One of our family routines is--as we're driving or biking around Ann Arbor doing various things--if we pass the large, stone church that houses Maia's preschool, we all chant this little song entitled "Hi, School!" (It has more words than that, and the verses are variable depending upon when the next school day is coming.)
This evening, in the dark, as we were all coming home from a coffee shop/Christmas shopping outing in Kerrytown, we passed the intersection at Washtenaw/South University, the sorority houses, and then our school's church building ... and Eli said "Hi, school!" with glee and gusto! Eli knows his way around his town, just like little toddler Maia did.
Just a little anecdote to get things started. :)
The year 2011 is wrapping up smoothly for all of us here ("all of us" now including our little beagle, Bell, who joined our family a few weeks ago). Maia's last day of preschool before her winter break was today, and she remarked that "This is the last time I'll be at Triangle as a four-year-old! Next time I come here, I'll be five!" She's becoming such a "kid"--even the word "preschooler" seems too young for her, some days. One of those days: last week she decided that one of the things she wanted for Christmas or her birthday was a book of photographs of dissected animals (including humans, natch) via which she could learn about internal anatomy. (!) When I tried to clarify this assertion of hers by asking if she wanted a book with drawings of these things, she said "No, pictures with a camera. Drawings aren't real, and they won't get me ready for the class in school when I can touch brains and muscles by myself." That's our Maia, five-going-on-Medical-School.
Maia and Brian are about 300 pages into Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, and they're showing no signs of slowing down. There are a lot of new characters to meet in this book, and the wizarding world gets bigger with the introduction of wizards from France and Bulgaria as well as the familiar cast of characters from jolly old England. Maia seems to be keeping up with it, for the most part--we shall see how she handles Voldemort and his brand new, human-again form at the end of this story (shhhh, don't tell her! She's learned about "spoilers" after learning in who Luke Skywalker's father is and wanting to share the news with all her classmates).
Eli is handling his second winter well, just like his big sis. He's becoming more and more verbal by the day; we've stopped counting his words at this point, as he seems to add one or two a day. Newly arrived just this week: chair, block, meat, bread, tree, cat, cow, poop (he's now telling us when he loads up his pants), butter, box, and a couple of others I'm forgetting. I love the sound of his boisterous, repetitive, slightly gravelly voice talking his way through his days. One of the funniest things he does now is raise his voice if he doesn't think you're responding quickly enough. It goes something like this: "Dada. Dada. DADA. DAAAAAADAAAA!?!?!!!"
I'm still deeply resistant to cutting off his beautiful baby curls, so I suppose it's time to start to think about how I can keep his bangs from growing in his eyes, and just how long his hair is going to get before I can cut it. He's weighing-in at about 32 pounds, which, at 16 months, is 9 pounds more than Maia did at her 18 month appointment in 2008. I know it's been a constant theme of our Eli-related posts to comment on his size, and I do certainly want to spend time reflecting on who he is as a person aside from how big he is ... that really doesn't matter at all, when it comes down to it. But, still, it is pretty remarkable, and we assumed at some point his growth would slow down, but it hasn't. Eli's bigness manifests itself in so many ways--his big, huge blue eyes, his dark and thick eyelashes, his big voice, his huge laugh, the way he stomps around the house, and the big way he expresses his anger when things just aren't working out for him. Just today he was stomping laps around the coffee-prep island at Sweetwater's in Kerrytown, and you could hear his footsteps rounding the corner even though he was out of view with a wall in-between us.
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