for Grandma Joan

Joan, thank you for the lovely V-day package for the kids. We read to Ruby your Valentine's card and how you wanted her to send you more pictures of herself. She didn't seem to get it though. She just looked up at us and noisily sucked on her chubby dimpled fingers, as she is apt to do. So I'm stepping in here to help you out while both kids nap simultaneously. (Tender mercies, indeed! If only this happened more often!)

Arms extended and worried brows. Ruby doesn't really enjoy bathtime.

Doing some time in baby jail.

Yes, I'm pinning her arms down with my feet. (Levi likes to call those my "kite socks".) Otherwise, many of her pictures would just be a blur of flailing limbs.

lunch conversation

The typical lunchtime conversation I have with Levi centers around the items on his plate. He'll point to the pasta and ask, "What is this?" even though he knows very well what it is. If I'm in the right mood, I'll play along and say, "I don't know. What is it?" Levi will then nod his head while announcing, "This is pasta." Then we move to the next thing on his plate and repeat until we've gone over each food item at least 4 times. I find it pretty tedious but the toddler really gets a kick out of it. Imagine my surprise then when Levi said at lunch yesterday, "Hummus rhymes with Thomas." Thomas of Thomas the Tank Engine, of course. Precocious don't you think? It made me very proud and a little wary. The kid is going to be smarter than me before I know it.

look at mii

we don't have a Nintendo "Wii", but this is what Harriet & I would look like as game characters.

milestones

Busy busy busy. This month Levi's been transitioning to a new preschool called Milestones in Palo Alto. It's 6 hours a week and the program is designed for kids with and without developmental delays. It might be too early to say, but so far it looks like a good fit for Levi. He's not so delayed in his speech anymore, but still seems to struggle with socialization and some sensory processing.

Speaking of milestones, Levi's latest one is something I've been trying to delay for as long as possible. He is now a conscious participant of the market economy. The other day we were at Mervyn's and he approached me with a toy car saying, "Buy this!" Sigh. Here we go. For the longest time, I made a deliberate effort to not buy any toys for him in his presence. I kind of treated toy stores like museums; we could admire the things inside but the toys stayed there. But somewhere along the line, the smart boy figured it out. I think things gelled for him when we started potty training and picked out cool and fun big boy underwear together. Oh well, it was inevitable. Bummer.

Ruby's latest milestone is sitting up independently. She did it for the first time today, and I almost missed it. I had her in my lap while she was intently grabbing at Levi's Mickey Mouse push car. Then I got distracted by something potentially dangerous that the boy was doing. When I got back, there she was sitting on her own playing with the Mickey car. My cheering must have been pretty distracting, because she tipped over almost before I could get any sounds out of my mouth.

Jeff and I also reached a new milestone: we managed to have some company over for dinner tonight. It was absolute chaos that involved 3 different batches of pizza dough, disabling the smoke detector in the kitchen, and one change of clothes each for Jeff and Ruby and me (Ruby's fault), but we did it. And we managed to put both kids to bed and clean up everything in time to catch the last 40 minutes of Pride & Prejudice on TV. Sweeeet. I'm so happy about Masterpiece Theatre's current Jane Austen series. Jeff definitely scores good husband points for watching it with me.

A quiet moment with The Rubinator.

Levi's knee jerk reaction when he sees an insect. Both arms go straight up to the sides of his head to cover his ears, even if the insect is nowhere near him.

What a flirt.