Late Summer

Dear Babies,

Summer is winding down and the ceiling fan is still hanging half-installed. Your mama goes back to work in a week and a half, and it seems like there are no Bronx childcare slots for babies till next September. The living room is a parking lot for the jumperoo and its many sisters: a swing, a rocker, two bouncers, an exersaucer, three strollers, many car seats for various reasons. Babies, you still have cats, in spite of your mommies' dogged efforts to find them homes where they'll score at least a little human attention and won't send Mommy on frantic searches for the inhaler. SNL is still in reruns, but we're waiting so hard to see the [Tina Fey cameo] mock of Sarah Palin and (minus the outrage) of Michelle Obama. You only have one Obama t-shirt between the two of you, but someone wears it at least every other day. Not because, as they say, "we've drunk the Obama kool-aid," but because we're even more terrified of a McCain world now that he's McCain-Palin. (When you're old enough to read this, will people be as grateful for the Anne Kilkenny letter as we are now?)

You're growing like weeds, and constantly seem just ready to do something new: talk, crawl, eat... We've moved on to a whole new size of clothing, and are ready to pass off a whole crate of hand-me-downs already -- you're bigger than other kids, how crazy! And you do bigger baby things, like crying to keep yourselves awake instead of going to bed; screaming, shaking and gasping until finally, miserably, you pass out. Like going from your big open-mouthed grins to laughing heh-heh-heh-heh-heh when Mommy's being so so funny or holding you up in the air. Like you can reach all the stuff on the jumperoo and the exersaucer, which you couldn't do two weeks ago.

You went to Wave Hill, touched and smelled all kinds of summer flowers, sat your naked tushies in the grass, and fell asleep in the shadows of leaves. You had a house-sit staycation in Chelsea, very glam, and saw lots of your downtown grown-up admirers. Later you came back down to fall asleep on the benches of a great Indian restaurant, among mosquitos from the balcony and coos from your cousine Jessica, and from Bruce and Alfonso who helped you get born.

You went for your vaccinations and the doctor didn't make Jojo get the one that made her so sick last time. We tried to start you on rice cereal but you puked it up like crazy and cried for milk, so jeez, okay, we'll try again in a little while. You drool buckets and it seems like you're teething -- got some sharp ones under those gums -- but nothing yet. You talk to each other sometimes now, which is most exciting of all, to see each of you find your first friend.

New things now: yesterday we went and worked on your Mommy papers, and ate great bagels and you got to play with all the slightly bigger kids, and then you went to Brooklyn in the middle of Hurricane Gustav... and today we went to visit my Nana in Woodlawn, where we sat under the magnolia tree that she makes grow into so much shade, and told her all about you.

Photos of some of all that are here.