Category Archives: Words Words Words

Recent Excitement

1. We have a new kitten. She’s three months old, and it only took our big orange cat Gryffindor two days of suspicion before he started romping with her. His hisses were half-hearted, though. I think they were mostly for show.

Gryff has been clingy and needy since Cricket left us. He’s always been one of a multiple-cat household, and very social; he was miserable without another cat around. The original plan was to get another cat at the end of the summer, when Owlet turned two. Well, that plan was moved up for Gryff’s sake. Last Sunday afternoon we visited the city shelter, and came home with a wee brown and grey tabby. Meet Minerva (McGonagall, of course):

She’s zippy and so energetic that she may tire out both the kids and Gryff, now that he acknowledges that she exists in his own reality. The first evening, she raced laps in our bedroom, under the bed, up one side, running across under my knees, throwing herself off the other side, then repeating the whole thing. She’s three months old, is slim and tiny, and has wee kitten claws and wee kitten teeth. We put her carrier in a quiet part of the living room when we got her home, and I found Owlet pushing the straw of her water bottle and goldfish crackers in through the wire door to share with the kitten on two different occasions while we made supper.

We all had a really good feeling about this. We wouldn’t have brought her home otherwise, as disappointed as everyone would have been to come home kitten-less. We’re good at judging personalities and energy and estimating how they’ll fit into the energy of the family and house. Minerva was grounded, forthright and self-assured without being aggressive, and wasn’t afraid of the children. She fit in right away.

2. Sparky turned eight last Tuesday, and we celebrated his birthday this weekend en famille. My parents came in from out of town and HRH’s parents came over, too. The birthday boy requested cheeseburgers and ice cream cake for his birthday feast, which also doubled as our Father’s Day celebration, so that’s what we had for lunch on Sunday. He specified ice cream cake with an Oreo crust, a bottom layer of chocolate ice cream, and a top layer of peanut butter ice cream, so I made that Sunday morning. We had it with whipped cream and homemade hot fudge sauce, and it was really good. My mother, who does not eat desserts, had a slice and enjoyed it immensely, which was all I needed to know it was really good. (I knew everyone else would like it, and I’m glad they did. It’s just that Mum doesn’t eat desserts, so wow.)

3. Sunday afternoon Sparky and I had our end-of-year cello recital. Sparky played “Song of the Wind” extremely well, clearly, in tune, and in tempo. I had the pleasure of accompanying him again. I did a “Chanson Triste” that people thought was excellent, but I knew had been better in rehearsal. And then we played lots of good movie music as an ensemble, and we totally killed our teacher’s original four-cello-part arrangement of “Skyfall,” which we segued into after playing the James Bond theme. (I don’t know about the audience, but most of the students up on stage had goosebumps!) My teacher now has twenty students, so it made for a long afternoon, but it was good. It was great to have Marc M and Marc L in the audience, and both HRH’s parents and my parents this time; my parents haven’t heard me play for years.

My teacher is raising her lesson fees for the first time in ages next year, so it looks like I’ll have to stick to my biweekly schedule instead of returning to a weekly lesson. (Assuming I ever work again. It’s been six weeks since the publisher sent me a project. Feast or famine, that’s what this is, and I know it. Still, work would be nice, what with Owlet’s private daycare costs about to begin in August. Especially since the whole point in putting her into daycare was so that I could get work done without making myself sicker.)

4. The Tour de Fleece is coming up! This is a for-fun spinning event that runs concurrent with the Tour de France. I was so excited that I cleared my wheels two weeks ago, which was kind of a dumb move. So I’m doing my vanilla spinning now to get it out of the way and fill my time before the TdF begins at the end of June. I’ve got an undyed BFL and BFL/silk blend going on my Symphony to ply with a bobbin of dyed BFL/silk I’ve already spun, and I’m doing some longdraw singles from heathered plum roving on my Baynes Colonial to get used to woollen spinning on it.

5. It’s the last week of school for Sparky. (We got next year’s supply and fee lists today, and I’m having trouble parsing the fact that he’ll be in grade three in September.) He has a final birthday party coming up next Sunday for five friends. Then after that it’s the Canada Day concert, two weeks off for everyone, and then day camp begins for Sparky. I’ve made it through the past two weeks; I just need to make it through the next couple.

Sparky: Eight Years Old!

These birthday photo posts are getting very long. Hmm…

There was a wave of “no way he’s eight!” going around Twitter and Facebook this morning, and really, we’re right there with you all.

Eight years ago today, during a humid heatwave, we unexpectedly found ourselves with someone who wasn’t scheduled to arrive till after the Wicca book proofs were handed in um till after the first draft of the green witch book had been handed in er till the nursery was ready well till we were fully unpacked from the move for another nine weeks.

One…

Two…

Three…

Four…

Five…

Six…

Seven…

EIGHT!

Eight years ago he was born nine weeks early, and we’ve been trying to keep up with him ever since. (That thing about preemies sometimes being slower at milestones and having to adjust gestational/chronological age expectations? Totally untrue in our case.)

I love his vocabulary, I love his weird sense of humour, I love how he tells stories that go on and on (and on… and even when I am exasperated because he can’t draw them to a close, I love his imagination). I love how he can look at something two-dimensional and turn it into a three-dimensional structure with Lego or another building medium. He’s really into plasticine and modelling compounds right now.

I don’t know what level he’s reading at any more. He just reads, and reads anything and everything, and in both English and French. HRH had to put the kibosh on Sparky looking at the open Harry Potter book they’re reading together at night, because Sparky is reading silently to himself and is going much faster than HRH reads aloud. I’ve come in for my turn reading to him a couple of times recently and found him reading a few chapters ahead in The Dragon Rider by Cornelia Funke, the chapter book we’re reading together right now, too.

He’s wearing size 7-8 shirts, and size 7 pants for length (but his size 6 shorts are fitting him just fine in the waist, and even some of his old size 5 ones). He’s in size 13 or youth size 1 shoes, depending on the style.

This year has been absolutely wonderful for him at school. It was hard at the beginning, but his teacher has been excellent, and he’s worked hard both in class and at home, and he’s now pretty much bilingual. We are super proud of him, and I have no doubt that his end-of-year report card will blow us away just like his last one did. He’s worked hard at cello, too, and he’s excited about the recital this weekend. This summer he has four weeks of his arts day camp, and he’s lookig forward to that.

He is thoughtful, sensitive, loving, and enjoys sharing what he loves with other people. He and Owlet play together wonderfully, and it has been such a privilege to watch him grow and learn. I’m having a hard time wrapping my mind around the fact that he’ll be in Grade Three in a couple of months.

Owlet:Twenty-Two Months Old!

Real conversations are what are making us stop and think about how far we’ve come these days. “No milk, thank you. Outside, please? Outside?” Owlet says when we offer her a drink. She is starting to do that singsong “reading along” thing when we read her stories, and wordless “singing along” with music in the car, shaping the sounds of the lyrics without actually saying the precise words themselves. “Tight,” she reminds me when I unbuckle her from her seat in the car, squeezing her stuffed rabbit in her arms, promising me that she’ll not drop it or lose with while we’re out. “Squeeeeeeeze!” she says suddenly when she’s sitting on my lap to get her shoes on, catching my arms and pulling them around her so I can give her a hug.

This month produced the first unprompted “I love you, Mummy” (and only the second time she’d said it ever). One weekend morning, she wandered up to me and leaned her head on my knee (not easy, as I was cross-legged on the settee so she had to bend at the waist to get to the proper level) and said, “I love you, Mummy.” Then she stood up and wandered off again. HRH looked at me and said, “And if anything was wrong, all is now forgiven!”

She had her first visit to a farm when we spent Victoria Day weekend with my parents. Here is a summary of the day:

    PONIES ARE AWESOME.
    No, wait; TRACTORS ARE AWESOME.
    Why are we leaving the farm? Why are you taking me away from my FAVOURITEST THINGS EVER?

In other words, it was an enormous success. There were three vintage and antique tractors that she could climb on, and she had great fun doing that. She went for a tractor-drawn wagon ride around the farm, and we saw turkeys, rabbits, chickens, and goats. “Goats! Goats!” she kept telling people. She even took the farmer’s hand and tried to get him to come over to see the goats, as if he was unfamiliar with his own livestock. While we were there, Sparky rode a pony for the first time, and she was fascinated. She had to think about it for a bit and watch other people before asking, “Poheys? Poheys? Neigh neigh?” So we gave her a ride, too, and she sat there very proudly while being led around the paddock. At the third corner, she looked at the spectators and said very primly, “Yeehaw.” She just about killed everyone.

