It's a sunny day at our house.

(Lila, Big Nighty Night, and Sweetie Baby get ready for Sesame Street)


(Let the magic begin)

That's my girl!

File Under: Food, Experimenting With

Last night at dinner, Lila took her hand and very deliberately pressed it into the ketchup section of her plate, making sure to cover her palm and all of her fingers in ketchup. Then she placed her hand on her cheek and made a perfect ketchup hand-stamp on her face. Finally, she took a piece of chicken off her plate, and "dipped" it in the ketchup on her face and ate it. Then she looked at me like she had discovered penicillin and said, "How 'bout DAT!"

This is what we look like...

When nobody is looking.

3 conversations with strangers.

Conversation #1:
Lila and I come upon a group of dog owners and their dogs at the park. The dog owners are friendly, and the dogs seem small and harmless, so we venture for a closer look. A middle aged woman with a small schnauzer says to Lila, "This is Sophie!"
Lila: "Sophie baby dog."
Woman: "Well, no actually, she's about five."
Lila: "Sophie have penis?"
Woman: "No, actually, Sophie doesn't have...a penis."
Lila: "Sophie have penis?"
Woman: "No-"
Lila: "Sophie have vagina!"
[Uncomfortable silence as the woman seems to determine she doesn't want to continue with this conversation.]
Me: "Let's go watch the tennis players, Lila."




Conversation #2
Lila and I are at a nearby mall that has a fish pond and a fountain. We are sitting watching the fish, when an older man wheels his chair-bound elderly father next to us. The man greets us, and starts to talk to his father about the fish. Lila points to the younger man and says loudly, "man have vagina? Dat man have vagina? DAT MAN HAVE VAGINA?" We move away quickly before any eye contact can be made.





Conversation #3
We are at the bookstore, reading an Elmo book. A store employee comes over and says, "Oh, do you like Elmo? I love Elmo! He's so cute!" Lila responds, "Elmo have vagina." I smile wanly, and the employee backs away.

A mild blow to feminism.

I went to the flea market in Pasadena a couple of weeks ago and got Lila this adorable 1950's girl's apron from the Paducah, Kentucky. I admit it, my commitment to feminism takes an occasional backseat to vintage aprons. But can you blame me? How cute is this?






I guess she needs a couple of more years till it fits. But she liked it enough that we had to pry it off her at bathtime.


(She did NOT get to watch the Baby Einstein DVD she's staring wistfully at, by the way. It was in a Good Will pile in the house that she found...)

Arlo's visit.

Arlo and Sheila, our frequent New York visitors, came to town last week, and we carved out a little quality time in Venice. Arlo and Lila are about six weeks apart, and they really do make an adorable pair...when they get around to noticing each other.




Visiting Arlo means three things to Lila: baby ducks, interesting musical toys, and plentiful snacks. When we walk around the canals, there are ducks at every turn, and the older Arlo and Lila get, the more inclined they seem to wander right off the edge of the sidewalk into duckland.



As an added activity, we imported our sophisticated aquatic system (see below) to their house, where Lila demonstrated her innocent -yet-vaguely-hostile poolside etiquette of splashing and pouring water on anyone within arm's length. Arlo stood in the middle of the pool while Lila danced around the perimeter, making trouble.




Lila is in a phase where she tends to summarize situations with three short sentences; the first two are statements of fact, and then the last comment is a little more abstract. As we drove away, Lila said from her carseat, "Arlo, babyducks."

"Uh huh," I replied. "You saw baby ducks with Arlo."

"Arlo like balls," she added.

"Yes," I said, "Arlo does like balls."

"Arlo nice boy," she concluded.

"True," I concurred.

And then she shifted gears. "Sunny Day?" she asked, drifting off into a reverie, as I plugged in the iPod and we settled in for our 1,432nd listen to the Sesame Street theme song.

Outing.

The family took an outing today to the Getty Museum, to see Ralph Covert, the folksy, congenial braintrust behind "Ralph's World", a series of children's CD's Josh and I really enjoy. We wish Lila liked Ralph's World more. For some reason we thought if she saw Ralph live and in the flesh - albeit from 100 yards away - that it might loosen her iron grip on all things Sesame. But the harsh truth is that, at the moment, if a singer is not a muppet, he/she would probably have to be on fire to catch Lila's attention.

Still, we were determined to give it our best shot.

The show had an excellent turnout, with everyone spread out on the lawn in the late afternoon...




Lila was a good sport at first, horsing around with Daddy...






And refusing to have her picture taken with Mommy...




Until she decided she'd had enough of this non-Sesame Street nonsense and declared her desire to move on.




So we took in the view...




Practiced our jumping...




Played in the dirt...




And at the end of the day, attempted a tantrum, that, in its execution, more closely resembled a peaceful sit-in than a full blown toddler fit...




Anyway, it's probably a good thing Lila's not that good at throwing a tantrum, because we're not good at taking them seriously.



(Apologies for the posting lapse. The thumb is not improving.)

Hello, Kitty.

