too hot too cold just right.

oddly, even at this precocious age, sophia understands the adage, 'absence makes the heart grow fonnder'.
the less we see of each other, even though it's only slightly less (due to school), the more readily affectionate she is. i guess she just has a very low threshold for overexposure to me. ohh, girls. i suppose i must share blame. anyway, the number of hugs heading my way has gone up by an order of magnitude since school started for us. i am still amazed by how intrepid and confident she is at and about school. yet she still cant have her hair brused without crying and needing consolation afterwards.
at least the way i do it.
i think the next blog-poll will have to be whether sophia is a)rail-thin, or b)stick-skinny.

Its a big big race

The weather in Indiana has been wonderful. Except the last couple of days. The last couple of days have been global warmingly hot and then finally it rained today so disregard all that. But really, the weather, fantastic. It is the perfect bike riding weather which is good because there has been a lot of bike riding going on.

Sophia has a shorter day at school then Elias. She either comes home at 1130 and has lunch with me and Tristan or she comes home at 1230 and pretends that she ate lunch at school. Either way, Sophia eats lunch and then promptly says to me, I'm ready to go for a bike ride! We started out going around the block. Sophia on her purple bike with sparkles and fringe coming off the handlebars and me on foot. Now I have to limit her to two miles because Tristan has to get to his Latin class and I think Sophia would ride her bike forever. Sometimes Sophia will get going pretty fast, which is good exercise, but I may actually need to start jogging for a little while to keep up with her. And everytime this happens I say to Sophia, It's not a race to which she responds. "Yes it is, its a big big race".

wet onesie

cybele has started responding to "no" with some consistency. she's always been a little better at understanding it than others, grownups and infants alike, for all the long term good it will do her to obey the word. right now, i.e. this instant, she is walking around, having un-napped herself before the big kids, and drinking from someone else's sippy cup, either sophia's or mary's, and then letting the contents cascade down her chin and chest. she seems to think this deeply clever and profoundly hilarious. she could work in naughty gentlemen's club for dim-witted harvard MBA's (sorry for the redundancy) and other toddlers. help us find one: BAM, more money! she does the act, shakes the cup, and nods in delighted self-approbation. i outfitted all three in American Apparel clothes this week and the truth is that cybele wears them best. the kara-te pants are just so right-on on her short, bowed, fat legs.

House Ape

Blogging about the Bele is always so much fun because she is bound to be doing something new and exciting after another three weeks. In the last couple of days, Cybele has started climbing. Everything. We find her on chairs, couches and yesterday at Uncle Aedan's house, a papasan. She has a couple of tricks that I have seen her using and they are as follows. Climbing up by swinging her leg all the way up because she is made of rubber, pushing something over so that she has a stairstep and then using her rubber legs, and lastly, grabbing on to the fabric on the couch/chair/bed/papasan/etc. to pull her self up with her upper body strength. I think the latter is my favorite because she appears to do it against all laws of gravity. It must be fun to be proportioned like a baby and have the relative strength of a body builder.

his sister's keeper

elias' popularity with cybele abides. when he gets home from school, if she's awake, she dashes for him, lunges for him, shreiks with delight. they maul each other with great affection. he has an amazing instinctive capacity to know what she likes and what kinds of things she enjoys, how rough he can be. she likes to rough house as much as anyone, but only elias can sustain the play without doing anything too rowdy.

Summers out for school

It is hard for me to imagine that one of my children might actually prefer school over summer. Elias told me at the beginning of the summer that he wished that school would be all year long, but I assumed that he would eventually enjoy sleeping in and playing all day. This does not seem to be the case. School is Elias' element. He enjoys reading and art and most of all science. Today Elias came home and told me that in science he learned about sorting. I am not sure what sorting is about, but Elias was excited about it and he volunteered information about it. I could not ask for more than that. Elias is also continuing to read up a storm. I was worried that he would have fallen behind in his reading over the summer because he didn't do much independent reading. We continued to faithfully read him a book at nap time and a book at bedtime every day, but he rarely sat down with one of us and read through a book on his own. Lucky for us, Elias is a natural at reading too and he still rocks his reading teacher's world. Tonight Elias read Sophia a bedtime story. He is a good big brother too.

starting school, again.

sophia is a good little runner. she trots along, in perfect asymmetry, one arm somewhat straightened.
her teachers are extraordinarily enthusiastic to have her at school. that's due in part to the fact that they have been observing her as elias' little sister who will soon be at school here for a full year, and so have had time to build anticipation, and in part to enrollment being a little down (and who should be surprised, what with the no student left behind program making the average public school such a paragon of elite academic acheivement). but it's mostly due to the fact that she is infectiously delightful. i heard a rumor about an exclusive clique in her social circle at school...she was on the outside of it. (4 yr olds, believe it) i assume sophia can navigate this herself, she is wily and irresistible, but if she can't, for some reason, I MUST CRUSH THEM.

Four years

I was looking at pictures in my photo library and I realized that Sophia's appearance has changed significantly throughout her life. I decided that I would do a Sophia throughout the years photo spread for the blog. This first picture is probably Sophia's first digital picture. We call it hippie Sophia and I just love it. She was ten months old in this photo.

This next photo is when Sophia was two years and four months old. I call it her chubby phase. She had a round face and a round body and she was just so deliciously squeezable.

This next photo is from right after Cybele was born. She was three years and two months old. We were at Eagle Creek and Sophia already knew how to roll her eyes. I think she is trying to explain to me that I am dreadfully wrong about everything, including the need for such trivial things as lunch and nutrition.

This last photo is from last Saturday. We went to the zoo and had a great time. I snuck onto the merry-go-round by insisting that my kids needed my help getting onto the animals. WEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!!!

buddies

Cybele pretty much delivers the quintessence of the 'parent to an infant" experience. it is rather surprising how extraordinary it is to behold a perfectly 'typical' baby. you could say she is amazing, but from a different point of view, she simply does every single little thing you expect a baby to do. verbally, manually, physically, behaviorially.
normally, when it is time to nap her and we are not at home, i find a safe place for her to sleep and lie down with her and hold her while she squirms and protests her little protestations, cries/whines and then falls to sleep. i discovered yesterday that she does the exact same thing, in the exact same way whether i am holding her or not. i just have to lie there next to her and watch. because she knows what she's doing.