Magrilless

I think this toy car must have been manufactured in England. No way Americans wrote this, don’t you think?

Tess has done some remarkable things this week. Two nights in a row she slept all the way through til morning. From 7:30 to 5 AM and then 7 AM. And cheerfully too! Oh my, those mornings felt good.

And we thought she was getting a bottom tooth. Two spots appeared on her gum and she had all the symptoms: drooling, chewing on everything, crankiness (albeit mild — this is Tessa after all), those white spots. But turns out they are just little calcium deposits that will disappear before real teeth come in. Thank goodness, actually, because I was nervous with their orientation. These spots are on either side of her gum (front and back) instead of in a line on top. I thought she was going to be the youngest person in history to have braces. But if this is any indication of what she’ll be like when actually teething, I say bring it on!

A great week! Tessa is just such a content baby. She’ll sit quietly on my lap at noisy restaurants until she falls asleep. She rode in her stroller without complaint for three hours while Bill and I walked to lunch. She doesn’t mind being right next to the vacuum cleaner. She loves being held by anyone (except one of our neighbors, but don’t tell her she’s the only one so far). And she’s given us a couple nights in a row sleeping til 3:30!

I still think she’s very visually oriented. I’ll talk to her or sing while I’m in the same room with Tess, but she quickly starts to fuss and then always smiles huge whole face smiles when I come into view. And she loves to jabber. I have a feeling I’ll walk into the girls’ room one day and see them sitting and talking at each other, both at the same time.

Maggie continues to wow us (and her teacher) with her brightness. She has pretty much all her letter sounds down and can tell you what letter a word starts with. We were looking at an activity book the other day and it had a “which two match?” page. There were pictures of a policeman holding a stop sign, except one had “go” written on it instead of “stop.” As I pointed to the stop signs she said “stop,” until I got to the tricky one and she said “go.” That same night we were reading a book that described an animal mama with one baby, next page two babies, then three, and so on. Hidden in the illustration is the numeral for the number of babies on that page. Without me asking her to look for it, she found the seed pod shaped like a three. When we went through to find them all (like a 4 in the barbed wire or the curl of a coyote tail to be 9), the only one she couldn’t find was 7. And neither could I. She can recognize her classmate’s names upside down and found her own name in some movie credits.

Lately Maggie’s favorite building medium is board books. She stands them up next to each other while open to make enclosures for little toys. She’ll even lay some on top for roofs. She also likes to put them flat on the floor like stepping stones to make a path. Now they are tower toppers so her toys have a place to hang out and enjoy the vistas. So creative.

I love living in a small town. This is the kind of story that gets published in the newspaper. Whoa, Nelly!