My mom's middle name should be FARKEL

My mom is visiting while Raph is away so that I don't lose my mind. I laugh a lot when my mom is around, mostly with her, but occasionally she says something funny, like today we were making soup with fresh rosemary and thyme. She looks at the recipe and looks at me and says "these recipes always say to remove the leaves, but I think they're so flavorful!" Yeah. All these years she's been removing the leaves, finely chopping the twigs, and adding them to our food. Who knew?

She also brought an awesome game, which I highly recommend. It's name is Farkel. Farkeling is actually not a good thing - it means to cancel out your score for the turn, like pigging out in pass the pigs. I beat her in two straight games tonight. No luck involved. All strategy and guts. Woo hoo...

Eight Months

I don't have the normal deluge of photographs to celebrate with this month. Raph is in Japan visiting his brother and he got to take the camera, so we've returned to film around here. It's also been a LONG week. We're both tired of being sick, though we are both starting to feel better. Now we just have hacinkg coughs and snotty noses. I might actually let Makili out of the house soon, since it has been so cold and he so sick that we pretty much haven't even gone on a walk in weeks. Nor have I gone running. Yes running. I was running for a while there, and the last time I ran I ran 1.2 miles without stopping once, which is like a record for me. But then the weather turned and rained non-stop for a week, then snowed non-stop for a few days making the road icy, and then I got sick and it's been all over. Damn.



Back to Makili. He is an adept crawler, though he always prefers to stand and try to get places by holding onto the furniture. He also really like to practice picking things up while standing, crouching down, standing up, crouching down, standing up. I think he might be walking soon, but we'll see. He LOVES books with flaps in them, like "Ears, Toes, and Nose" (thanks Kate, Guy and Elio). He will crawl off my lap to get to that book if I try to read another one, though he will patiently sit through others too, like the Boynton collection Raph's cousin Sarah gave us. What a lucky kid!



We've entered into mommy land too, where I am the only thing he wants. He cries if I leave the room, like always, ahhhh... He will crawl right after me, whether into the bathroom or the kitchen (it isn't too hard to find me in the 741 square feet of our house!)

Raph and I have been working on teaching him to wave "hi" and "bye" and sometimes I swear he does it. I also swear occassionally he'll try to make an animal sound when we're reading the noisy farm book. I'm pretty sure he knows the following words: look, help, up, booba, dadddy, and maybe some others. We do sign language with some of those words and I'm hoping he might start signing back at some point, maybe this month?