Kit got a great series of pictures of the girls today, taking a rare opportunity to shoot pictures of Claire, who is normally reluctant to be photographed.
On the Steps
McG Kids
This weblog tracks my kids’ early years. Each entry is a snapshot from their childhood.
Please pardon any type-o’s, misstatements, or factual irregularities. This blog is written by an often dazed dad, normally after 11 pm when he should really be in bed if he had any sense. Even the basic quick edit is not a regular practice here.
Won’t Eat Again
Molly has generally been eating well the last few weeks. But on her daily note at school today, we got a reminder of what things had been like for so long, when Molly often did not care to have anything to do with food. Here is her daily note.
Under “For Lunch I ate”, you can see that she ate nothing at all, declining noodles, beans, and apple sauce. She apparently did help herself to a bit of water, though, so at least she was hydrated.
That’s My Little Sister!
Claire loves to show off her cute little sister, Molly, to her friends at school. When I pick Claire up from school in the afternoon, she usually says, “Can you go get Molly first?” When I produce Molly a few minutes later, a group of Claire’s friends enthusiastically gather around her. They love to get Molly to repeat their names. Molly quietly works through the crowd, taking a crack at Charlotte, Ivan, Ella, Elke, and all the rest. The girls love when Molly says their name, or even gets close. At this point, Molly remembers some of their names and will say them without prompting, especially Ella and Elke. They also love to hug Molly, and sometimes they want to pick her up, although usually I draw the line there. Eventually Molly wears down from all the attention and has to withdraw to my arms, with her face in my shoulder. Sometimes this affection can be too much all at once.
Claire seems to enjoy this outpouring of affection more than Molly does. Claire is so proud to have Molly as her little sister, and she never tires of showing her off around school.
Independence Day ’11
For July 4, we met up with some friends and went to the Tarrytown neighborhood parade. The friends enthusiastically collected candy tossed from the parade and/or generally acted goofy in celebration of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. Claire and Molly had fun too but were not quite as silly.
Sausage King of Chicago
Molly has been especially interested in letters lately. Sometimes she will see a letter and actually say the letter, or least say a letter. She might see an R and say “R”, or she might say “A” instead, but she definitely gets the idea that these letter shapes are significant and have names.
It is sort of a special thing for Molly to say a letter, not an every day occurrence. But there is one very special prop which has Molly saying letters every time. It is my Abe Froman, the Sausage King of Chicago, shirt. Almost every time I am holding Molly while wearing this shirt, she loves to point at the letters and try to guess what they are. She often gets the A, B, and O right. Sometimes she points to the crown after the E, and I just have to say “crown”, which she now thinks is a letter.
If you’re wondering who the heck Abe Froman is, this clip from Ferris Beuller’s Day Off should clear it up for you.
By the way, this shirt has another magical power. It starts conversations with strangers, many of whom instantly recognize it from the movie. This shirt, acting on it own, even got me a free fountain drink at Rudy’s BBQ. Another ten of those, and this shirt will have paid for itself!
MPCV
Claire and Molly saw their first real, live spaceship today.
Kit read in the newspaper that NASA’s new Multi Purpose Crew Vehicle (MPCV) was parked about a mile away in the parking lot of the Bob Bullock Museum tonight. The spacecraft was on it’s way from California to Florida and just happened to be passing through town. We decided to go check it out after dinner, even though Molly would be late for bed. I mean really, a spaceship sitting there a mile away for one night? You have to go check that out.
So we did go check it out, and it was pretty cool to see this space-pod thing sitting there on the back of a flatbed, and we waited in a long line to take look through the window. We even got to talk to some of the engineers who designed the spacecraft. Claire and Molly ran around on the grass while we waited, and Claire made a couple of friends. It was a good night.
All Orange
Molly is all about the orange.
Tonight for dinner, she had macaroni & cheese, mashed carrots, and orange slices. I didn’t realize until the end that everything she was eating was the same glorious orange color. Well, okay, fortunately the milk was white.
To top it off, I then realized that she was wearing an orange shirt, as was I.
Molly’s teachers tell me that that she only eats orange-colored vegetables. Sure enough, she still gobbles up baby food carrots and sweet potatoes, but normally won’t touch any other kind of baby food.
Where does this orange obsession come from?
Maybe this fondness of orange, combined with her disposition on yelling “AGGIE!” when upset, show Molly, the family’s only Austin native, to be a huge fan of the Longhorns, her hometown team. She’ll be yelling “Go horns!” soon enough.
Down with Rock & Roll
Today when Claire was in one of her occasional sour moods in the car on the way home from school, we were discussing different kinds of music to put on to maybe cheer things up. Kid’s music? Beach Boys? An audiobook? Rock & roll?
Claire did not like the rock & roll idea at all. “I hate rock & roll!” she proclaimed. “It’s the worst kind of music there is! I hate rock stars too!” She then paused to add, “And I hate movie stars!”
Yeah! Eat it, Bono!
Once she got that out of her system, she was calm and relaxed, and we drove home a little more happy but with no music.
Oh so ironic… that was such a “rock & roll” way for Claire to work out her emotions. Take down the man! Yell it out! I think she might have slammed a guitar into an amplifier if she didn’t hate rock & roll so much.
Running Scared
Molly is usually curious, and often brave. She will climb, grab, or throw any unknown object with the best of them.
But Molly does at times get scared by ordinary things. For instance, she used to have a paralyzing fear of shredded paper in her old classroom as a baby. When they got out the shredded paper for a special festive play activity, Molly reportedly screamed and cried and crawled out of the area as fast as she could.
Apparently she still holds a fear of unexplained, colorful, festive items in the classroom. The picture below appears among dozens of others from Molly’s classroom. In the picture, you can see a teacher wearing a colorful parachute on his head, surrounded by delighted toddlers. When you look a little closer, you can see Molly, alone among her peers, running away as fast as possible.
Molly seems to be thinking…
That man has a poisonous octopus on his head! No, wait, that IS his head! Run for your life!
Happily, later photos show Molly contentedly playing with said teacher and parachute, so she was able to calm down after the initial panic. I should not make too much fun of Molly, though. This quick, irrational fear may have been useful for some long past ancestor when, say, a colorful snake appeared in a tree above. While her fearless friends stuck around to see what it was, maybe this ancestor ran for her life and was able to produce a long line of similarly panicked and embarrassed offspring.
McG Kids 