While we were visiting my parents, Owlet also had her first real large playground experience. (Because I keep my kids locked up, you know. Actually, there just aren’t very many around us.) She’s at a great age to watch the other kids and figure out what to do that way. She had some fun with the swings, seriously considered the climbing wall, and entertained herself by picking up handfuls of the hot, fine sand and dumping them into my hands, until she decided that pouring it into my shoes was more fun. She did the small slide a couple of times with her Granddad helping her, then decided she wanted to do the big slide, thank you very much. So I got her up there through the climbing structure while Granddad waited at the bottom. Except she’s not heavy enough to keep up her momentum, and she stopped halfway down! In the end she compromised on the curved slide with Sparky, and had a wonderful time. Appropriately, when it was time to go, we told her she could go down the slide “once more for the Queen,” as it was Victoria Day. After that we went down to the lakeside and sat on the rocks, throwing stones into the breakers of Lake Ontario. This was the best thing ever. (Tractors? What tractors? There are rocks here. And water.)

She really enjoyed her hour exploring the new daycare last week. She was a little unsure of the toys that made noise – I think we have all of one toy that makes noise when you press buttons, and it is mercifully very quiet – but she was very interested in all the different play stations, and already has her own little hook and cubby with her name on them, all ready for when it opens at the beginning of August.

She loves exploring her environment. Dandelions were her biggest thing this past month. She picked them on walks, and on the way to meet Sparky after school, carrying handfuls of them and trying to blow dandelion clocks. Or rather, we’re working on actually blowing on them instead of snorting them too close to the nose and ending up with a sputtering toddler. We had some terrific rainstorms this past month, too, and she became fascinated by puddles, particularly in combination with her beloved sticks, rocks, and pinecones, stirring them up or dropping them in to see what happens. HRH built a proper sandbox this past weekend, because Owlet plunked herself in the garden and started piling dirt on her legs one day. We put veggies in the garden right after that, so the sandbox will hopefully redirect her enthusiastic digging efforts.

She just invented a little game that she finds hilarious. You have to sit on her bench by the window at one end of the bookcase while she wedges herself into the corner between the wall and the other end of the bookcase and clears her throat. Then you count aloud, “One, two, THREE!” and both of you pop out to look at one another around the bookcase, and she giggles wildly. Then she sobers, looks at you seriously, holds up a finger or two, and says, “Times?” which means, “Can we do this again?”

All of us are having fun with her. She’s of an age where she can romp with Sparky now, who isn’t exactly the most dexterous of kids at the best of times, so sometimes he accidentally bounces her off corners or furniture because they’re going too fast or cut a corner too closely. But they play together with various toys and pillows, and hug one another, and share books, too. It’s so much fun to see them together.

Knitting And Spinning April-May 2013

It took me two months, but I finally finished the test knit for n e o n, an acquaintance’s toddler sweater. This is knit from a wool/nylon yarn I found in my stash that my mother had passed along to me, originally a partly-knit pullover, and dyed by me with purple acid dyes. I learned how to do wrap and turn short row shaping (both the regular way and the garter stitch way for wrap and turns when the regular one didn’t work for me), and a three-needle bind off. Things I have learned: I think I am very good at weaving in ends. I can’t find most of them. But seaming garter stitch is not as fun as it appears to be in photos. Also, when you have used a contrast yarn for the cast on and then later sew the two pieces together, you need to somehow carry the contrast yarn across the seam so that it looks like one piece after joining. I did that by weaving in the front ends across to the back, and vice versa.

I love the contrast bind off on the shoulders, the picked-up cuffs with the contrast bind off, and the buttons on the sleeves. I did something weird on the right side of the placket; only I can mess up garter stitch. I am calling it rustic and embracing it. Everyone’s going to be looking at the sleeves and the little girl wearing it, anyway, right?

Owlet has bedhead in these pictures because we did the photos right after her nap. She was surprisingly cooperative. And then she got upset when I took the sweater off, and whinged until I put it back on her. Best baby ever!

I spun the lovely blue-green-purple gradient braid of BFL I dyed for my own fibre club in March (I posted a picture of the dyed fibre here). I ended up with something like 350-370 yards of lovely DK weight yarn, spun worsted and chain-plied. Ceri now owns it, and I hope she pets it often, because it is so deliciously silky. Look at that BFL lustre! You’d think there was silk in it.

In April, I dyed 3.5 oz of BFL/silk blend top. I experimented with braiding the damp top and injecting purple, green, and chestnut dye in random spots with a syringe, because when it spun up I wanted different subtle streaks of colour and the natural colour of the fibre too. Well, it’s working.

