Thing 1

My nephew from the Shaker Hts. clan recently went to Abby's alma mater, Dartmouth, for a college visit. Apparently, he's quite the star. When the people at the dog park saw Margaret's t-shirt and asked if I had gone to Dartmouth, I responded "What, are you kidding me? Like an Ivy League school would even open my application envelope." In any case, they sent us a couple of t-shirts from their visit. Margaret is wearing the first. The second is slightly smaller and is labeled "Thing 2." So you can imagine what our Xmas photo will be this year, particularly given the festive color of the shirts.

And some random thoughts:

• Fittingly, Margaret and I read "One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish" before I put her to bed tonight. My review: THAT BOOK MAKES ABSOLUTELY NO SENSE! I don't even mean that there is a lot of nonsense in the book. After all, I would have anticipated lots of gobbledygook given my recollections of Dr. Seuss. But, OF, TF, RF, BF has absolutely no narrative thread. None. Just a bunch of completely random nonsense pieced together. I did like the rhymes and rhythm (and basically started "rapping" the book to her in my own way) which always makes a book more successful in my opinion, but some overall point would have been nice. Perhaps I'm being too much of a literalist. Naturally, Margaret had a ball. Until she started to conk out at the end (it's actually an astonishingly long book for something that doesn't have a point.)
• The kid's outfits involve a very particular pattern depending on who dresses her in the morning. When Mama chooses the clothes, she tends to wear pink or purple and is much more likely to wear a dress. But when Papa chooses the clothes, she often wears blue jeans and green or yellow tops. The people at the dog park have quickly learned to guess the source of the clothes. The above photo illustrates a "Papa outfit."
• Margaret has crushed another milestone for kids of her age: the what-sound-does-a-___-make trick. She's been working on it for a while, but now has the following animals down cold: dog, cat, cow, horse, sheep, lion, rooster, frog. Although interpretation of some of the harder multi-syllable sounds (e.g. the rooster or frog) does require some creative license on the part of Mama or Papa.
• She has also learned the names of some of the dogs at the park. Bob (a brown lab who loves to chase balls) and Molly (a somewhat rotund, but very devious Border Collie who likes to edge away slowly while no one is watching before making a break for it.) She also waves goodbye to everyone at the park when we leave which gets an almost universally enthusiastic response from everyone sitting at the "dog" picnic table. The sight of 6 people sitting at the table, all waving wildly at us as we leave, is pretty funny.
• The position of the kid relative to the kitchen counter in the above photo illustrates another recent development: Margaret's assistance during the preparation of dinner. Since Abby tends to get home after we've started the dinner preparations and since I'm the one who does those anyway given my comparative, nay absolute, advantage in that aspect of home production (geez, such an economist), in the past, Margaret spent a lot of time wallowing in misery around my legs while I cut stuff up and started cooking. Pretty annoying behavior. So I have started to plop her on chair, give her a dull butter knife to fiddle with, and push veggie remnants in front of her to mess around with. Since those remnants are obviously food, she tends to taste them, but most, such as raw garlic or onions, come back out pretty quickly. Still, she seems to be much happier. Up at the counter with Papa, messing around with important things - much better than being left on the floor by Papa's legs. And she seems to have a general affinity for messing around with "kitchen stuff" as I noted when I picked her up yesterday from the preschool room (yep, she was in the preschool room since she's obviously an advanced child) where she was fiddling around in the pretend kitchen. It looks like we may to have get her a kiddie kitchen set at some point. (By the way, I actually like cooking even though I tend to complain about always having to do it. A guy at the dog park who also cooks for his family summed it up perfectly: "It's something concrete that I can actually finish every day.")
• I went to Chicago this past weekend to watch the Cubs last homestand of the year against the Pirates. Since they won the Saturday and Sunday games against the Bucs, it currently appears that, barring a monumental collapse (knock on wood), the Cubs will win the division. But the best moment of the weekend happened on Sunday. The Brewers (the team chasing the Cubs) had taken a 4-1 lead against the Braves through the 7th inning. When the manual scoreboard at Wrigley showed that the Braves had put up 4 runs in the bottom of the 7th to take a 5-4 lead, everyone at Wrigley started to do the "Tomahawk Chop." They then did it again when the Braves expanded the lead to 7-4 and when the score was posted as a final. It was pretty cool. As I told one of my friends at the game, "I've always hated the Tomahawk Chop, but I'll do it today."

And another photo of Thing 1.