(Sara)

Last weekend Lila and I took a trip across town to visit our friend Katy, and to visit Katy's two cats, Sara and Prudence. Katy had been telling us that Sara, particularly, was child-friendly, and since Lila hasn't really met any cats, it seemed like a perfect introduction. Also, I'm very afraid of cats; the result of growing up next door to Nippy and Suki, two mischevious Siamese kitties (actually one of them was perfectly nice, but I couldn't tell them apart). I wanted to see evidence of a charming cat myself, because if a dog doesn't work space-wise as a pet in our future, I wouldn't want to rule out a cat as a pet on account of a 35 year old unsubstantiated phobia.

When we arrived, Katy was out in front of her building with Sara. Upon first glance at her fluffy coat, coquettish eyes, and lissom posture, Sara was so perfectly feline that it seemed almost like she was created in a laboratory.

Here's another shot Katy emailed me later, that nearly made me swoon:


(Doesn't she look like a perfect combination of Marilyn Monroe, The Cowardly Lion, and Bumble, the abominable snowman from "Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer" CBS christmas special?*)

Anyway, it turns out Sara really doesn't go outside her apartment much, and meeting us out front really threw her off her game. She immediately retreated to the kitchen and hid under the stove, and no amount of cajoling could coax her out. But there were other things to entertain Lila, including Prudence, who came out for a brief hello:


(Prudence)

But things really got cooking for Lila when Katy pulled out a fabulous crocheted cape that she had picked up at a sale for another little girl she knows. Lila, who can be a little persnickity about wardrobe, fell in love with it immediately, and wore it for a walk around the block in 90+ degree heat:



Katy took this picture too, which has vaulted to the top tier of my all-time favorite Lila pictures, because the lighting makes it seem more like a John Singer Sargent painting than a photo:



When we returned from our walk, Sara still had not emerged, but Katy lured her out with some catnip. Lila was definitely beguiled by her passive cuddliness. Since we visited a week ago there has been a lot of chitchat about kitties...and capes.

* + + =

Baby Ducks.

This is at our local park.







Thumb is improving. Stories to return shortly. A teaser: "Sesame Street" is now officially a part of our lives, and today I listened to the theme song (Typical mid-day sentence from Lila: "Sunny Day? Sunny Day? Sunny Day? Sunny Day? Sunny Day? Sunny Day? Sunny Day? Sunny Day? Mommy, Sunny Day, please?") at least 13 times.

How to blow Lila's mind, part 1.

Show her this picture Aunt Catherine created in Photoshop.

Typey-typey, not so much

I've developed a repetitive-stress injury in my thumb - too much mouse-use. So for a little bit...just pictures.

Peaches. Plums. Summer.

We're having a lovely time these days in familytown. We permanently (for the summer, anyway) moved the dinner table out to the patio, and we eat all our meals outside. The garden is bursting with flowers that wend 30 feet up into the trees, and the nights are cool and quiet.




I've become obsessed with the local farmer's markets, where all the best fruits and vegetable are bursting with flavor. The flowers are pretty nice too.




Lila is showing an affinity for all of it. Each day we have a snack of a peach or a plum, and she eats the whole thing, stopping only for me to remove the pit. And she has developed a quirky ritual upon the pit's removal. "Kiss the pit," she says, and I offer her the pit to kiss, which she does. Then she says, "Pit in trash," and I throw it away. Then we talk about our friend the pit. She has a good heart, my girl. Compassion is her essence.




Life is good.

Two short lists.

THINGS LILA LICKED TODAY:

1. The right rear tire of my car.

2. The drain at the public park sprinkler.

3. The triangle at music class.

4. The footrest of her highchair.

5. A cracker she put inside my shoe.

6. A piece of cement that came loose from the patio.


THINGS LILA ATTEMPTED TO LICK, BUT WAS PREVENTED FROM DOING SO, BY ME:

1. A used bandaid she found in the sandbox at the park.

2. The brush used to scrape the grill.

3. A duck.

Last Vacation Post

Here it is, the last post from our nearly month-long vacation. This spot is one of my all-time favorites on the planet, ranking up there with the black pebble beach in Corsica I last saw at 16, the obscure but genial Caribbean island of Saba, and the view from Big Dock at my beloved Camp Waukeela in Eaton Center, New Hampshire.



It's a windy point at the end of a long peninsula; not much for sunbathers, so we've never encountered more than 4 people on the entire shore (That is due mostly, too, to the fact that even though all the coastline is open to the public, the clever citizens restrict parking for miles).



When the tide is out, you can cross a sandbar to another sliver of beach, and beyond that are small, rocky but verdant islands that reminds me a little of Ireland's west coastline.







I was fiddling with camera settings and set the image to "widescreen", as most of these pictures demonstrate. Standard ratios seemed inadequate, but it turned out to be a quick and easy way to annoy Josh. There's something about widescreen that, no matter the context, screams pretentious film student to him, and this was no different. I paid it no mind; this is a man, after all, who thinks setting your ice machine to "crushed" instead of "cubes" is showing off.



Did I mention that I adore him, nonetheless?