Skipping Town

This morning, the girls and I dyed Easter eggs. They were beyond thrilled. I put some eggs for each of them in wooden bowls, and they played with them throughout the day. At naptime, Greta brought up a little bag, as she often does; I assumed it was filled with tiny princesses, as it usually is. Just before I put her into her crib, I realized the bag was quite heavy. I looked inside and saw five dyed, hard-boiled eggs. I find this absolutely hilarious.

Finally: spring. Our backyard is a mudpit, the crabgrass is growing in aggressive clumps all over our front yard, the finish on our porch steps has worn off completely--and yet it's glorious to be back outside, able to keep the front door open and let the girls run around with zip-up sweatshirts or, today, only their regular clothes. Lucia and Greta, starved for the outdoors for months, have been gorging themselves on the open air and the space to run. All week, whenever I've taken them outside, they've been absolutely overcome--they don't stop moving. The activities they've been absorbed in are just different reasons to run. One game is "It's raining!" and involves running from the playhouse to the rhododendrons to the slide to the biggest mudpit and around and around again. Another game is "Help me find my sister!", which involves each girl holding her three small mermaid dolls, hurling one of them as far as they can, and then just running ...

Dear Anna, You, of course, have been christened Anna as part of the Frozen mania you and Lucia have succumbed to lately. Though you don't yet have the ability to sing the songs in their entirety, you do your best--you pipe in with words here and there, and whenever you catch a glimpse of anything Frozen-related, you exclaim excitedly "Zen! Zen!" Your favorite companies are your "zen dolls"--Elsa and Anna dolls. You know the movie well enough to recreate scenes with Lucia (under her bossy direction--"Greta, say this. Greta, now say this."). Today at dinner you looked at me and said "You sing 'Go.'" I, too, welcome any chance to belt out "Let It Go" and obliged. We've seen changes to your speech the past few weeks--now and then you'll get two syllables in, and you're stringing words together more and more. Your speech therapist has observed that your vocabulary and grammar are developing normally, despite...