It's mid winter, or early spring

After the thrill of the holidays the period between mid January and mid February seems to lack any sort of interesting events and so our picture taking slows to an almost stand still. We did celebrate Three King's Day back in January with presents from Spain, a little bit of snow play and Maria made Papa a special Three King's Day card.

Mid January we met up with the Chevaliers at the Ecotarium in western Mass. and then went back to their house for chili and pizza and visiting. We forgot our camera so we don't have any pictures. Maria, Hannah and I went to a reptile presentation where we pet an orange snake and saw how they trained lizards to walk onto scales and lift body parts so they could examine them and make sure they're healthy. Paul and Maria went to see Disney on Ice one Saturday and since then life has been pretty uneventful.

Maria has been learning to write letters of the alphabet and she recognizes some words: cat, flour, milk, eggs. She loves to cook and is still really into Cooking Channel. Tonight I let her use a real knife for the first time to cut pea pods in half. She talks about rice absorbing flavors as it cooks and the creaminess of the chocolate cream pie and how she enjoys the "little bit of crunch the nuts give to the stir fry". She's also been into one of my old books, A Very Young Rider, given to me in 1983 for my first communion. Every night from December 10th until last week we read that book and she's been angling for riding lessons. I have mixed feelings. How could I deny her after my experience riding. How will I deny her a horse when it comes to that? How desperately do I want to see her in a helmet and breeches on a pony! I can picture it!

Estella just had her 18 month check up and she's >90% on height and between 70-80% on weight. Amazing considering she eats hummus, bread, bananas, sun butter and baby food pouches of fruits. Stella is starting to say a lot of things, one of her favorite phrases is "Here ya go." "Here ya go", you accidentally put a vegetable on my plate, I'm giving it back to you. "Here ya go", I want to share my crackers with you. You can't refuse, she'll keep saying it until you accept the cracker, even Maria has learned this by now. "Here ya go", here's my foot, I'm sticking it out so you can do the silly rhyme on my toes again. "Here ya go", here's a book, you know what to do with it. Another big thing for Stella is "washing up". When you ask her if she's all done eating and ready to wash up she'll pull her bib off, mime washing up by rubbing her hands together and push her sleeves up, and she hasn't even gotten out of the highchair yet. She now gets to climb on a stool to reach the sink, she thinks it's a big deal. Lastly, Stella is a climber. We rearranged the living room so she wouldn't fall off of the couch and over the railing of the stairs. One day after coming home from a shopping trip she pushed the box of diapers down the hall so she could climb on top and reach Maria's art work that was posted on the wall. I was reading an article in the dentist today that said this type of multistep problem solving is a sign of creativity, it's called "divergent thinking".

One of my favorite moments recently was listening to Maria read books to Stella. At first Stella tried to sit on Maria because she always sits on our lap for books but once they got themselves situated they were there for at least four books.