While Claire and I were off in Houston swimming, Kit kept Molly back in Austin, due to work and several social engagements. One such engagement was the end-of-the-year gathering for Molly’s pre-school class, the Kangaroos. Apparently everyone had a great time cooling off at the splash pad.
Molly has just recently started putting together simple two-word sentences, the main one being, “eat it”. This normally refers to actual food, and not a mean jab.
I am not sure if this counts as a sentence, but Molly also loves to say “Oh, Daddy”. I invariably reply “Oh, Molly”. Clever, I know. We riff back and forth like this for minutes at a time. Molly loves it. She has a big smile on her face the whole time, and she plays around with different ways to inflect the two words “Oh Daddy”.
For her part, Claire insists that Molly is not saying “Oh Daddy”. She strongly believes that Molly is saying “Old Daddy”, and she thinks I should not say “Oh Molly” back because it’s supposed to be “Old Molly”, and that doesn’t make sense since Molly is a baby, or actually a toddler, or a “Boddler”, as Claire says.
One of Molly’s favorite phrases is actually three words, although it sounds like one word when she says it: hearyago. She’ll often walk up to you and hand you something, saying “hereyago”, aka “Here you go”.
She also recently learned a classic three-word phrase, although she was just repeating it at her Mom’s prompting. When I was leaving the room one night for Kit to put Molly to sleep as she does each night, Kit said to Molly, “Can you say I love you to Daddy?” Sure enough, Molly repeated “I love you”, her first time to say such a difficult phrase (in more ways than one!).
Today, Molly made her first original, unprompted three-word sentence. While eating lunch, she dropped an orange slice on the floor. When our dog Muffin came to inspect it, Molly said, “Muffin eat it.” Pretty good for a boddler!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
McG Kids 