motion
The kids are alright! Olive is gregarious, athletic, and excitedly participating in SEP1. She's currently on lesson 38/100 in a phonics-based home study program for reading, and she does quite well at it; she knows that a successful lesson completion gets her a glass of chocolate milk2. She had her first two milk teeth fall out a little while ago, and she's been actively attempting to wiggle every other tooth in the vicinity ever since.
Pumpkin, in the meantime, is the most orderly 2-year-old I have ever met. He occasionally spontaneously goes and finds a tissue, blows his nose, and then hands the tissue to an adult. He takes his boots off on arriving home, and delights in organizing them just so on the shoe rack. I'm fairly confident that at one point recently he tipped out a full dustpan, then re-swept the spilled dust back into it. He's pretty firmly into "late talker" territory at this point, but I'm pretty sure that when he decides he wants to talk, he won't have any particular issues; it's just that communication by pointing and chirps is working out very well for him right now, so the effort hasn't yet seemed worthwhile.
Olive has recently been requesting spooky stories of me at night, so I've told her mostly-improvised versions of The Girl with the Ribbon on her Neck and Roswell 1957. She seems to enjoy these, though she's fairy confident that neither of those stories happened in real life. The version of The Ghost Train's Haunted Whistle that I told didn't quite land, unfortunately.
Speaking of spooky, we're all a bit unsettled this Thanksgiving; we are in the midst of moving. To a house. Which we have researched, found, financed, and bought in the interval since the last blog post here3.
The house is both larger than our apartment, and cut into more rooms, which has the counterintuitive result that every individual room is slightly smaller than its equivalent in our old apartment. This has led to a non-trivial amount of anxiety about the move, which will either be relieved or proven predictive in the next two days when the movers unpack our stuff.
I don't think this blog is dead, despite recent evidence to the contrary. It's just that, as Tolstoy said, every happy family is alike. I'm lucky and grateful that my family falls into that category, but it doesn't give me a lot to write about on any kind of regular basis. Next update when it comes!
Schuleinsteigerprojekt: periodic activities organized for nearly-school-aged children, meant to prepare them for the onset of first grade next year.
The downside of this strategy is that she generally refuses to attempt to read outside of a formal reading lesson, with its regular and customary attendant reward.
It's been 502 days since I last wrote here, which even in terms of a fading medium like blogging feels like an unfortunately large interval.