status updates

I will go first:

1) I have succeeded in making a passable recreation of the ma po tofu at my favorite chinese restaurant. I win! Come over for dinner and I'll make it for you. If you can stand the heat.

2) I am pretty sure the way we scheduled my current rotation was actually a psych experiment. It was 14 med students sitting around a table taking turns choosing 14 shifts each with lots of constraints about when the shifts can be. It got a little dicey there, for a while. Nice of them to give us the illusion of control.

Ollie:

1) Gives kisses now. They involve a lot of tongue and leave a thick layer of slime.

2) Signs milk. We did not teach him this. The sign is a bit too close to home for my taste. And I am lazy. They must have done it at daycare. I had wondered why he's been doing that funny wave at himself. Then at dinner tonight when he combined it with an angry yell and a steady glare at me Aaron figured it out. He must think we're quite dense.

Snuffy:

Has been sort of antsy. I have been trying to give him lots of extra attention, training, and exercise. It's worked really well and he's a lot calmer. The only training I could think to do was agility kinds of stuff, so we now have a de facto doggy parcours loop we do around the neighborhood. I should make a video.

Dylan:

1) Is adjusting to her new class. It wears her out and she misses her old teachers, but I really think it's good for her. Her best buddy is still with her, but their other friend is in the other class, which I think it nice because with three of them things were a little intense. This class has a bunch of older boys, so there's much more parrying and talking about spiderman now, which is disconcerting because every class prior to this has had a pretty intense girly socialization bent to it. But I actually think she's less bored and learning a lot.

2) Is usually pretty hard to read, Aaron-style, when I'm trying to figure out exactly what she understands. I am very hoard-y with the breast milk (this relates, I promise), and at this point I can only keep up with the pumping if Ollie takes one bottle during the day, but not two (countdown to turning one and no more pumping: eight weeks). I usually report to Aaron about this at the end of the day (often in the form of a gleeful exclamation when I'm up for the day), but I have never talked to Dylan about it. Today when she and I went to pick Ollie up he had just started his second bottle. Dylan asks the teacher, "is that his second bottle?" Then she turns to me and goes, "Mommy, you did not score today. You never do."

Aaron:

Is down 40+ pounds since January, exercises religiously, and leaps up every evening to wash the dishes. I feel a little bad about the brainwashing, but I think it's working for him. Also! He is patient! Not something I understand, but it means he can sit still long enough to play board games with Dylan.