Today she had two accident reports at school. A deep bruise on her cheek from running and tripping into a table, and a small cut on the inside of her lip from running and tripping into maybe the same table. She’s a brute, though, and was entirely unperturbed, at least at the end of the day.

Not so at the start of her day, when I dropped her off. She screamed bloody murder, or as Siena now says, she screamed “her head off.” I dropped her off in the Toddler 1 room, which is about 20 feet away through a closed door from the Infant 1 room. As I walked by Infant 1 on the way out, with Thalia wailing in the background, I heard one teacher in Infant 1 say, “There’s our Thalia.” The other teacher said, “Wow, really?” It was that loud.

Siena took the day off with Mama, who was off today for working this Saturday, and together they went to the beach and had a grand time lounging and then shopping in Newburyport and generally hanging out together. Siena had her first official gelato (vanilla of course), and loved it. She also let some waves splash into her, which is good progress for the water at the beach.

That being said, Siena is a pretty fierce drummer. Sure she can bang keys on the piano too, and she can actually sing decently (as evidenced by the Donut Song), but she is probably best at banging a drumstick on some surface. Drums not technically required.

My thinking, therefore, is that even if Siena is not the best singer, keyboardist, or drummer in the world, or even necessarily pro-grade, if we nurture enough of it and she gets the right looks, for which she’s well on the way, then all she will need is to be fronted by a really stellar songwriter/guitarist/singer. So, basically, she needs to be Meg White.

Thalia got tired of waiting for someone to help her and walked across the room unassisted!

All four of us were on the floor in the living room, arranged in a “T”, with Mama and me at the top corners, Thalia in between us at the top of the T, and Siena at the base of the T. We were talking with Siena about something she was doing, when suddenly we saw Thalia literally walking across our vision on her way determinedly towards a toy near Siena. I had to stop Mama and say, “uh, um, err, look at Thalia!”

Thalia was so proud of herself (or getting to that toy), that she stopped, while standing up, and clapped her hands a few times. All told, she was upright unassisted for probably twenty seconds and took probably ten or twelve steps. Hooray!

Unfortunately, I didn’t have the camera at the ready the way I did when Siena took her first true steps. So we’ll have to doing a dramatic re-enactment sometime in the next week or something.

In the bath tonight, I took one of those little foam alphabet letters (the letter N), got it wet, and stuck it on her back. She didn’t really notice it, so I moved it to her ample belly. She giggled and pulled it off. To bite it, naturally. I took it from her and stuck it back on her chest. We repeated this process three or four times, and then she did something interesting. I was kneeling next to the bath, with my right form-arm resting on the edge of the tub and my right hand hanging over the bathwater. She took the letter N and stuck in on the back of my hand, where it stuck! She giggled. I took the letter off my hand and placed it back on her tummy. She grabbed the letter and again put it on the back of my hand.

After this definitive display of intellectual and motor-control prowess, she resumed attempting to chew the letter N. She was in bed sleeping twenty minutes later.

Siena saw this table toy when we got home and said, “What’s this?” I asked her if she ever remembered playing with it herself or remembered being scared by the train (it sits on a little revolving circular platform that can be wound up and then makes a tremendous racket when it unwinds as the train moves around). She didn’t remember at all, so she said. Which I find very interesting, that she is already forgetting things that happened a year or more ago.

Siena immediately attached herself to the plastic phone headset, pretending to make calls and invite friends over. She held onto the phone while watching a Muppet Show episode (Harry Belafonte), and when I told her it was time for dinner, she said, “I can’t come to dinner, I’m on the phone.”

Oh please, already?

I told her to tell them that she would call them back. Whoever “them” are. She said she couldn’t because they were still talking. I asked who, and she answered, “The people who are coming over.” I finally had to explain to her that her choice was dinner or the phone and going to bed. She brought the phone to the table, and it “rang” once during dinner.

This morning she brought the phone in the car with her on the way to school. Aye yi yi.

Let the record show Thalia had very little interest in playing with anything other than the A, B, C blocks, which were delightful little chew toys.

Here’s her having her first bite of cake. Notice, she goes for what she knows first (strawberries), but really really likes the cake. We caught on camera basically her longest giggle ever.

Finally she really gets into it and makes a royal mess.

Thalia got some presents, too, though to be honest she was neither that interested in opening them (Siena was more than happy to help her out) or playing with them at the time. Here she is with a couple of books:

Here she is sitting on top of one of the presents:

Getting a look at her first cake:

Enjoying her cake:

Caught mid-giggle! I count three chins here:

Look at me! Cake!

Did I get cake in my hair?

Guide to Harvard Houses

Eliot: Dunster with an Attitude
Winthrop: Dunster without the Maturity
Kirkland: Winthrop without the Brains
Leverett: Cinderblocks in Dunster’s Skyline
Mather: The Box that Dunster Came In
Adams: Dunster with Angst
Lowell: Dunster with no Character
Cabot: Dunster with no Social Life
North: Second Best Dining Hall on Campus
Dudley: Dunster without the House
Quincy: The House with No Redeeming Value
Currier: Quincy in the Quad

Dunster: Cultural, Intellectual, and Extracurricular Center of Harvard University

And now, at long last, I can throw the shirt away.

to this in one year:

That, by the way, is one of Thalia’s birthday presents, and she loves it!

Thalia clocked in at 30 inches (75%) and 22.5 pounds (also 75%), so she’s a little better than the median range she was at before, but not close to Siena, who measured in at 30 inches (and a mere 20 pounds) when she was 9 months. That being said, Mama and I are happy that Thalia continues to grow longer and not just wider, or denser as we were starting to suspect. Mama hypothesized that Thalia would just turn into a white dwarf star and eventually become a baby black hole, sucking in all food and light.

Siena, in the past year, has gone from this:

To this:

So she’s growing really well too!

I apologize for the first 6 or 7 seconds of prep work. I don’t have a decent movie editing program yet, and I forgot to clip these on the camera before I transferred them to my computer.