't follow the plot, but afterwards she remembered her favorite quote along with Dolly's general attitude toward the world.   

Then in the throes of the Hello Dolly phase this display magically appeared around the corner from us. I think it's probably a memorial of some sort, since Carroll Gardens is known for it's over the top funereal displays (I once saw a logo of Reese's Peanut Butter cups made in flowers being driven around on the back of a black El Camino, following a black hearse. Why? I don't know.)

Rosemary gets more and more kid swagger every day. And kid swag. The two combined make for a lot of comments/compliments as we walk down the street together. I have mixed feelings about this, but it is fun, I admit. Last weekend, on the way to go swimming at the Y, we found a stoop sale and she hit the mother lode of tween accessories. Even before this stoop sale, she has taken care each morning to put on her rings, bracelets, and necklaces. Blue butterfly ring goes on one hand, peace ring goes on the other. This has become her thing, so much so that the very sweet crossing guard who we see every day on the way to school brought her a few of her (more grown up) daughter's kid jewelry collection.

Maggie likes the new blue hat too.

The babies are of course full of energy, into everything, climbing, walking, etc. Maggie loves to SIT on things. Stairs, laps, little chairs. She will back into your lap from three feet away. Not much in the way of words from either girl, I think, or at least not many I can understand. They both seem to say tree -- or at least say something and then point to a tree, but it's not anything a person could understand.  They get more and more independent, although Sylvie still insists on being held a LOT. You pick her up, and the next second she starts insistently signing "more-more more more more MORE" and then starts pointing to things. Which really just means "I want it" -- outside, more Daddy, food, your coffee mug so I can splash it around, you name it. It seems to us she often starts signing more before she's settled on what she really wants - she'll sign first and then look around, deciding what to point at.

Maggie gets more and more helpful (theoretically). She tried to actually pick up Sylvie the other day, when I was asking Sylvie to come over to me. It's clear she's understanding what's going on, and wants to do something about it. However, she is an unrepentant toy taker. And Sylvia needs to get a better grip.

Silly sniffs

So this is a video from January, when our cousins Helena (in this video), Brooklyn, Mike, and Lisa were visiting. Oh, but that was a fun few days. Anyhow, this video demonstrates one of those essential truths of babyhood: kiddos will do something obsessively or often for a few days, or weeks, so much so that it is their THING, and then - blip - they stop, never to do it again. At the time of this video, Sylvia was crawling up to everyone, looking them in the eye and then doing these funny, scrunchy enthusiastic sniffles. She looked like a member of the Lollypop Guild.

Guaranteed to Make Mama Smile

Poem by Rosie, written at school today.