You Find Me. . .

The first three books Joe ever loved were Where Is Baby's Belly Button?; Tickle, Tickle; and First 100 Words, from the Bright Baby series. In First 100 Words, there are two pages of animals--farm and wild. We spent many, many a night with Julie asking Joe to find her the pig, or the gorilla, or the tiger. Julie would make all the animals' noises, too. Joe was so great at finding all those animals. And then before we knew it, he was saying di-on (lion) and we were beyond First 100 Words. But tonight, the tables were turned:

Joe [opening First 100 Words]: "You find me. . .the grapes!"

Julie [pointing]: "Right there!"

Joe: "Good job!"

Fans, he's got me down cold.

Baby Bird's First Solid Meal: The Video

For those super fans out there, here is an edited 3 minutes of video from the feeding. It includes extra bonus footage of Joe in the background!

Hello Yellow House!

When Julie rolled up to the house each evening with Joe and Clara, Joe had adopted her habit of saying "Hello the House!"* When Joe's class began a unit on their home, and they were discussing home colors, Julie added yellow to the mix and thus, the new phrase became "Hello Yellow House!" (Julie was really glad our house is a color easily recognized by the toddler set.) Now it's too cold to park on the street at night, so we've returned to parking in the garage. We still say hello to our yellow house, but apparently, it is not the same unless you are greeting it from the front, because after pulling into the garage last week, Joe said he wanted to say hello to the yellow house "through the window." What to do? So we traipsed down the front walk to the steps, turned around, and said "HELLO YELLOW HOUSE!" with a flourish (the flourish is key). And thus was a new routine born.

*Out of Africa fans will recognize that this line is not her own.

Joe's Pajamas

Lately, when we check on the bambini before heading up to bed, we find Joe without his pajamas on. He had several kinds of pajamas: footed sleepers (fleece and cotton), and pants and shirt sets (the kind that are made to fit like sausage casings). He always striped off the footed sleepers. He seemed to not be able to get the sausage casings off entirely, but we would find that he had pushed the legs up as high as he could and had wrestled with the shirt. Was he hot? Uncomfortable? Just excited about his ability to take his clothes off? Worried that he was hot or uncomfortable, we got him some pairs of the looser fitting big boy pajamas. It's a little sad to say good-bye to the footed sleepers and sausage casings, but some things remain unchanged: he's still taking his pajamas off.

Baby Bird's First Solid Meal

Eating. It's tricky, tricky business. Especially when you can't sit up without listing over to the side. But our Baby Bird was all, "I'm six months old and I. Am. Hun-GRY! Bring it." So this morning, she had her first solid meal. Rice cereal and breast milk. Mmm, mmm good! Ted prepped the rice cereal in a pink bowl and pink spoon. Baby Bird took right to that spoon. She was all over it; wanted to guide it right into her mouth and check it all out. (She never met a thing she didn't want to check out.) You can see how this check-me-out-checkin'-things-out tendency got the table progressively messier as the meal wore on. Good thing Joe was around to mop up. (And he could have cared less that Baby Bird was in the high chair.)