I’ll ply this with a plain undyed single of BFL/silk to make the colours even more subtle, which means I need more BFL/silk top. I shall add it to my list of things to buy from the local spinning/weaving studio over the summer! Ultimately, the yarn is destined for a triangular lace shawlette that I’ll tuck into the neck of my spring/fall jacket.

In May, I dyed some fibre for a swap package destined for another spinner. I worked with two fibres I’d never dyed before, a mixed BFL top (also called humbug BFL, because it’s streaked natural and brown like a humbug candy), and superwash Merino/bamboo, which was deliciously silky.

The mixed BFL I dyed in three shades of green, a mossy green I blended, a dark emerald, and a half-strength emerald solution. I wasn’t sure about it when it came out. It seemed awfully dark, and the variegation in the mixed BFL was kind of lost. I think the colours I used were too saturated for it.

So I dyed a second braid of mixed BFL, mostly with the moss green I mixed, and added a contrast highlight of russet red:

This time I got the saturation right so I could see the natural variegation of the base fibre more clearly, but I realized that while it looked great in the braid, spinning red with green gives you, well, brown. So I ended up sending my swap partner the original green braid, as she loves green, and I called that colourway Malachite. I called the second version Apple Orchard and it stands as my May entry in the My Own Fibre Club series. (Which means I get to spin it at some point and find out if the red and green really do merge into a muddy brown, or if I can spin it intentionally so that the red bits stay red. We shall find out!)

The second braid I dyed for my partner was a very daring (for me, anyway) assembly of bright colours: sky blue, emerald, golden ochre, and chestnut. I love how it turned out so much that I will now spam you with lots of pictures of the process.

I loved how saturated the colours were when the fibre was wet.

And when it dried, you could see the streaks of white bamboo against the dyed Merino. (Acid dyes don’t dye bamboo; you need another kind of dye for that.) It’s a wonderful effect.

I’m going to do another version of this one for myself. I called the colourway Sunflowers Under Blue Skies. This was hard to photograph, because the white, shiny bamboo kept picking up the lights and making the braid look even lighter than it was.

I’ve been getting to know the little secondhand Baynes wheel I scored at a fabulous price. It’s got very sensitive tension adjustments, and I find I either feel like I’m gripping the fibre so it doesn’t run away into the orifice or there’s no takeup at all. It spins incredibly smoothly, though. I’ve been using the regular flyer, but the braid of BFL I’ve been working through should probably have been spun on the faster flyer; I’d have had fewer problems with the single drifting apart. That means my tension and the wind-on aren’t quite right. I have two bobbins with 2 oz on each; now I get to ply them together. The hooks are driving me crazy, too, since even when I swing them I can’t fill the bobbin evenly. I’ve ordered a pair of the pinch-and-slide yarn guide hooks that the newer flyers come equipped with from the US rep, and I’ll take the hooks off both the regular and faster flyer and use the sliding one instead. That way I can control the packing of the bobbin more efficiently.

Here’s a photo of it, since I realize I didn’t post one before. I love that I can carry it around, and spin in the playroom while Owlet watches PBS or plays with the trains. I’m looking forward to spinning outside this summer, too. The Tour de Fleece is coming up at the end of June!

Fibro: The Next Step

As of today, I am officially back on the medication for my fibro. I’ve been off it for about five years now, having stopped taking it after a year so we could try for another baby. (When it looked like that was a strike-out I went back to the doctor and said, “I cannot deal with the pain and physical fatigue any more, and it looks like the second baby isn’t going to happen, so I need to start taking it again even though I don’t want to.” I took it for three weeks and then ta-da, baby conceived, so I stopped again; it didn’t even really get properly underway that time.)

Somewhat ironically, over the past couple of days I’ve felt the best I have in about three months. But my appointment with the doctor was scheduled for today, so in I drove through stupid traffic (an accident on the highway meant I was late and Owlet was fit to be tied after being stuck in the car for an hour and twenty minutes). And it went like this:

    Me: So these are my symptoms. I think the fibro is making a comeback.

    Dr: Good grief, if it’s this bad, why didn’t you come to me sooner? It’s a chronic illness. How much Tylenol are you taking a day? And periods of using melatonin to knock yourself out and sleep deeply enough?

    Me: Um.

    Dr: It seems silly to suffer when we have a therapy that worked in the past, doesn’t it?

