Beatrice discusses her brother

but she gets a bit derailed.

Arthur, Month One

Happy one-month birthday, Arthur!

It's hard to remember now that we're in the throes of the terrible twos, but Beatrice was a really easy infant: she almost never cried and she slept through the night for the first time before she was even three months old. When I was pregnant this time I kept thinking, there is no way I will be that lucky twice. Well, I don't want to jinx it, but I think I am!

At this age, infants can change fast, but so far at least, Arthur is a really easy baby. He spends almost the whole day looking around happily or contentedly napping, and while he remains a very voracious eater, as long as he's fed, he's completely content. About every 2-3 hours he lets out a shockingly loud wail for such a small person, but as soon as he's had his milk he's perfectly happy again. While he's not quite the amazing sleeper Beatrice was at his age, he's not a bad one, either, and I think and hope he'll sleep through the night relatively early like she did. (Right now he usually gets up every three hours at night, but he can do four hour stretches from time to time and once as long as five hours.)

This month Arthur met a number of our friends, including Zac, Colleen, Jeff, J. Ryan, Kat, Lucas, Veronika, Chris, and Nadia, as well as his grandmother Marilyn and his aunt Gillian. (He'll meet his grandfather Richard next week.)

He continues to roll over every day during "tummy time"and he is also working now on rolling the other way, back to front, and a sort of stymied proto-crawling.

He also learned to drink out of a bottle, though he remains somewhat resistant to it.

Not only is Arthur early to roll over, but he's early to focus on and reach for objects. He's already fascinated by the hanging stars and planets on his bouncer seat, by the toy hanging from his car seat handle, and most of all by the stuffed dog my mother gave him - in fact, he was even hugging the stuffed dog while staring intently into its face as if mesmerized. He will also stare at people's faces, completely absorbed, trying to figure them out.

As you might expect from the brother of a busy toddler, Arthur spends most of his days tagging along on activities planned for Beatrice, whether to the baby gym, the park, or the pool, but in the month ahead I plan on signing him up for Beatrice's old Mommy and Me class so he can have a little more one-on-one attention.

With toys Beatrice brought to him

Arthur has been sticking out his tongue a lot right from birth

There are more photos on Flickr and Facebook.

Happy Father's Day!

In honor of the occasion I had Beatrice decorate twelve paper lunch bags with paint pens and markers. Now when Dev brings his lunch to work, he can bring some art along with him.

Arthur contributed little to the project

My mother (who is visiting this week) and I also presented Dev with gifts and then for dinner he barbecued some excellent pork chops from the Vallarta Mexican supermarket just a few blocks away (yes, I know this means he cooked his own Father's Day dinner, but that's what he said he wanted...)

Boot Shoes!

I asked Beatrice what she was doing and she said she was "baking a cake for Mommy Ami." "What is in the cake?" I asked her. "Corn!" she replied definitively. Then to Celeste she added, "Eat this!"

I know everyone's probably tired of hearing it by now, but I continue to be totally amazed by the rate at which Beatrice is picking up new words - by now she can talk about pretty much any object in her daily life, and she's adding more adjectives, verbs, abstract concepts (like "scary" and "happy"), and full sentences. Every day she shocks me by saying some new thing I had no idea she knew, like "I'm baking a cake," "Food makes the doggies happy," or yes, "Starbucks."

But a particularly funny verbal mannerism she's picked up is the use of two-word phrases where one word is general and the other specific. For example, she calls her boots "boot shoes," and her stuffed duck (technically a stuffed least tern) "bird duck," and she calls butter "butter cheese" (based on the mistaken impression that butter is a type of cheese). She calls motorcycles "motorcycle cars" and grapes "grape berries."

There are also a few words she continually says incorrectly. Elephants are "amis" (pronounced like "ah, me") - the stuffed Babar and Celeste dolls that Dev's parents handed down to us from when their kids were young are "Daddy Ami" and "Mommy Ami." When she hands us something she says "Ah, go" (presumably for "there you go") and when she wants you to help her open something, she asks "Ah, me?" (Yes, it sounds the same as the word for elephant.) She also refers to her favorite food, macaroni and cheese, as "hot cheese."

Toddler Treks with Acorn Bear

Today was Beatrice's first session of the delightfully named Toddler Treks with Acorn Bear, a weekly series of educational nature walks for children 2-4 years old at Descanso Gardens.

Despite the grey skies and light rain, the group of toddlers gathered for songs and stories around the day's theme, "Frogs Make Me Happy." Then they did a frog-related craft (making a frog out of paper plates and affixing bug stickers to its outstretched tongue) followed by a walk around the gardens to look for frogs and other things.

Beatrice learned the words "spider web" and "pond," and though we didn't actually see any frogs because of the rain, she had a wonderful time watching fish in the pond, declaring them "funny" and "happy."

Best Birthday Present Ever

Summer gave Beatrice two big balloons for her birthday last week and they made Beatrice about as excited as I have ever seen her. I wish I had a video of her jumping up and down shouting "balloons!" but I did get a few good photos of her in front of "Summer and Jack's house," as she calls it.

Beatrice is (really) Two!

Happy Birthday, Beatrice!

Enjoying a birthday trip to In n' Out. She now starts shouting "fries!" as soon as she sees the sign from the car window.