Less than Twelve Parsecs

Mara loves pasta, in all its shapes and forms. She will drop her highly important playing and come to the dining table if you mention the magic word. Thus, today we had pasta for lunch. Large, round Ravioli, filled with cheese and spinach, with Parmesan cheese sprinkles and tomato soup to dip in, as a side sauce. Mara ate and ate and ate, and smiled and smiled and smiled some more. I broke silence by telling her what she is eating: Me : "Did you know what this type of pasta is called, Mara?" [Big eyes.] Me : "Ravioli!" Me : "Can you say Ravioli? Rah-vee-oh-lee!" [She turns her eyes into little half-moon shapes curving downward, just like in those cute Japanese cartoons. It's such a fleeting facial expression that we only managed to capture it once on camera, a long time ago - see this side photo we retrieved from Greg's archive.] Mara : "There's a Rah-bee-oh-lee song!" [This is news to me, but there's a

These past two weeks we've been celebrating continuously. To put it in cheesy rhymes: Roses are "Wed" Violets are "Boo" Gaius is three months old And Mara is Two! A Vacation Before We started with a short trip with family and friends in Yosemite. We hiked 1900ft up on the Mist Trail with two kids in two backpacks, fought plagued squirrels valiantly on top of the Vernal waterfall, then went as high as Nevada falls and back down to the Valley (blog post to follow, but check out the preview photo). We returned home just in time for Mara's actual birthday - the 29th. The Birthday Weekend We did two things somewhat differently than your usual birthday party: 1. Open house The idea Our friends have extremely varied schedules between kids' naps, weekend activities and just plain lifestyle. Because there was no good time to schedule a party for everyone to attend, we declared open house all weekend: stop by and say Happ

Today's story goes in reverse chronological order: two moments about a week apart. Episode Two Mara scans the cover of a large atlas book about reptiles: "This one's a lizard And this one's a lizard And this one's a lizard and This one's a lizard and This one's... pro[ba]bly a frog ." Episode One  [about a week earlier] This part needs some precursory info: for the entire time that Mara has been verbal, she's referred to herself as "Mara  does this"  and  "Mara is that ", rather than using the first person pronoun. You can imagine our excitement when for the first time she used the word "I". First she started experimenting with phrases like " Mara is swimming by Mara's self ".  Then, one evening: "Mommy drinks water, Daddy drinks water, I drink water Baby Gaius drinks... milk from Mommy's b**b." P.S.: Gaius would pr