Busy Little Beaver

This morning on "The Cat in the Hat Knows a Lot About That," the Cat in the Hat whisked the two kids he's always having adventures with off to watch a group of beavers build a dam. "They're building a dam!" he would exclaim. And when the dam sprang a leak, the Cat and the kids helped the beavers repair it with mud. When it was all finished, the Cat proclaimed, "Now this river is dammed!"

Perhaps you can see where this is going.

Later, while I was changing Elyse's diaper and getting her into some clothes--quite a challenge these days--Jessica was playing in the corner of Elyse's room, pulling down clothes we had stacked on Elyse's dresser and piling them on the floor.

"You have a busy little beaver!" Jessica told me. "And she's building a dam."

She started taking shoes out of a box, shoes that are way too small for her but which Elyse isn't quite ready for, and lining them up on the floor. I was busy trying to convince Elyse to squirm in ways that are conducive to getting arms in sleeves and socks on feet, so I can't tell you exactly what Jessica said. But I think it was something like this:

"These are all my dammed shoes."

I assure you that she got that phrase from this morning's episode of the Cat in the Hat, not from anything she ever heard me say once upon a time when I was struggling to get those same shoes on her wriggling little feet.

I just hope that if she plays Busy Little Beaver at preschool tomorrow, she makes it clear to her teachers that that's what she's doing.

I also hope that if the kids on the show have a dog, it's not a Shih Tzu.

Elyse

All that crawling,
all that cruising.
Her thighs, once
plump with
doughy rolls,
are slimming down.

Faster than I want,
my baby's growing up.

The Most Wonderful Time of the Year! 2

I've already written about my love of egg nog. Here's another reason I love Christmas:

I bought this little guy--he's about five inches tall--at Dollar Tree for (of course) a dollar.

It's not that I have a great affection for cheap and tacky gimcracks, though in fact I do. It's that I love the iconography of Christmas, both religious and secular--Santa Claus, Christmas trees, snowmen, candy canes, angels, Nativity sets and crèches, and all the rest. I love the color and fun and magic of it. I love the notion that for a few weeks leading up to December 25, our society glows, quite literally, with childlike innocence and wonder.

Sure, it may be superficial, and it may be commerce-driven rather than beauty-driven--sadly, much of the sheen of Christmas is intended to encourage people to trade their hard-earned money for something they don't necessarily need, or even want--but I choose to revel in the gaudy marvelousness rather than shake my head cynically at the tackiness and commercialization.

Wonderful means literally full of wonder, and wonder, in this sense, means "the quality of exciting amazed admiration." That, dear friends, is what I aspire to at Christmastime: exciting amazed admiration. I think Christmas is wonderful.

The Most Wonderful Time of the Year!

One of the many reasons I love Christmas--and not the most important one, mind you--and yes, I do realize that we haven't even had Halloween yet--is because of the egg nog that is in abundance at that time of year and no other. I love egg nog any way you can have it: by itself, in coffee, in cake...sometimes I even shampoo with it. And guess what Walmart is already selling?

So, as far as I'm concerned, let the Christmas season begin!

(I don't really wash my hair with egg nog, by the way.)

Nine Months Old!

Today, Elyse is nine months old! It's hard to believe. It seems like just a few weeks ago that we were in the hospital getting ready for her arrival, and here she is already 75% of the way to the end of her first year.

Here are some pictures we took to commemorate this milestone:

As you can see, Elyse can stand on her own pretty well. She's not actually walking yet, but she can crawl like a pro, and we expect her to chasing after her sister--on two legs--any time now.

Rock City

On Saturday, we took a whirlwind one-day trip to visit one of my favorite places, Rock City Gardens (which Jessica remembers from our visit two years ago as the place with the "deep, dark cave that sings Mother Goose"). It's about a three hour drive from our house in Loganville, but the girls slept for most of the first two hours, until we stopped for breakfast at a Waffle House in Dalton. It was nearly noon by the time we made it to Lookout Mountain, but we were (mostly) ready for a day of fun.

Here are the girls sitting by a wall of the kind of rock formation that Rock City was named for:

And here are Anna and Elyse sitting at a table somewhere along the trail:

This is what the precipice they call Lover's Leap looks like:

(While we were there, however, no lovers leapt.)

