Been a while since a good general update …
On the health front: no worries! Everyone’s been fine for a couple of weeks running now. There have been cases of HINI at Dominic’s preschool and probable cases (“flu-like symptoms”) at Ella’s school as well, so we are beset on all sides but soldier on nonetheless.
We’ve started scheduling afterschool playdates for Ella; she has her third one this afternoon. I wasn’t sure whether she’d be interested in playing with the other girls in her class, most of whom do in fact do things like wear pink or wear dresses or bows in their hair or have flowers on their backpack. But that doesn’t appear to be a significant impediment.
It’s so fun to watch her learn. In addition to the general progress we can see in her reading, her Spanish, and all that, we’ve also seen a shift in her solo activities: she likes to do a lot more drawing than she used to. When your kid is a baby there’s a particular thrill in seeing something of you in them: they have your eyes, maybe, or your chin. As they get older these are replaced by different thrills. When Ella doodles she doesn’t generally draw pictures of people or things; instead she’ll make outlines of abstract shapes and then have fun filling them in in different colors and shades. That’s totally what I did too.
Dominic throws tantrums. The two things in his life that he would like to have happen a lot more often are 1) preschool and 2) Friday lunch with the guys (though he says “Fwiday lunch of the guys”). He adores preschool two mornings a week and when I must inform him on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays that he is not going to school that day: tantrum. Similarly, every day is a good day as far as he’s concerned for us to drive to Clarendon and meet my friends for lunch, and when we don’t do that on Monday-Thursday it is an occasion for a tantrum. These are the easy sorts of tantrums, though, where you can distract him — “would you like some juice?” “let’s do a puzzle!” “hey Dom, show me something that’s green!” — and he’ll forget what he was carrying on about.
Toddler bed continues to work well. And though I fear to articulate it lest the fact evaporate even as a reach out to touch it: he’s been sleeping in a little longer. Today by alarm going off at 7:00 was the first sound of the morning. Wonder of wonders.
Halloween costumes: Dominic will be a bat, with one of those toddler onesie costumes. Ella’s going to wear her long-sleeve hoodie with skeleton ribs on it, and a lone ranger mask. (She finally outgrew her Peter Pan costume.) I lobbied hard, as I do every year, for her to go as Kiki — even offered to dress Dom up as a cat so he could be Gigi — but she ain’t biting.
A final anecdote: I’ve been playing around with Picasa 3.5, which have face recognition technology so once you identify some specific people in your photos it tries to extrapolate which ones they are in all your photos. And in many ways it works remarkably well — it even identified some childhood photos of me as me after I had identified myself only in adult pictures. But there’s going to have to be some significant technological advances before any software can tell apart pictures of Ella and Dominic circa 12-18 months . . .