So, I have a new babysitting gig. Two days a week, the kidlets and I hie ourselves to Jessica and Adrian’s house to hang with their little girls for the day.

As a side note, Microsoft Word doesn’t recognize “hie.” To what is this world coming?

Anyway, some small portion of my babysitting days is devoted to keeping Liam from gouging Baby Lindsay’s eyes out. She is still relatively immobile, and can only lie there helplessly as his little hands edge nearer. The two babies do have their cute moments together (sometimes they link hands briefly before he starts trying to figure out if her face is attached). Fortunately, familiarity seems to be breeding somewhat less eye-gouging.

Yesterday, Liam outdid himself on the cuteness-not-gouging scale. He crawled up to Lindsay—I sprang into intervention-preparedness mode—he sat quietly by her knees. His face assumed a certain impishness. Then he very carefully pulled up her shirt, leaned forward, and stuck his finger in her belly button.

I burst out laughing. He looked up at me, grinned, and then did it again.

Of course, when I went for the camera, he came crawling toward me, so you’ll just have to take my word for it: There was cuteness.

I have been a remiss blogger, I know, I know.

A bit of timeline clarification: The Husbandlet actually wound up making two separate open-ended Floridian romps, April 15-29 and May 19-31. This was because his clammies weren’t getting eaten fast enough during his first trip, so he had to return after the crabs had eaten their fill at the Research Experiment Buffet. As for the living room sleeping, I have personally been engaging in said activity since the Husbandlet’s first departure. When the Husbandlet has been around, he has elected to join me.

He is off again on Monday for almost a week. But at least this time I’ll be in a comfy (if lonely) bed during his absence.

Last night, I deflated, folded and put away our air mattress. The kidlets have successfully shared a bedroom for four nights now. The Husbandlet and I have our room—and even more importantly, our extremely comfortable non-inflatable bed—once again.

(You knew that the adults of this family have been sleeping in the living room for the past two months whilst the little ones reclined in single-room luxury, right? First Liam needed sleep-training, which was mercifully short/sweet, but just as he started sleeping through the night, Ngaire developed later bedtime needs, which involved lots of rambunctiousness in her room at night.)

Woot.

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The Husbandlet announced that he will be spending the day making cages for his interns.

I think the obvious follow-up question is, what do you use for intern bait?

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It has come to my attention that my church has discovered my blog, due to traffic from my blogroll link. Hi, everybody! Feel free to give me a shout-out in the comments.

Apologies in advance for any tediousness contained herein. When I was a teacher, the studentlets gave me plenty of entertaining blog fodder, but now I’m pretty much down to cute stories about my kids and double-entendres about my husband. Also, now that Garey is reading, I will have to keep the heresy to a minimum. So there goes that.

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Apropos of nothing, I’m having a really hard time making it through Watership Down. I don’t know why. It’s not that the bunnies are too fuzzy for me, though of course they are fuzzy, in the most menacing way imaginable. It’s just that right now I’m not sure they’ll ever get out of the beanfield.

So if you really really love this book (hi, Neb!), please tell me why. Maybe that will give me the burst of interest needed to read the next approx. 8,291 pages.

Also? I wound up skimming Things Fall Apart. It bored me to tears. I am a terrible English major and an unworthy African-in-law.

Liam can now:

* Turn around and back carefully off of things he has climbed Up on (including stairs).
* Play peekaboo by pulling curtains and such in front of his face and then popping out with a huge grin.
* Give zerbers.

* * *

Mommy: “Ngaire, say, ‘To be or not to be.’”
Ngaire: “To be. I want to share my [i.e. Daddy's] coffee.
Daddy: “‘Or not to be.’”
Ngaire: “I want to be.”

Ngaire at breakfast the other day, covered with crumbs: “I’m all done and I need a cloth to wipe my hands because I am crumbled.”

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Liam has discovered his tongue, in the pinching-between-thumb-and-forefinger sense, not in the verbal sense.

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This morning, Liam picked up a spoon and cup measure Ngaire had been playing with, and instead of ripping them out of his hands, she went and got others for him, offered them to him (“Here you go, Liam!”), and then sat on the floor and banged the cups with the spoons with him.

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I’ve decided it’s about time I started reading some Real Literature again, and have been reading Hemingway of late (The Sun Also Rises and A Farewell to Arms). Boy, I forgot how much I enjoy Hemingway … I mean, sure he’s a tad grim, but also very wry and insightful. I find his plain prose restful. I also read Graham Greene’s The Quiet American and enjoyed it very much. I started re-reading A Clockwork Orange but found myself mainly skimming it for old favorite sections, so I’ve decided to move on for now and approach it again some other time. Next up: Things Fall Apart and Watership Down. Yes, I’m approaching the Classics section at the library alphabetically; why do you ask?

In other cultural news, the Husbandlet and I made our annual pilgrimage to the Shakespeare Theatre Company’s Free for All to see a teenage-angst version of Hamlet, and then paid actual money to see Antony and Cleopatra, which I had never seen before and which was good in the sense of being Shakespeare I had never seen before but not so much in terms of the actual performance, which was bland. Ah well. We are planning a Shakespeare, red wine, chocolate and cheese evening with some friends … who says a liberal arts education is for naught?

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Speaking of which, I was talking with my friend Jessica today about our husbands. Her husband Adrian is quite a bit like the Husbandlet, if more of a law geek than a science geek. Anyway.

Me: “They’re like two peas in a pod.”
Jessica: “They’re like two pens in a pocket protector.”

Yesterday, when Daddy came home from work: “Did I want this kiss?”

This morning, also to Daddy: “Would you have this hug?”

We have taught her that a dragon goes “rawr” and a butterfly whispers (per Dr. Seuss). A couple mornings back, she started talking about a butterdragon … she gets this from the WonderPets, who had an episode about a griffin and then followed it up with one about a pangaroo (part parrot, part kangaroo). We asked what such a beastie would say, and she whispered, “Rawr.”

Last week, Liam learned to clap. He is totally impressed with himself and breaks into delighted cackles every time he brings his little hands together. I always cheer him on, so on Friday as he was clapping, he also said, “Yay!”

Also last week, he started blowing little raspberries whenever I give him zerbers.

Ngaire’s first word was “Daddy,” so I’m finding it interesting, gender-proclivities-wise, that our little boy’s first discernable language attempts (aside from the “Mamamamama” when he wants food or cuddles) are noises rather than words, per se.

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EDITED TO ADD:

While my friend was feeding Liam his lunch today, I left the room briefly … just long enough to miss Liam saying, “Mommy?” while looking around for me.

He also babbled “Baby,” which he has been saying a lot with no evident connection to actual babies, right after we had been talking about the little sproglets.