We took the girls to "Ringling Brothers" with our Lamaze buddies and their daughter.

We had a pleasant time (elephants, tigers, trapeze, and bouncing tire things - good! other stuff - dubious)

The day after (Sunday), Kate insisted on wearing her bathing suit (well, two different ones) all day, including being persuaded to wear it under her clothes when she was outside gardening.

Little did we initially suspect, the Circus was in her blood!

She's decided she wants to dress like the glamorous ladies at the circus - not sure if it's trapeze artists or the dancing squad, but there's a definite impact -

• She insisted on learning how to stand on her head, and then practiced whenever she got a chance.
• Kate snuck upstairs ("I'm tip-toeing") to preen dreamily in the mirror, spinning in her bathing suit skirt and examining the angles - announcing "I'm beautiful".
• When we were taking a bath, she closed her eyes whenever she laid down to rinse her hair and spent five minutes hip shimmying and talking herself through dance steps ("turn", "open", "turn", "open", "kick") - both for the shampoo and conditioner cycle - with a dreamy ecstatic smile on her face.

I'll definitely be reading "Olivia Saves the Circus" to Kate tonight!

Isabel has started to really kick it up a notch. Friday she gamely sat in her crib playing for almost an hour, surrounded by baby miscellany, pleasantly chattering to herself while Mom finished sleeping in the a.m.

Friday and Saturday, she turned on the "Momma" speaker (seven months), Sunday was full of Momma, and this morning (Monday) she pulled a "Kate" and chattered "Momma" until Momma was forced to wake up and get her out of bed, ironically leaving Kate herself sacked out in the middle of the king-sized for another 45 minutes.

One of our favorite North Slope boutiques, Boing Boing, is opening a new store in the South Slope close to us! How excited are we?

Today we planted tulips and hyacinths in our front garden. I ordered some bulbs prechilled so we could plant them and have them bloom this spring. We got a mixture of yellow, red, deep purple and pink tulips, and blue hyacinths. I am excited to see them all come up! The bulbs arrived and sat on our counter for a couple of days, and when we opened the packages, most already had shoots.

(more...)

Posted on the go:
Right on queue, Isab€el said mama today. Not just mouthing the words, but actually patting me and saying, "Mama!" Yesterday she said it maybe 10 times. Today she said it a hundred times, no exaggeration! Mama, Mama, Mama, Mama...music to my ears. Obviously it is hard wired in my kids to start talking at 7 mos, since their due dates were only 2 days apart, and they started speaking within two days of each other. It really makes you think this is all genetic.