Elan named the baby. Thank goodness, because Mikhail and I have been having some trouble with this task. One morning, playing a game involving magnetic tow truck and wrecked cars with numbers on them, Elan said “Baby Tie-lie is 1 years old.” Only a blip of hesitation before he busted out with “Tie-lie.” Then he towed the “1” over to my belly and plopped it on top. Also, according to him, it’s a girl. He’s thought that since the start, using the pronoun “she” and talking about his “sister.” Won’t he be surprised if it’s a boy. Of course, I think he’ll just be surprised that it’s an actual baby, come to live with us, and by the way, when will she/he be going home?

We’ve been having a lot of 5:30 a.m. scream-fests. You can imagine how much Mikhail and I enjoy this. This morning, I plopped Elan in the stroller and took a walk. The sky was gray, the air was damp, and the crickets were still chirping. The fact that I could hear the crickets chirping was a blessed relief. He was quiet in the stroller, curled under a blanket in his sleeper, eyes wide. On the way home, he told me: “Mama, I’m going to blow like this (demonstrates a puff like blowing out a candle), and then I’m going to be a big boy. Ready, set, go. (Big puff.) See? Now I’m a big boy.”

Back in Berkeley, it took knocking the contents of a full glass of water into my open nightstand drawer in the middle of the night to get me to clean out my junk drawer. Not that I tend to procrastinate household organizational tasks or anything… If I spent as much time doing them as thinking about doing them, I’d have a very well-organized house indeed.