When you first enter Mother Goose Village (the deep, dark cave that sings Mother Goose), the famous Goose herself greets you:

Among many other sights in Mother Goose Village, you will see Little Miss Muffet having the dickens scared out of her by a spider, and Humpty Dumpty, pre Great Fall:

I love Rock City, and commend anyone who visits to double the hour and a half to two hours the brochures tell you it takes to go through. Try to make your visit as long as possible, not as short, and to appreciate as much of it as you can. Remember the words of Robert M. Pirsig in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, when he describes the trip that the book (in part) describes:

We want to make good time, but for us now this is measured with emphasis on “good” rather than “time” and when you make that shift in emphasis the whole approach changes.

At Rock City, as is so often the case in life, you should try to make good time rather than good time. Or, as Henry David Thoreau once wrote,

Nothing can be more useful to a man [or woman, or child] than a determination not to be hurried.

Take your time, and enjoy the walk, and the view, and the company of the people you're with.

Here ends my sermon for the day.

Dressing Your Friends

Jessica likes to dress her stuffed-animal friends up in her clothes (and quite often lately, Elyse's clothes—they do tend to fit better). Here we see Giraffe, Puppy, and a dragon (he doesn't actually have a name, not even Dragon) all dressed up and sitting together on our sofa:

You may notice that the dragon is wearing a Winnie-the-Pooh sleeper. Here's a close-up of Puppy in Jessica's Tinkerbell nightie:

It may not be too long before Jessica decides she wants to dress up Elyse. It will certainly be interesting to see how she reacts to that!

The Girls

We made some portraits of the girls for Granny's birthday, and here are the best of them:

Rabbit

We don't hear much about Rabbit anymore.

For quite a while, more than a year, we couldn't go anywhere without hearing, "That's Rabbit's house!" or "That's Rabbit's car!" We were often surprised to hear that when we went out to eat, Rabbit had chosen the same restaurant, was just a few tables away. Rabbit liked the same kind of ice cream we did. Rabbit watched the same TV shows.

But now, days, even weeks can go by without Jessica mentioning Rabbit once. And when she does, it is without the verve that Rabbit once inspired.

Sometimes I think I catch a glimpse of Rabbit out of the corner of my eye; a large white ear disppears around a corner, or a fluffy white tail hurries through just as a door closes. But I'm afraid that soon Rabbit will be gone entirely.

I really miss Rabbit.

Elyse and Granny

Granny came over to have lunch with us and play for a while on Tuesday; I took advantage of the opportunity to take some pictures of Elyse and Granny together. Here are three of the best:

'Magination

This morning, Jessica said:

I just had a 'magination--Frankenstein's monster isn't really under my bed.

Preschool, Year Three; Two Teeth

Both of our children have significant milestones to report:

Today, Jessica starts her third year of preschool at St. Matthew's! Her teachers are Ms. Michelle and Ms. Kathy. There will be thirteen kids in her class (thirteen!), only one of whom Jessica knows from previous years. (At least that's how it looks now. That child wasn't at last week's orientation, so maybe there won't be any kids Jessica knows.)

Elyse has two teeth! We felt the first one poking through her gums about two weeks ago, and this past weekend we felt the other. She already knows how to use them to bite down on the spoon and not let go when we feed her her favorite foods--carrots, sweet potatoes, squash.

Christmas in July

Jessica doesn't worry about waiting until November or December to celebrate Christmas; we've been watching "Santa Claus is Coming to Town" and "The Year Without a Santa Claus" and "Frosty the Snowman" all summer long. So it shouldn't have come as a surprise to me the other day when Jessica was pulling her Christmas dress (the one we bought after last Christmas, for this coming Christmas) out of her closet and trying to get it on. She didn't have any trouble convincing me to let her wear it when she told me she wanted me to take some pictures of her. And here they are:

(You'll probably be seeing more pictures of her in this dress, in about five months when it really is Christmas.)

Elyse at Six Months

On Monday, Elyse turned six months old! Here are some pictures I took of her to commemorate her half-year mark:

And finally, a picture with her Daddy:

(It took Mommy off-camera several tries to get that smile out of her!)

