Fifteen months of Miss

Now I'm here at Blogger, and the view is lovely, thank you. I had fun moving all my entries over one by one - handcrafting it, if you will - and finding photos to retroactively (but still anonymously) populate it. Now I'll just sit back and let the readership roll in.

Ahem.

Miss is 15 months old today. She understands everything, nods emphatically and says "Yyyup!" for yes, and prevaricates with a grimace and a sort of swingy head motion for no. (In contrast to her brother, who said "No" very clearly a long time before he agreed with anything.) She climbs up on the kitchen chairs to sit at the table and demand some food, which is counter-productive since I can't make her anything if I'm constantly having to remove her from danger. She wants very much to brush her teeth if anyone else is brushing theirs. She has just lately fallen in love with Curious George, from the big hardback book we have to the stuffed monkey who I think is becoming her security item.

Monkey had a security item for about a week. The rest of the time it was just my boobs he wanted. But when he was 18 months old he picked up a small chocolate labrador puppy (plush, to my relief) one day and it was bought for him by his doting grandmother, who was visiting. Luckily for him, as I would have just dismissed his wails, said firmly but gently that we can't buy everything we like in the shop, and put it back. And then where would my boobs have been for the next ten days? Being carted around under his uxter, that's where, as Puppy was, barely allowed to be put down for baths or meals. The poor dog still lists to the left because his neck was permently squashed by a small arm for that brief but intense time.

After ten days (and a near miss in Target when I thought I'd have to offer myself in retribution to the gods of losing your child's comfort item - or my firstborn, which might have solved everything all at once but would have upset my mother) Puppy was not quite so elemental to keeping the world spinning on its axis, and in a little while Puppy could easily be taken or left. These days Puppy is called Not Max, to distinguish him from the other stuffed dog, Max. (Max is apparently the only name a dog can have. I think this stems from The Little Mermaid, where Price Eric's dog was Max. Monkey was Prince Eric for a while back there this time last year, to the extent that all the flight attendants on our trip home in March thought his name was Eric. They assumed he was just joking about the honorific.)

Anyway. George is to Miss as Puppy was to MonkeyBoy, or getting to be that way. I wish she'd chosen something smaller, but at least he has long arms and legs to hang onto.