In Brief

• At the playground, Doodles started shouting from across the park: "Sweetie! Give me a beer! Give me a beer, Sweetie! I need a beer!"
  
• What goes through that little head? I went to pick Doodles up from preschool last Friday and the teacher says to me, "So you're headed to New York now?" Um, no. What else has that boy been telling you?
  
• My friend J. visited last week with her six-month-old son, who is also a J., but since that's confusing, I'll call him S. (for son). Doodles was so excited to have S. over. He's already declared a number of times that he wants more babies. He seems to have a hankering for brothers. I told him that while S. was in town, Doodles could borrow him as a brother. J. concurred. Well, two days after they left, at lunch, Doodles asked me, "Are we going to borrow S. later?" I explained that they went home. Doodles was pretty upset and he said, "But J. said we could borrow S.!" He was not happy.
  
• Doodles finally tried syrup. He's been eating pancakes, waffles, and French toast for a while, but only with cinnamon sugar. At a restaurant recently, he barely dipped a pancake in some, tasted it, and declared happily, "It's juicy!"
  
• Pie Pie took a single step. And then she panicked, realized what she did, and took it back. She, is however, regularly trying to climb everything she can. She'll be standing somewhere innocently, then the next thing I know, that little knee is lifting as she tries to scale just about anything. The other day, I caught her trying to pull herself up onto our bed. And then over the side of the arm chair. And then up the big climber at the playground. She is a fiery little thang. The gate on our stairs is retractable. Sometimes, when I go to close it, the bottom doesn't quite catch. In all of Doodle's three years, it was never something I worried about. Now, I worry about it. Because the other day, I heard a strange noise. The sound of a gleeful Pie. Which only happens when she's doing something she's not supposed to be doing. I came out and I was very confused when I saw that the gate was closed, but Pie was halfway up the staircase. Turns out the bottom didn't catch, and somehow, Pie managed to lift up the corner of the gate, wiggle underneath it and over that bottom step, and take off. She's go go go and you'd better keep up! Where's the Pie? Oh, pulling every book off the shelf. What's that in her mouth? Oh, just a half-eaten crayon. What's that piercing noise ? Oh, that must be the normal 4 to 6 p.m. screamfest. That girl is going to be the death of me.