Sharing

Late last Saturday, it became clear that Meredith was feeling a bit under the weather. Soon Jen got sick. Then me. And finally, Elaine. We're a sharing family. It's a nasty head cold and it's been a miserable few days here. This is Elaine's first experience being sick. Her coughing and sneezing is pretty pathetic; but despite that, she's kept up her spirits.

We're all on the upswing now. It just feels like we've lost a few days. Meredith continues to enjoy school. Recently she's been telling us about how our bodies work. She refers to her brain as a third party that keeps information and makes decisions for her. Today she informed me that blood is a liquid, just like water and milk, and our heart pumps it through our body all the time, even when we're walking. Her interest in such things, paired with her fascination with dinosaurs and volcanos, sometimes causes me to think she'll be a scientist someday. But she has lots of other interests as well. She can be whatever she wants to be.

In the last couple of days Meredith has talked extensively on who vaccines work and why leaves change colors. I've given the answers in the way that I know them. I'm not quite sure if she quites understands the concept, but there will be time for her to nail these and other concepts down.

Elaine is making all sorts of noises. She is on the cusp of making consonant-like sounds. She responds to her name. Which is impressive when you think about how many variations of her name we use. For your viewing pleasure is a list of nick names in use in rough order of frequency:

• Elly
• Els
• Ellikins
• Elsworth
• Lainey
• El

Earlier this week I was showing Elaine a little book with pictures. She liked looking at the pictures of babies but then got to a picture of Jen with Meredith as a baby and Elaine got really excited. I turned the page again and she got frustrated. I repeated it twice, once for Jen to see, and she had the same clear response. Elaine just loved gazing at the picture of her mommy.