Would-Be Baby Book Entry

Last night after dinner I told Lily that it was later than I had thought, and that we would soon need to organize ourselves for bed. I started putting some of the dishes in the dishwasher, not noticing that Annika had headed upstairs. A few minutes later, she appeared beside me, proudly bearing a short stack of clothing she had found in her bedroom. "I got my 'jamas for you, Mama," she said. And she had. The child is still only one.

And then this morning, I was reading to her from a pile of books she had assembled for the purpose. (Like Lily, whose first sentence, uttered incessantly, was, "Mama! Read this book to me," Annika is a voracious and demanding listener. Which is, don't get me wrong, a good thing.) One of the books was a counting board book, with pictures of objects numbering from one to ten. The last page was of a baby's feet, with the toes representing the number ten. The photograph had been taken from above, but I never would have noticed that--had never, in fact, having read the book before--if Annika had not said before I was able to read the line of text, "Uh oh! Poor baby." I looked at her, confused. "No, it's ten toes," I said, starting to count them for her. "No, Mama," she said, more insistently, holding her own feet up in the air like the feet in the picture. I realized the baby had to have been on its back for the picture to look like that. "The baby fell," she said.

And in a final trivial yet delicious detail, this afternoon Lily and I were doing a hard-to-explain craft/organizing project that involved construction paper and magic markers. Annika held a marker out for Lily as I walked into the room to get something. "This one, Lily," she said. "It's purple." Turns out she knows all her colors. Who knew?