Update on life

I always forget just how much pregnancy brain afflicts pregnant mamas. I forget my shopping lists, and then when I get to the store I forget what I wrote on them and go up and down the aisles saying, "I think we needed applesauce..." I usually remember the coupons, though. I forget words, especially nouns, and Meg is always supplying them for me with tolerance. This evening Jonathan was telling me a story. I was listening, I really was, but I went straight from "...became a character in his own right..." to "...practicing Civil-War style medicine on him." I think I may have missed something. Fortunately he thought this was hilarious.

The other day I explained this phenomenon to the college girls at church as "The baby is eating my brains" and they just about died laughing.

Meg still takes a keen interest in Baby Junior, as we are referring to the new arrival until we discover which pronoun is appropriate. (Meg is still convinced he's a boy.) We had a mutually confusing conversation a couple days ago, when we were talking about grapes. She thought Baby Junior was in my tummy "eating grapes with his teef!" Nooooo, I said, Junior is too little to have teeth. I have to do the chewing for him. She just looked at me in disbelief. But she is definitely preparing for his arrival. She got out the stepstool and carefully arranged her stuffed animals on the highest shelves of the bookshelf so, she explained, he wouldn't be able to chew on them.


I'm so proud of Meg. She's fascinated by words and has almost got them figured out. She goes around saying, "Duck! D-d-d-d-duck starts with... D!" and "Say starts with A!" (True story.) If you show her a written word, she will rattle off the letters for you, D - U - C - K, and might be able to tell you what sound the first letter makes. If the word is accompanied by a picture, she's fabulous at reading the first letter and guessing the word: the other day she got "spaghetti" that way. We're practicing saying all the letter sounds and putting them together.

We also count things, anything and everything, and do simple addition problems. She was really solid on adding two fingers and two fingers, but when there were five fingers on one hand and three on the other, that was too hard. Sometimes we do addition out loud and sometimes I write it out for her in a proper equation. When Nana came for a visit yesterday, I hear they counted to a hundred and Meg noticed that for every new set of tens, the same digits recur in the same order. I think she's doing great.