Whole Tiny People

The babies are short wobbly people! They don't have language yet, but they study the things around them (using their tactile little monkey tongues as much as anything else) and they look to see how other people are responding to them. Their eyes are really lit up and attentive and much more advanced than their hands. They get a little shy now around people. Odessa even cries when something scary happens (although I did trip over the stroller and face-plant in the babies' laps last week, and all I got was shocked stares, and, from Georgia, the special are-you-kidding-me-with-this? eyebrows.)

Milestones show up every day. The bouchkies had their first East Village garden klezmer show the other night, with the magic of tight quarters, mosquitos, dim lights and razor-witted, love-laced songs, and reunions with all the friends who had heard about them but not yet pinched their pajamaed tushies. They wear shoes now. They're outgrowing the co-sleeper, and we fight with ourselves over whether it's okay to keep moving them into the bed, and for how long? They still don't like rice cereal, but it doesn't seem important enough to force them. They only have one cat now. They didn't watch the first presidential debate. Lots of stuff...

I don't know why the babies must be called bouchkies, but bouchkies they clearly are. I googled it, thinking it might be an inherited word and not just a mishmosh of the kutchky and buba and kush-kush my cousins and I were called. And look what turned up: "Buchky is a Georgian toast (Republic of, not State of), sort of pronounced "butch-kee," that means when you tap glasses it's like the leaves of a bush all coming together." That's so lovely! If it's true. And it has Georgia and everything.

Hey babies: speaking of Georgia, do we need to talk about Georgia, the place, not in the south? The question of whether we had it in mind when we named our Georgia has finally left your Mommy with Georgia of Eastern Europe in mind. And now the war. What a strange sweet mix of sounds -- it looks in transliteration like Scandanavian and maybe Arabic, and Latin, some Slavic ones. Will your names draw you to it?

New photos are here.