sniff

Sam's overall-clad behind was wet when I took him out of his booster seat after dinner tonight, and I wasn't sure if it was leaked pee (it had been, upon reflection, fairly long since his last change), spilled apple cider that had missed his bib pocket, or something else. J. remembered having sat him on the edge of the sink to wash hands before dinner. So I asked J. to smell it and see if it smelled like pee, cider, or nothing, and J. obligingly got down on hands and knees and sniffed Sam's behind. Sam found this very amusing: "Dog!" he announced, giggling.

We had a beautiful weekend with lovely sunny crisp-air fall weather. I decided I needed a bit of a break, so had resolved not to do research-work or teaching-work, or at least not much, so we just crossed domestic items off the list. It was our turn to clean the Toddler Room at Sam's daycare (it's a coop, which means not only weekly help shifts, but also a cleaning weekend which rotates through all the families-- it works out to roughly once a semester, which feels totally doable), so we did that yesterday. We went to the Farmer's Market, did laundry, had dinner at the home of a colleague. Today J. worked all day and Sam and I went for a bike ride and ran errands. He seems to be comfortable in the bike seat, and the area around our home is very bikeable, so I think we'll be doing that a lot until it starts snowing. We had lunch at home-- Sam's been eating like a horse, protein especially ("chit-ten! meat! more!"). I think he must be growing. Then this afternoon, he slept for an astonishing 2.5 hours, during which time I started-- and finished!-- the novel I got at the library yesterday morning. (I've taken to reading young adult fiction when I have a fiction craving, because it lets me do just this-- finish a novel in, if not a single nap, a nap + an evening. There are some fantastic writers targeting books towards 'young adults'. I loved Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy last year, and just found another couple of his books. Yum.)

Sam's newest library favorite: Leo Lionni's Let's Play . I also got out Tomie de Paola's Strega Nona, which I remember loving, but Sam wasn't so into it-- too many words. And also a Babar book, but every time I read Babar now, it strikes me as oppressively colonialist and patriarchal. I have no problem with elephants wearing clothes in, say, Richard Scarry, or dressed up animals in so many other books (Toot and Puddle!) but in the first Babar book, Babar the King doles out clothing to all his previously clothes-free subjects, a set of work clothes and a set of fancy clothes, and it marks the occasion of the incorporation of the elephant town. For some reason this creeps me out. Maybe I'm just hypersensitive after reading this amazing article about the unintended consequences of human attempts to manage elephant populations.