Peeeeeeeeeeeeaaaaaaaaaaaaaccccchh!!

Dancing! This is the dancing area. This is where the dancing takes place. Dancing outside said area will be met with stiff resistance by management. Management can be seen in this photo.

Lily has a new favorite book (thanks, Reicherts!) called "Each Peach Pear Plum". It's a fun book filled with fun things to spot, and Lily does not seem to tire of it. In a relatively short time, we've gone from her enjoying it casually (it's a casual read) to not being able to go down for a nap or night-night without it (which means if I ever have to get her down without it in my possession and it goes badly, I will curse the Reichert family severely). We always plan ahead; it's usually in the crib from the get go. But it's now certain that Lily will, halfway up the stairs, take out her pacifier and scrunch up her face really tight and say, "Peeeeaaach Pluummm?" with all the emotion of a gut-shot policeman. I can't really do her voice justice on the page, maybe I'll try to capture a video of it, but she sounds mortally wounded, and she just keeps saying it over and over again, "Peeeeeeeaaaaaachhhh? Pluuuuumm?"

I need to take a moment to toss out some accolades to the kids for some notable achievements lately.

First, Jen noticed today that Abby, when doing one of her puzzles, is correctly identifying the circle, oval, rectangle, and triangle. I think she noticed her saying, "Oval" repeatedly (but poorly...the blonde one is way-bad at enunciating) before she figured it out. So we quizzed her later, and she got them almost all right. A budding mathlete, maybe.

In addition to her obvious Euclidean predispositions, the kid is getting really good at singing along to songs. Scary good. I wish I could accurately quantify how many songs she can pretty much sing along to...maybe 10 at least? It's ridiculously cute to watch her climb the steps while singing "Twinkle Twinkle" on the way to bed time (we sing that song every time we bring them to bed. We don't have many traditions, but that is one). She loves to sing. Which is fine, as her sister seems to have gotten the dancing gene. Our kids do nothing if not dovetail nicely, vis a vis their abilities. If they ever form a band, Abby could sing lead and Lily could be the designated dancer, just like Paul Rutherford in Frankie Goes to Hollywood.

As for the brown one, she is ever braving the murky waters of English sentence construction. She is in the nascent beginnings of the stage in which any number of strange word combinations can come out of her. Here are some examples:

Jen: "Abby, do you want a cookie?"
Lily: "Cookie!?! Abby, come here!"

"Mommy, take that please."

"Thank you, Daddy." (that one hurts so good)

"More fruit, please."

"Olly, watch this." (she said this while trying to show the dog a mechanical swimming butterfly. He was not impressed, but we found it hi-lar-i-ous)

Now, I know it might seem as if I'm painting a Flanders-like image of my daughter, like she's some measure of saint. Trust me, this is not the case. But when she's calm and happy, she makes better sentences. When she's really angry, there's rarely more than a grunt or, if we're lucky, and actual English word.

Lily is also getting fantastic at answering the phone, a fact that our families are becoming exhaustively familiar with. When the phone rings, she shrieks and runs to get it. Of course, we oblige every time; it doesn't matter if it's a friend, family member, or telemarketer. Honestly, I have given many telemarketers to her, which I find a delicious bit of schedenfraude. I'm clueless to the reaction she gets though, since the line is always dead when I finally get the phone.

If I get a bill saying that I donated any money to UND, I will be furious.

Day three hundred and fifty three (on the 12th day of blogmas, my morons said to me...)

Every day I resist the urge to leap into bed with these two.

"Peeeeaaaach!"