    Me: Well, um… yes? I guess I’m just… stubborn? About taking medication and… other things like admitting it’s bad enough that I need to do something?

    Dr: Well, let’s move past that and improve your life quality again, shall we? You’ll feel a lot better on several levels, including mood and outlook above and beyond the physical benefits of less pain and fatigue both muscular and mental, and you can stop beating yourself up.

I am so, so thankful that my new GP is just as supportive and open-minded as my old one. And apparently also knows me really well already. Heh.

This afternoon, Owlet and I have an appointment at her new daycare. It turns out it’s starting operations in two months, so she’ll be starting there the first week of August. I’m excited for her; I know she’ll love it. And it overlaps with a week or so of Sparky’s summer day camp, so he and I will be able to have a couple of hours in the afternoon together alone, which I know he’ll appreciate. We do have some work to do first, though; toilet training needs to formally start this summer, as does Operation Phase Out the Soother.

I owe the blog a post on my spinning and dyeing. Maybe tomorrow. Or next week. My swap partner seems to love the package I sent her, which had some lovely dyed fibre in it, so I’ll show that off, too.

Quiet

I’m being very quiet these days, because I’m exhausted.

I remember this. It’s what the beginning of fibro felt like. The kind of zoning out, the physical exhaustion, the inability to hold a thought in my head past a certain period of time. I’m irritable as a result of all of this. I have a constant low-grade headache, and my body is starting to hurt again. I’m not sure how to relax, because a lot of my time is just spent sitting there, trying to interact with my children or fold laundry, and not getting very far. I’ve forgotten how to enjoy myself again, because it’s kind of a weary triumph when I just get through doing the regular stuff. I wonder if I need to try to start the “yay me I accomplished these things today” posts again. It would serve to get me journaling more often, and to show me that I am accomplishing things, even when it doesn’t feel like it. I need to consciously start implementing my fibro-coping mechanisms again, starting with my expectations and limits for my daily activity.

I’ve had time off from work, thank goodness. After a crazy few months, I’ve had a couple of weeks of evenings and naps to myself, and I’m so grateful. I don’t know how I’d handle it otherwise.

I’m reading a bit every day, which is nice. I’m almost finished Guy Gavriel Kay’s new River of Stars, and as usual, I don’t know how I feel about it. Kay has vaguely frustrated me a bit over the past few books for reasons I can’t pinpoint, and every time I read one I decide it will be my last… then every time I read an excerpt of the next one and the poetic prose just sucks me in. I disliked the Sarantine Mosaic duology when it came out, but now I think it’s my favourite of all his works. Funny how one’s opinions change.

I’m sending a box of handmade projects to a swap partner from my mums’ group today, and working on that has been lovely. I can’t say any more than that until she’s received it, but I pushed some of my boundaries and skills making the items, and explored new techniques, and I’m pleased with it. Even with the last-minute wibbling about one project, redoing it, and deciding in the end to send the first version after all.

I finally got around to making an appointment to drop in at the local spinning and weaving studio that’s been open for over two years, and it was glorious. Oh my goodness, I will never have to shop online again! There were shelves and shelves of silks, cottons, flax, wools of all sorts, and luxury fibres like yak, camel, and alpaca, which I’d never touched on their own, only as blends. She has two full-size floor looms set up, six wheels, and lots of swifts and rigid heddle looms and carders all over the place. There were cones and cones of cones of weaving yarn, dyes, spindles… I wanted to move in. I could have easily spent so much more than I did. She was so patient with Owlet, too, who wanted to touch all the things. Especially the packets of ginned and dyed cotton that she kept picking up and squishing, saying “skish, skish,” and the huge skeins of handspun she picked up and cuddled, saying “soft, soft.”

We actually had to go two days in a row, because I’d forgotten to take money out of the bank to pay for my order the first day, so we went back. Owlet stopped at every dandelion plant along the sidewalk and yanked off the flower tops, then gave them all to the woman who runs the studio. And she told me she hosts a spin-in once a month on a Sunday, and invited me! Unfortunately, the next one isn on a group cello class day, so I’ll have to wait for the next one.

Owlet is great, Sparky is great (he has a school concert tomorrow afternoon, and I hope everything works out; HRH’s parents are coming to stay with Owlet so I can attend, and then I think there should be a Mama-Sparky treat afterward), I have a new-to-me spinning upright wheel that was a crazy good deal (thank you, enormous tax refund allowing me to give myself a little treat amid paying debts) and HRH has a new-to-him iPhone that we’re trying to set up (ditto the treat, but grr, technology and things not talking to other things). We are a single-cat household for the first time in… well, ever, actually, since I had to take Cricket in to the vet to be euthanised two weeks ago. She’d stopped eating and drinking, and you could almost see through her; it was just time.

