March fun

Both Maggie and Bea have become expert climbers, whether the object in question is a couch, an armchair, an ottoman, or especially stairs. And Bea has figured out how to get herself back down feet first. A great deal of time is spent cruising along the edges of furniture and walls, and even taking the occasional toddling steps out into open space before sinking back to ground and the familiar crawl. Full walking seems dangerously close. At Grandma Joan's house, they practice sitting (Bea) and standing (Maggie with xylophone accompaniment from Bea) on a little chair. Back home, the girls command a wagon as charioteers. But all such experiments in the vertical must compete with the pleasure of collapsing into the big pink dog that Pete and Sarah brought when they kindly MaggieBea-sat, allowing the parents to see some light uplifting comedy at the theater (well, actually "Richard II"). Finally, we could not resist including this image from Heidi's birthday as the girls tuck into a giant edible arrangement of fruit, Maggie eyeing the camera with a look of wild surmise.

The return of the blog

The girls' thirteenth month passed blogless, but that absence says more about the state of their parents than any lack of bloggable antics on their part. Some highlights include a second birthday celebration on Valentine's Day complete with cupcake hats from Grandma Janet and a valentine cake from Grandma Joan (the mess potential of chocolate cake and red icing proved far more enticing than their actual birthday cake). Transportation options have been steadily expanding. Maggie wears an appropriate bib for tooling around on her ladybug wheels, while both girls enjoy a blanket ride from Grandma Janet. Finally, thanks to Rennie for this photo of Bea showing an early vocational interest in plumbing. Ka-ching!

First birthday

The girls' first birthday brought still more snow with strong winds and whiteout conditions. We can count our lucky stars that the snows of 2010 (variously referred to as snowmageddon, snowpocalypse, and now snowverkill) were not the snows of 2009, which would have made the task of getting to the hospital a wee bit more dramatic. But the change in the weather has nothing on Bea and Maggie when it comes to transformation (Heidi holding them both is a good look back.) For this birthday post, we present them snacking, perusing the bookshelves, and chowing down on a birthday present of (soft) blocks. There is also the matter of the cake, which can be seen here towering over their dinner. Despite our hope that the girls would dive in with both hands and make a complete mess of themselves, they merely took a couple of swipes at the icing, showed little interest at the proffered cake itself, and generally appeared to be above such barbarity. Lesson learned: We should have gone with chocolate!

More snow!

After a string of largely snow-free winters in DC, this season has brought a couple of doozies. The latest dropped 20 inches on the city. The girls awoke to a deeply buried scene and ate breakfast with a snowy view. As the storm was waning on Saturday afternoon, we donned backpacks for a trudge around the Capitol. By Sunday, the sun was shining for an outing to the hardware store. Bea loves the old-school backpack from John and Amy, and demonstrated that she can sleep pretty much anywhere when tuckered.

(Mostly) shared pleasures

On an unseasonably warm day in January, Maggie and Bea enjoyed a visit to the National Arboretum with their new friend, Sadie. Back home, Bea singlehandedly arranged all her toys in the proper order of the visible spectrum from longest to shortest wavelength. Amazing! And she's learning Chinese calligraphy and working on a symphony and.... Okay, so we did the arranging in proper ROYGBIV order (a bit weak at the indigo-violet end), but at least she appears to have been amused. Among the joys of visiting Grandma Joan is the chance to share a tray. Maggie is, however, a bit unclear on the sharing concept as we caught her out being a two-fisted drinker. (She's a messy, if not mean, drunk.) And speaking of drinking, the girls may still be a tad clumsy with the sippy cups but do a splendid job administering their own morning bottles.

A box, a bug, bars, and a Brit

The girls have any number of carefully chosen educational toys to harness their burgeoning brain cells, but none can compare to summiting a box in one's new feet pajamas. Both girls enjoyed their visit to see Missy and Hans and especially Siena, and no visit to an entomologist is complete without spending some quality time with a large South American beetle (or in this case a big plastic replica of same). Maggie isn't buying the cheesy grin that Mark adopted for this photo. The jail has yet to be built that can contain Bea, the international baby of mystery, although the gate barring her from the kitchen seems to be working just fine.

Ringing in the new

We rang in the new year with a group of Dave's college friends, adding our new additions to the joyful next-generation throng that converged on Turkey Hall for what has become a traditional in-gathering. Big George and Cathy, who has adopted Maggie and Bea as their nona, somehow manage to outdo themselves in hospitality with each new year. Thanks to them, the girls now have their first car, a situation that we were not expecting to face for another fifteen years at least. Despite being a bit under the weather with a cold -- fairly inevitable at this point in the holiday season -- Bea shows her enthusiasm for driving as does the slightly less under-the-weather Maggie (shown with Cathy). Maggie also took considerable delight in rocking chair rides. Turkey Hall is quite the magical place. The wintertime view contrasts with a similar view taken back in July. For one thing, the Shenandoah is now visible through the leafless trees, and the snow is quite a bit more visible than it was during the Virginia summer.