Let me count the ways

I can't help but try, futile though it is, to convey snapshots of the emerging personality of Eliot. Yes, yes, I'm her mum, but she is an awfully charming little person and has kept all of us delighted all the weekend with her funny, vivid character. She is an excellent mimic, and picks up anything out of the ordinary-- sounds, voices, gestures. She kept us laughing all the way home from Monsoon lunch with a very amusing version of Weird Al Yankovic's "Boring Song", and likes to toss into conversation at dinner her line from Halloween: "FEED me, Seymour!"-- which in her version has become "FEED me, more!". She tips her head to one side and makes a variety of funny faces.. if not crossed (and even then), she keeps up a happy, buoyant, amused and amusing frame of mind almost all the time. She likes to comment on everything, particularly what belongs to whom. Right now the number is two (generally accurately) and the color is blue, which applies to most everything, including an African-American lady in the checkout line the other day. She was thrilled when I unearthed a snowsuit for her to try on this evening and insisted on waddling around the house in it like a penguin, unfazed at the extra toppling and inability to reach things on the floor that it induced.

Anselm is also in a lovely phase: gentle and gently spoken, helpful and considerate, full of interesting thoughts, and as delighted as we are with his baby sister. He told me he has found a method for hugging her without injury: he sneaks up behind her and pins her arms down. (On her side, she has made real progress with the concepts of "good" and "nice".) Yesterday afternoon when Blaise came home from the airport, we decided to walk down through the forest to Eastlake, quite a ways, to the bakery for a cake. Anselm had been running all day at a playdate, and, it eventually emerged, hadn't eaten since before aikido at 8.30am. He was pretty tired and hungry, but after at least an hour's walk, when the bakery turned out to be closed due to a power outage, he didn't complain at all and walked another half a mile over the University bridge to Agua Verde for dinner. And then fell asleep at the table. Blaise brought him a seal and sealing wax from Spain and he spent this afternoon writing secret letters to us all: TO MUM FRUM ANSELM, I LUV YU MUM.

We are very fond.