That’s about it. Trudging along.

Owlet: Twenty-One Months Old!

Now that the weather’s nice, we get multiple requests for “Ousside? Ousside?” each day. When we are ousside, she mucks about in the dirt of the garden, inspects every flower (or “flowerfly,” if you are Owlet), giggles on the swing till she hiccoughs, picks up rocks and carries them to new places, and picks up as many sticks as she can till her hands are full. And then she stands and stares at the ones in her hands, wondering what to do with them, because there’s another stick on the ground, right there, and if she lets go of the bouquet of sticks with one hand to reach for it the ones she’s holding will fall, and that will be a crisis of unimaginable proportion.

She adores pine cones, dandelions, standing on manhole covers and crouching down to poke her fingers in the grooves and holes, and stopping to talk to random people on the sidewalk. One of her latest obsessions is the small bell tower around the corner. We can see it from our back porch, as a matter of fact. Every day as we pull into the driveway she asks two things: “Flowerflies?” If I tell her no, we can’t spend half an hour in the front garden examining every single flower that is currently in bloom, she asks, “Bayels?” We walked once to the church to look at the bells, and now she asks to do it several times a day. Most of the time it’s a nice way to kill twenty minutes, especially in the early morning after we’re back from dropping Sparky off at school, but sometimes I have stuff to do, and it’s not a convenient time.

She is also currently enthralled with bugs of all kinds. She is especially fond of bees; bee-bugs (which are ladybugs); fufferfies (we get this one mixed up with flowerflies a lot, to her frustration); and nails (snails: she pointed at the spiral in Ceri’s seal tattoo the other day and informed her that there was a snail in it). We have recently managed to get her to understand that the buzzing sound in the sky is not a bee, but a plane. Mushrooms, tomatoes, and cucumber are the best snacks ever. Unless there are goldfish crackers in the house. Then all bets are off.

New words are too numerous to keep track of any more. Monster, snail, loom, sit, sauce, pizza, dip, snack, bite (“Bite?” she says hopefully when she sees you eating something, and she offers you bites of whatever she is eating, too… also to the cat, whether he is there or not), diaper, people, sure (it is hilarious to ask her if she wants something and to hear a laid-back “Shuuuure!” in reply), and phrases like “here you go” chirped every time she puts something down by you. About six weeks ago she started calling me Mummy instead of Mama, and it’s rarely once at a time; it’s usually Mummy, Mummy, Mummy. Today I asked her, “Do you want to help me?” “Help you? Shuuuure!” she said. That’s huge, being able to turn the pronoun around from “me” to “you” and use it correctly like that.

She wakes up around 6:30, has lunch around 11:30, and has a nap from roughly noon till 2:00. Then we go get Sparky at school for 3:45, have supper around 6:00, and she’s in bed by 7:00. When she wakes up from naps she calls for Gryff (“Maow! Maow!”) and I open the door for him. He runs in and they get all excited, because the next thing I do is lift the cat into the crib, and the two of them lie there and talk to one another. Owlet covers him with blankets, asks me for some books and reads to him, or just lies down and cuddles with him until he’s had enough. It’s really sweet. The two of them play an odd game of Marco Polo in the house, too. If Gryff is somewhere and meows, Owlet will meow back, and the Gryff will reply, and they’ll carry on like that for a while.

We cut out the bottle or cup before her nap entirely; now it’s just snuggling with the soother till she’s asleep, which is usually in about five minutes, and then I slip her into the crib. (We do the opposite at bedtime: a couple of ounces of milk still, then into bed awake, although we need to switch that milk over to a cup of water now). Over this summer we need to start weaning her off the soother before naps, because she won’t have it at daycare.

She’s still incredibly social. When we drive to or from school, she waves to bus drivers (“Hello, peoples!”), and blows kisses to the drivers around us as we pull away from red lights. She’s cheerful, likes to make sure everyone gets hugs and kisses when people leave (family hugs are particularly important before Daddy goes to work in the morning), and shares everything with everyone, but expects the same in return. (You weren’t going to eat half that bowl of pasta, were you? Or that scone? Or drink that cup of tea?).