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.

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.