but in REALLY important news,

the celtics have a chance to win the nba championship tonight! bebe is pretty excited, as you can see in this video. please excuse the mouthful of avocado -- hey, at least it's green.

the reason i haven't been posting much lately

introducing bebe's little sister or brother, who is expected to join our family sometime around new year's and who has been making her/his mommy very sick.

we got to take a peek yesterday and it was surreal going back to the hospital where bebe was born, for the first time since then, to have the ultrasound. it brought home the fact that we are back on the rollercoaster of having a baby.

we are excited and terrified.

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23 months!

today, bebe marie is 23 months old. this is the last "months" post i'll write, i think -- next month, she'll be two (!!!!!) and after that, well, "25 months" just sounds silly. i'll try to keep updating the monthly bebe with pictures, though.

at 23 months, bebe continues to be the same loving, willful, happy kid she's been since her personality first started to emerge. toddlerhood has brought with it some challenges, to be sure, but she regularly amazes me with her ability to reason and be reasoned with. i'd say that 3 times out of 5, a meltdown is averted because we work together and come up with a compromise. 1 time out of 5 i have to force something on her (getting buckled into the car seat, a poopy diaper change) and 1 time out of 5 i give in to her demands (no bib for dinner? fine, no big deal).

her language continues to develop every day and she now regularly strings long sentences together. she is counting, mostly, to ten, though she has yet to grasp the concept of assigning a single number to a single concrete object once there are more than two of them. the biggest change over the past month has probably been her ability to express her feelings verbally.

some examples:

one night, during a rough stretch when she was fighting bedtime and nothing worked but giving her some time to cry in her crib, she kept calling for me and when i didn't come, wailed "bebe no happy! bebe no happy!"

when morrie pushed her one day at the playground, after she was done crying she told me, "bebe feel sad."

over the weekend, as we prepared to go grocery shopping, she told me she wanted to bring her doll stroller with her. reflexively, i said no, because the thought of having to direct her through the grocery store with her stroller sounded like a pain in the butt. but she kept asking, and eventually i told her that it was ok to bring it as long as she was going to listen to mommy, stay close to me, and stop when i asked her to stop. "that make bebe feel good," she told me.

and you know what? it made me feel good to be the kind of mom who listens to my kid, respects her as a full person with her own desires, and accommodates them when it's reasonable to do so.

math genius *does* run in our family

count to ten from bebe's mama on Vimeo.

visit to the valley

we have just returned from a really fun weekend in the sleepy west of the woody east, where we went to stay with our friends nolan and andrew while their parents were out of town. i used to babysit for these guys years and years ago and we have remained good friends ever since.

bebe and i had just been out there in april, so she was a bit confused about why beth and tim weren't there ("beth? tim? beth-tim? beth-tim beth-tim?"), but she was excited to see the boys and their dog bailey.



bebe had so much fun! she visited playgrounds,

went out to lunch (these pictures were taken just seconds before the great orange juice incident of 2010),

played basketball with daddy -- they were both skins,

{it only looks like that ball is going in}

and went out to breakfast at the world-famous miss flo's, where she

consulted the menu

had such a hard time waiting that she had to eat her arm,

drank some juice (note the clever usage of lid and straw)

snuggled daddy

(sarcastic teenage boy brother-snuggle)

and ate an english muffin with jelly

and BACON!!!!! (that's what she kept yelling at the top of her lungs while we waited for our food: "BACON!!!! BAAAAA-CONNNNNN!!!!!!")

on our way back to the car she stopped to splash in a puddle

and then it was time to head back to boston. thanks for a great weekend, nolan and andrew! hopefully your mom won't ever know how much sugar you guys consumed!

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topless day at the playground

this morning we met a bunch of friends at the playground. jakob's shirt got wet and his mother lena took it off, inspiring a wave of half-nudity. it was pretty darn cute.

bebe, morrie, ben

morrie, ayelet, bebe. one of my favorite pictures EVER.

may catch-up, part 4: fun friday

last friday, i took bebe and morrie to play at a friend's house. on our way, as we often do, we stopped at the fire station.

jackpot!

the ladder truck was pulled out in front of the station. when one of the firefighters saw us watching he waved and then said, "you just missed the show!" every morning they put the ladder up and down as part of a daily testing routine, but we've only every managed to catch it once (it's usually done by the time we are out and about.) i expressed some regret and he said, "well, you want me to do it again?"

did we ever! so we got our own private show. bebe and morrie were thrilled and after he was done we all said "thank you" to the fire fighter.

then we went to our friend aya's house, where much fun was had. the hit of the day was the bowls of water and little paintbrushes that aya's mom meg distributed among all the kids. they happily "painted" the fence while we mommies sat on the porch drinking iced drinks. score!

after we got back to morrie's house and had lunch, it was potty time. here is a picture of bebe right after she pooped on the potty. and so ends our recap of the month of may, 2010.

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may catch-up, part 3: cousins visit

earlier this month, we got the chance to visit with some special cousins, chely and kayalá. their mother ali is my second cousin, and she and i were very close growing up. her dad and my dad were first cousins -- their fathers were best friends who married sisters, so the two families spent lots of time together. our dads are closer than cousins, sort of a cross between brothers and best friends. when they grew up, married, and had children of their own, those families then in turn spent lots of time together, including many weekend visits and extended summer vacations together. interestingly, the age difference between ali's father jerry and my dad is almost exactly the same as the age difference between ali and me, and between chely and bebe.

since chely and her family live in guatemala, i know that she and bebe will probably never get the chance to be quite as close as ali and i were, if only because they won't get to spend nearly as much time together. but on this particular day, it was really fun to watch bebe follow chely around, looking up to her as the cool older cousin who knew -- and could do -- so much more than she, just as i used to look up to ali.

it was also fun to watch all the jumping.

may catch-up, part 2

a goodbye hug before daddy leaves for work

hey-hey!

running running running!

auntie ash, who works in a garden store, started some container gardens for us which josh recently picked up and brought back home. lettuce, swiss chard, cilantro, basil, chives, rosemary, tomatoes, beans, cucumbers... i am so excited to eat it all! we've already had some tasty salad with the lettuce. bebe loves going out to the front porch to visit with the plants. she often takes a book out to read to them.

watering them is, of course, also a fun activity.

as is watering the floor.

more reading on another sunny morning.


the following is a long series of pictures taken one morning at breakfast. bebe looked so pretty and i was trying and trying to capture it in a photo. i never quite managed, as you'll see:

this last one is of her saying "no more pictures." seriously.

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