Cousin Naomi

While we were in Minnesota last week visiting Anna's family, we went to Molly and David and Naomi's house so I could do a photo shoot with Naomi. Naomi has a beautiful smile and was very cooperative; here are five of the pictures from that afternoon:

Identity

One of the many interesting things about life with Jessica is that I never know exactly who she will be, or who I will be, from day to day--or hour to hour, for that matter. For example, our early morning conversation might go something like this:

Daddy: Are you ready for some breakfast, sweetheart?
Jessica: Yes, Peter Pan.
Daddy: Okay, Wendy. Do you want some grits?
Jessica: I'm Tinkerbell.
Daddy: Oh, okay. Do you want some grits, Tinkerbell?

By mid-morning snack, I might learn that now I am Santa Claus, but it's up to me to figure out whether Jessica is Mrs. Claus or Rudolph. If she's Belle, I'm always the Beast. If she's Dora, I'm inevitably Diego.

And when she's Snow White...sometimes I'm Dopey. It's something I've come to accept.

Rice Cereal

Elyse has been showing a lot of interest in "big people" foods lately--reaching for our pizza, attempting to grab spoons, trying to get her mouth to the straws on our cups--so we decided it was time to start her out on solid foods. Here are some pictures from her first, very successful feeding of rice cereal:

(It was Jessica's idea to put the headband on her. Elyse put up with it because she was so excited about her rice cereal.)

Playing in Lilburn with Lucye

On Monday we met Audrey and Lucye at the park in Old Towne Lilburn to play and have lunch at the Blue Rooster Cafe. Here are some pictures from the day:

Portrait of the Artist as a Zane Grey Character

I've been doing self portraits lately, which I've been trying to give a Julia Margaret Cameron-like feel. Here are two of them, one from Vines Gardens and one from Stone Mountain:

(Zane Grey was a novelist who is remembered primarily for his westerns--Colonel Potter was often reading them in various "M*A*S*H" episodes. The hat I'm wearing in these pictures isn't really a cowboy hat, but in the first picture, because I'm wearing a vest, I look at least a little like something out of Zane Grey. Or so I want to believe.)

Jessica's First Movie; Elyse; Pictures

Last Wednesday, June 9, Granny kept Elyse for a couple of hours so Jessica could go with Mommy and Daddy to see her first movie in a theater! We saw The Tale of Despereaux, based on Kate DiCamillo's Newbery Award-winning novel of the same title, at the Snellville Stadium 14 theater as part of the Regal Entertainment Group Free Family Film Festival. Jessica enjoyed the movie, despite a few scary parts and the tendency of her seat to fold up with her in it (one of the problems associated with weighing only 31 pounds), and especially enjoyed Daddy's Junior Mints. We'll probably be going back in a couple of weeks to see The Pirates Who Don't Do Anything, which, being a Veggie Tales movie, hopefully won't have many scary parts.

A couple of weeks ago, Elyse had her four-month doctor's appointment. She's up to 18 pounds--the 95th percentile (that means that if you got a random group of 100 baby girls her age, Elyse would be larger than 94 of them, and only five of them would be bigger than her)--and 25 and 1/2 inches tall--the 90th percentile. The doctor tells us that when she starts crawling, she'll slim down some, but that won't make her any shorter. At this rate, she'll be taller than both of her parents by the time she's in first grade! (Fortunately, "this rate" lets up quite a bit pretty soon, and she'll be gaining height much more slowly. Still, she could be the tallest of us.) She's not quite five months old, but she's already wearing six-to-nine month clothes.

We've created a photo gallery of 50 recent pictures, some of which you've seen here on our blog before, some of which you haven't. You can see them by going to:

http://www.planetburdett.com/galleries/june2010/

About half of the pictures were taken at Vines Gardens, the park/formal gardens that's about two and a half miles from our house. Most of the rest were taken at home, though there are a few from Jessica's play date at Granny's house with her second cousins on Pa's side of the family; those pictures were taken by Granny.

(And yes, two of the pictures are of the possum who regularly visits our backyard. Every night we put out table scraps and the leftovers that have been stuck in the back of the fridge for three weeks and are on the verge of going bad. Sometimes, if I go to bed late enough or get up early enough, I can peek out and see one of our visitors having supper. One morning a couple of weeks ago, I got a few pictures of him. (It was actually still pretty dark, but I braced the camera against the sliding glass doors, and later brightened the pictures in Photoshop Elements. If you ever see a possum out in true broad daylight, you should probably call Animal Control--when a nocturnal animal like a possum is out during the day, that can be a sign of rabies.))