To eat a plum, or hum, or beat a drum

Would you like a back view of that hair?
We get lots of comments about the curly hair.

She has started doing this thing where she kind of stands close to Harper or Hudson and swings her arm around until she "accidentally" hits them with it, then, when they protest, she starts singing "Shoo Fly! Don't Bother Me!" as though it was all just a big misunderstanding and she was really just shooing a fly.

Also, she has recently begun to be very interested and empathetic when someone has sustained an injury or is crying for any reason. The first thing she does is say, "I get a tiss-oo!" and she runs and gets a tissue, then she is rather forceful about the injured party accepting the tissue, which doesn't always go well. Then she wants to do a rather thorough examination of the injury, actual or psychological. This generally does NOT go very well at all. In fact, it pretty much defines "add insult to injury."

Hudson hums all the time while he's playing. Today it was "Ode to Joy." My brother did the same thing as a kid. Are things like that genetic, I wonder? I think Hudson is the most musical of the three. If there is music playing, he usually stops what he's doing and he'll go and sit in front of the cd player and listen intently, sometimes with his blanket and thumb, like a very cute combination of Linus and Schroeder. He's also the only one who likes to listen to music at bedtime. He listens to the same cd every single night, and has for at least 2 years. In fact, I bought our third copy of it yesterday because the other two had gotten so scratched. It's a Baby Einstein cd called "Lullaby Classics" that my friend Tara gave me when he was born, and it's got Brahms and Bach and Mozart and Pachelbel and Beethoven and Vivaldi and Dvorak and Schumann. Perhaps someday he can make a lullaby cd of his very own with just drums. I imagine it would be very soothing.

Harper perfected a forward roll during her summer gymnastics class. She was really hoping for a cartwheel, but Miss Kim was strangely reluctant to teach them. It was just Harper and her friend Toby for most of the classes. They also hula-hooped quite a bit. She is beginning to be slightly annoyed with all of the memorizing we are doing for school, but she is getting it done all the same. Today she got a little show-boaty with her Latin pronouns (after I dared suggest she might not have them quite memorized yet), so we may have to have a talk about humility.

I watched the GOP presidential hopefuls debate last night after everyone was in bed. I was reminded that a few weeks ago, I looked up the lyrics to "God Save the Queen" (what? is that weird?) because I was thinking about that scene in "Chariots of Fire" where it's super confusing because Abrahams (or maybe Liddell) won the race but then "My Country 'Tis of Thee" starts playing. Then I realized that "My Country 'Tis of Thee" actually stole the melody from "God Save the Queen" (which, frankly, seems pretty un-American). Anyway, in verse two I giggled at this:

Scatter her enemies,
and make them fall.
Confound their politics,
Frustrate their knavish tricks

Not that we are enemies anymore or anything, but WELL DONE ENGLAND. I am decidedly confounded by our politics and knavish tricks. I actually liked Rick Santorum pretty well, but he'll never win. And, I pretty much just like him because he has 7 kids and does not seem as slick as the others, which, of course, has very little to do with whether or not he'll make an effective president. I didn't mind Ron Paul or Herman Cain either. They are both just sort of Crazy in the Eyes. Not that that is a bad thing. It just makes actual winning rather untenable. Or maybe not. That will be all of my political commentary until December of 2012, so be not dismayed.