Hot Days and Big Steps

Hot, hot, hot. We've had 6+ days now with head indices hovering at or above 100. Calla and I have been living in the pool for the past week, and collapsing at night. It's also been a time of some interesting milestones and developments in the life of our nearly two-year-old. With that in mind, a random Calla update...


Thanks to a garage sale right across the street from us, Calla has a new kitchen in our basement. This has caused some degree of confusion when I've told her to find something in the kitchen, meaning the one with running water, and I find her down stairs, making pasta, soup and coffee. That's basically her culinary repertoire these days, and we tend to eat that with her for whatever meal she's making. Her babies also now drink coffee, and eat soup and pasta, which is surprising given their youth.


It's funny to remember that just a month ago, Calla was leery about getting in the water. She's now a fish with floaties: she can float on her stomach and kick, float on her back, and the biggest development this week was learning to blow bubbles. It's fun because she's much more self-sufficient in the pool now. Don't get me wrong -it's not as if we throw her in the deep end and then sip daquiris pool-side, but it does mean that we don't have to be as completely hands-on with her as we were last summer.

How hot is it? Well, our 40,000 gallon pool now registers 91 degrees. That's after we added water last night to cool it down from a sweltering 93. This sun thing is hot. You'd think somebody would figure out how to harness energy from it one of these days....

Talking and more talking... Calla's starting to figure out how to string together her impressive vocabulary into something resembling sentences. Objects still give her trouble, so sentences come out "Daddy apple eat," but she gets her point across. She's becoming more comfortable using pronouns, particularly "I," as in "I can do it" (we hear that a lot) or "I made it" or "I'll get it."

She's also telling stories more. She still talks about the "noisy trucks" that we saw chipping up wood from the storm over a month ago, but newly added to her story-telling series is: "Bug on window! Fly! Gone!" (Translation: she spotted a big bug on the window. It flew away, and it was gone. Got it?) From that story, she might transition to another window story: "Squirrels. Window. Mama. Bang, bang, bang. Go, go go!" (Translation: Squirrels on the bird-feeder. You figure out the rest.) Or she might tell the story about that one time when there was a bug on her head. What makes it fun is that each time she tells these "stories," they seem new and exciting to her. The truck was noisy! It hurt my ears! Loud truck!

It's supposed to be another scorcher here tomorrow. Hope you're finding ways to stay cool wherever you are.