Scrolling
As I scroll up the pictures on my phone, Essie gets younger, just like that.
As the days go by, she grows up, just like that.
Warm Weather
The first 60° day of of 2016, so we headed out for a walk in the stroller.
As I scroll up the pictures on my phone, Essie gets younger, just like that.
As the days go by, she grows up, just like that.
So we drove the few hours, through a dark morning up to Duluth, Ess sleeping in the backseat after a few miles of sleepy babble. We were bound for a dance competition for mama’s work, and like she always does on long trips, Ess woke up just as we were turning into the slow roads between freeway and competition. Once there, Ess received a little ladybug from Robin. Meant to be good-luck disposable hand-outs for the dancers, our daughter took her particular ladybug to be rather different than that.
Ess bowled two strikes in a row (with the help of a ramp to launch her ball) on her first day bowling.
The first 60° day of of 2016, so we headed out for a walk in the stroller.
Reading Merry Christmas, Amelia Bedelia.
Dancing and eating. Eating and dancing.
This book has six pages—it’s one of those indestructible, untearable books, which is a good thing considering that Ess carries it with her wherever she goes. It came from Nannie’s, and Ess currently has it out on loan. It goes in the car with her, she plays with it during the day, she shares it with George, but she can’t take it in the store anymore because she isn’t great at holding on to it for long periods of time and the last thing we want is to lose it.
Ess loves to put food out for George and watch him eat. It has taken a while to get her to leave him enough space to eat; before, she was scaring him away trying to show him so much affection while he was trying to eat. They’re figuring it out.
I took this before we went in to the RV show at the Minnneaplis Convention Center. Ess is holding what she calls ‘mama’: a hot pink Under Armour shirt of Mykala’s that Ess, out of the blue, began to use as a security blanket of sorts. In fact, she’s holding it as she sleeps right now. Anyway, we needed a way for Ess to be able to hold the blanket as we strolled around; Mykala thought to tuck it into the straps.
“Dada, hi!” and then a pause. “Dada… hi.” Essie had just turned to see what I was doing at the edge of the bedroom, and while she has been uttering expressive morphemes in response to me and my actions for a while, her greeting marked one of her first definite sentences at me. The thrill! Burbles and gurgles of infancy have so quickly become expressions of thought and opinion and frustration and love.
When Mykala was just three months pregnant with Ess, one of the challenges I anticipated was a sick kid at home. How difficult it must be to watch your little one run down by aches, a runny nose, a tight cough and tired lungs. It has been about two years since that thought, and through a combination of luck and hand sanitizer, our family has threaded the contagion needle through birthday parties, sick relatives, and an entire cold and flu season. Then there was last week. Ess was down, down, down. The primary prodrome was her tendency to sit on our laps for extended periods, paging through a book, resting her head on our encircling arms. Kid must be fighting something, we guessed.
If Essie doesn’t know or can’t say the word for something, it is always always ‘dahVEE’. “Can you say ‘refrigerator’?” we ask. Then, with utter confidence comes the response: dahVEE. “What’s that?” we query, pointing to something new. It’s a dahVEE. Obviously.
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