Plus ça change

The babes are changing madly... Stand them in the Jumperoo and they're whole new people with real person faces, cooing strange and beautiful whale noises at anyone who'll listen: plastic roos, spinning gears, clacky beads, singing frogs. Lots of photos here and hopefully more to come -- including the video of Odessa finding her feet -- from Bethany.

The constant attention of many cooing aunts, uncles, grown cousins and baby cousin, all gathered at Myrtle Beach, seems to have the babies growing and waking faster than ever.
They're getting Habits now. Odessa is no longer willing to go out to dinner no matter what's on the menu. She wants to walk around, and better yet, to just leave out of the restaurant. (If you try to come back in, the lip starts to quiver and curl and you're in trouble all over again.) Georgia, if you lean her back, slams herself forward in a sit-up... a trick she first unveiled for Great Grandma Dot. And she seems to have learned how to eat. Amazing!

The beach itself may have been incidental -- who knows what a baby takes in, when so little of it is remembered? But they looked devilishly cute in their stripey kits... which are more for the mothers, as we found out when we dipped everyone in the ocean. Really, the baby bathing suit is not the issue. Naked would be fine. The bigger problem is the sopping gelatinous diaper mess. (Although plastic diapers, grossly, don't seem so wet once the outside dries off. Chh! Feh.)

The funny part is that, the more conscious the bubelehs get, the more they look alike... till finally we took a picture and found, for a second, that we almost couldn't tell the difference.

P.S. What's with all the French? Don't know. Staci thinks all dogs are boys and all cats are girls. Maybe all babies are French. They certainly wear a lot of very daring horizontal stripes.