Hoya saxa

To begin with, a few updates:

• Teddy has grown a lot over the last month or so. He's no longer a "newborn" at all. In fact, he's not only outgrowing all of his 3 month clothes (at a bit less than 4 months), but his 6 month clothes are also getting pretty tight. I do not like this development, especially given the drastic change in weather that DC will experience between now and May-June, but if anyone out there is thinking about sending any clothes Teddy's way, I'd seriously consider choosing a 6+ (or perhaps even 12) month size.
• Margaret has similarly started to outgrow a lot of her size 2 clothing even though she hasn't hit that milepost yet. So the same caveat applies for anyone looking to contribute to Maggie's wardrobe.
• Margaret is starting to employ substantially more complex word structures. Rather than simply saying two or three syllable words, she's starting to put together combinations of words into multi-syllabic phrases. We have things like "Papa's shirt" or "On the bike", these types of statements. It's especially fun since we've entered the stage where there's a lot of interpretation required to figure out what she's saying, but we're the only ones who can decipher most of what she says.
• Initially, we thought that Teddy's hair might end up being quite a bit darker than Margaret's hair. At this point, Margaret is about as blond as the come - we've only run into a few kids as blond as her, and most of them look like albinos. Teddy, on the other hand, seemed to have slightly darker hair when he arrived. But he hasn't had much hair in general, and over the last few weeks, he appears to have shed most of his hair with the new hair coming in pretty light. Perhaps not as light as Maggie's hair, but I suspect that we'll have another serious tow-head on our hands.
  

Today, Margaret and I went to a Georgetown basketball game at the Verizon Center. We met some friends of mine from college and sat in a luxury box during the game (really, nothing fancy, but we knew the people who had the tickets so we were able to get them.) At this stage of Margaret's life, a box is the only way that I'd take her to a game since she didn't sit still at any point, and the box provides a nice way to confine her. When we first got to the game, the band was playing, the scoreboard was pulsating with pictures as scoreboards tend to do these days, and we were generally bombarded by lots of noise and people. Margaret's mouth dropped open and she spent a few minutes just staring at the whole scene. She especially liked the band, particularly the drums. Then the lights dropped for the intro of the Hoyas, and Margaret was completely stunned by all of the hoopla. As the game progressed, she got into certain aspects of it, but never seemed to catch onto the fact that the players on the floor were doing something interesting. For example, during breaks, she liked to watch the cheerleaders and, as before, liked to watch the band. (Hopefully, the latter will take hold more than the former in the long run since I can handle a "band geek" a lot better than I can a cheerleader.) She also caught on to the free throw ritual of raising her hands before a free throw as I'd draw her attention to the student section which she would subsequently mimic, but she didn't seem to get the distinction between waving her hands during a free throw by an opposing player and the still solemnity that accompanies the free throw of a Hoya. And she didn't seem to grasp when she was supposed to drop her hands (and clap, or not) after a free throw. Most of the time, she wiggled around my seat while I tried to track of her with a hand in one direction while talking with my friends in the other. At the end, Georgetown won, but Margaret didn't seem to register that fact. Instead, I loaded her into her stroller and, since the game had pushed right through her naptime, she fell asleep by the time we got out of the stadium.

And some random pics from the last week: