Where's Alice? In her element!

This past Wednesday we attended a contemplative Advent service, at which everyone received a blessing upon exiting. The person saying the blessings at the door pronounced, "May your heart prepare you for the coming birth." I smiled and thought what that sentence would have meant to me two years earlier on the same night, as Tom and I wandered up and down Nassau Street in the frigid cold, trying to have a last date before going to the hospital for an induction.

Indeed, this past Thursday morning Alice had to learn a new phrase to replace the announcement she's been making for the last month: "My birthday coming up. Sing 'Happy Birthday to You'! I almost two." 

"Almost two" no longer, Alice is now of legitimate age to participate in the Sunday School class into which we've been sneaking her for the last month, an iconic age that justifies noun status--a two year old--and not just adjectival form--a two-year-old child (per Linguistics 114, fall 1994...). Hardly our baby any longer, she is talkative, social, loving, opinionated, funny, and on the go. 

The deer came to say "Happy Birthday" in the morning. We caught the last of them just as they were leaving the yard.

At breakfast Alice danced to her new Putomayo CD, with her new stuffed meerkat, her favorite animal from the zoo. 

We celebrated with a very low-key get-together, inviting over two other two-year-old girls from the neighborhood and their parents for a morning of parallel play, lunch, and cupcakes. It was just right!

Before the party Alice had been asking over and over where Ellen and Lauren were; afterwards she asked once more. Indeed, her most striking new habit is asking where everyone she knows and loves is, providing the answer herself when she can. "Where's Aunt Susan? In Pennsylvania. Where's Aunt Suzanne? In Virginia. Where's Pappy? In Delaware. Where's Uncle Peter? In 'consin. Where's Cousin Katie? In Delaware, waiting her baby come out her tummy. I in my house in Manitou Springs in Codoralo." She wants to know where far-away family is, where neighbors are, where various people from church or the YMCA or my job are. She's our extrovert, thinking always about other people and wanting to keep tabs on them.

In the evening, when Edith came home from school, we had a cake, featuring Alice's other favorite zoo animal.

At a well-child visit to a new pediatrician Friday we waited 75 minutes to spend 10 minutes with the doctor and confirm that Alice is a healthy, thriving two year old...if a small one. At 22 pounds she's hovering around the 3rd percentile for weight. Fortunately, her new pediatrician seemed very relaxed about that, even after looking at her growth chart and seeing how she has continued to drop through the percentiles since clocking in at 9 pounds at birth. First of all, he said, the American Academy of Pediatrics and the World Health Organization are debating the value of their respective growth charts, since the American ones are based only on bottle-fed babies, who tend to weigh more, with the result that the charts may be adjusted downwards soon to reflect a wider range of baby diets. Regardless of the charts, said the doc, Alice's cardiologist someday will be thrilled that she's skinny. And that was that. Now if we only could find some clothes that would stay on her...

Now that her birthday is over, Alice is grudgingly allowing for the fact that Jesus' birthday is coming up. Just so long as the meerkat is hers.