Climbing and poetry

The kids are consummate climbers.  Ziggy spends many happy times mounting small chairs, kneeling in them and trying to climb over the back, or just trying to stand on top of a box of butt-wipes.  Luckily, he is also a fairly graceful faller.  Ella is very good at the technical aspect of climbing.  She's a good listener about where a good hand or foot-hold might be and is pretty brave even when high up.  She can really own the big (probably 15 feet high) rope structure at the mall, though she doesn't really go to the top, just up to where I can still reach her feet.

At the park this morning, Ella met a climbing friend, 3 1/2 and a very good climber.  After realizing that she couldn't climb all of the things he could climb, she was moved to compose a poem on the subject.  Literally, she said, "I just thought of a poem," and then, thinking very hard, said the following,

Different climbs

for different minds--

we all climb together

but at different times.

And they're cute too.

Blog Hiatus Over!!!

Wow!  Well, that turned out to be a whirlwind of a year!  Sorry for the no blogs.  But actually the hiatus serves as a pretty good historical record of how busy the year was: I was teaching a lot at Tufts, Lauren was teaching at Bentley, and we were all just trying to survive for the most part.  Lucky for us, Ziggy is a pretty good sleeper and Ella is the best big sister ever!

In our last posting, Ella was just off on her first day of school, and Ziggy was a tiny little laugher.  Well, now Ella is almost done with school, she's 3 and 5/6th years old, and she's gotten quite tall and kid-looking.  And Ziggy will be 1 in a matter of days, and he's now not only a BIG little laugher but a big little walker too!

Our trips to the park or the Science Museum are different now too.  I'll usually hang out with Ziggy and he'll walk around holding my hand or climb some stairs and go down a slide face-first, while Ella just takes off and climbs up everything in sight.  She can do pretty much everything at the park by herself now, except maybe the monkey bars, which really are very hard.

Here's Ella doing some bed gymnastics:

And here's Ziggy walking and playing with his balls (this one deserves a series.)

Notice that he's turned from a brunette into a reddish-blondie!

  ... and did he just say "ball" or was it my imagination?

In case you haven't heard, we'll be moving to Hamilton, NY, at the end of July where both Lauren and I will be teaching at Colgate.  It's going to be hard to leave friends and family, but it's just a one-year gig for now, so we might be right back in Boston next year.

Over the summer, we're going to try to do some retro-posting to fill in the gap from this past year.  So look out for more back-dated posts to come BEFORE this one (scroll down!).