Pumpkin is now a few days past six months old, and he's recently been delighted to be included at the dinner table. Olive has been sitting in an adult chair there for some months now, and we reconverted her old tall chair into a high chair complete with frame and tray. Pumpkin will very happily sit upright and supported in that seat now. He can't yet sample most of the food that the rest of the family shares, but he's very happy to be fed mashed vegetables, or suck on a chunk of fruit. He goes in for the full-sensory style of eating: he'll prod a spoon's contents with his finger, grabs the spoon, clap his bib with two hands over the food, lick the food off the bib; you get the point. That's all right: he gets the mush.

Sitting isn't the only motor skill he's been working on; having mastered rolling, he's trying to work out the fundamental principles of crawling. As of now, he can get as far as a partial lift of his body from the floor, but that takes all his strength. He's not yet ready for proper crawling, but I suspect that it's more a matter of strength than interest at this point. When he's in a relatively quiet mood, Pumpkin is spending quite a lot of time looking intently at his hands and fingers, slowly moving them in various ways. It's kind of fascinating to see him explicitly forming the first stages of hand-eye coordination.¹

Olive has recently had some trouble with the truth; she's been prone to telling us all kinds of fabulations, and when pressed, claiming that it was just a joke. It's hard to blame her, though. Out on a walk recently, we encountered a monument commemorating one Alexandro Ioan Ball Eq. Bar.; I told her that this meant that Mr. Alexander Joan Ball was an Equestrian Barrister, which is someone who is good at riding horses and knowing the law. Christina called me out on that, and I readily agreed that I didn't know what those honorifics actually meant. Olive took this badly: "You made that up! You make everything up! That was a lie. That wasn't nice."

That wasn't an easy thing, for me. I've talked about this policy before: it is fun for me to invent entertaining lies, with no intent to deceive, for the sheer joy of creativity. Morally, I figure that this is acceptable if I'm quick to tell the truth when someone expresses a flicker of doubt. She didn't feel that way, apparently. What could I do? I apologized, and said I'd try to not make so many things up. I'm not sure that this new policy will stick, because I suspect that as she gets better at recognizing tone, the appetite for entertaining lies will return. Maybe that's just hopeful self-deception; we'll have to see how this plays out.

Olive's burgeoning creativity is expressing itself in other ways as well. She's recently been fascinated by knock-knock jokes.² However, she hasn't quite mastered the intricacies of the form yet, which gives her own such jokes a touch of the surreal. One recent example:

Knock knock.

Who's there?

Mrs. Toaster.

Mrs. Toaster who?

Mrs. Toaster because you opened the door!

I'm sure Mrs. Toaster is very cautious about doors now.