One night the Little Green Erin went for a walk under the blue stars. She came to an egg. It was the strangest egg she had ever seen - it wasn't a robin's egg, because it wasn't blue. It wasn't an Easter egg, because it didn't have stripes or fancy colors. It had letters on it. It was an Alphabet Egg.

She picked up the egg to take it home to her brother Alek, because he was very good with letters. Then she realized she could read the letters too - all kinds of different letters, like "A" and "E" and "R" and "Z". As she was carrying the egg home to Alek, she heard a knocking sound. "Knock knock knock." It was coming from the egg!

The knocking was getting louder and louder. She got to her house and called "Alek! Come see my alphabet egg!" Alek came running. Mama and Dada came running, too. And right then, there was a loud knock and a crack in the egg. The crack got bigger and bigger and out popped the whole alphabet!

Erin and Alek brought the baby alphabet up into Alek's room and made all kinds of stories out of it. Then the stories hatched more eggs. Erin and Alek brought all the eggs outside and buried them in the woods for other kids to find.

Copyright HejaFred 2010.

Sometimes when I'm lying in bed with Alek or Erin at night, I tell them their own bedtime stories - just like my dad used to tell me, the one that always started "There was a little girl who lived out in the country...." Except I tell them about the little boy/girl in the brick house with the Mama and the Dada and the sister/brother and the dogs and the cats and the red car and the green truck and the blue minivan. And inevitably Lightning McQueen. Well after I told Alek a story about Lightning McQueen and his star headlights (inspired by Alek's ladybug night sky night-light, which happened to be shining on the front of the big stuffed Lightning McQueen), Alek wanted another story. This is the conversation we had:

Alek: “Can you tell the story of Lightning McQueen and his friends and the moon headlight tattoos and how they went to Carburetor Canyon and then how they went to my house?”

Me: “I think you just told it.”

Alek: “No – that’s just the NAME of it.”

Me: “Well it sounds like a good story – I think you’re off to a good start.”

Alek: “Oh OK. This is the story of how I was out on my driveway waiting with Lightning McQueen, and ‘Mater and Chick Hicks came by, and they all wanted moon headlight tattoos so they went down to Carburetor Canyon and found a guy who had them. And he put them on and they went outside and turned on their headlights – and they saw ALL KIND OF MOONS! And then they came back to my house and they were driving around but they fell in the big hole in our backyard! And they couldn’t get out! And their headlight tattoos fell off! But I had a cold glue gun so I fixed it – they had to sit still for a little while so it could dry.”

"Now can you tell me another one?"

"Santa! Santa! Santa is here!"

The kids are running around the house getting ready for Santa. Yes, it is January. But Santa is coming down our chimney.

Alek: "It's night-time and we're going to bed. I made Santa a play-doh snack. And hot cheerios."

Erin: Giggles

Alek: "Santa! Santa! Go sleep! Santa's here"

Erin: "Santa's here! Santa! Santa! Open the door for Santa!"

Alek: "You know what Erin, Santa comes down the chimney. Santa comes down the chimney, Erin. Erin, go to sleep!"

Erin: "Sleep on the chair!"

Alek: "Santa's magic, Erin. He wants you to be asleep. Santa's already at the bottom of the chimney. Let's go find our presents."

Erin: "OK."

I'm not sure who's living in who's world sometimes with these kids. Sometimes they are clearly in another one. They have no problem shifting back and forth between alternative realities at a moment's notice. But getting them back to THIS world is sometimes a challenge!

It is a fairly chaotic morning at the Frederick house due to an alien invasion. Fruitflies are everywhere, and they are winning. Cries of "I have a fruitfly in my straw!" erupt from both kids. Erin is turning them into imaginary friends and actually pretending to be one. She runs around the house flapping her arms and growling, saying "I'n a fruit fly!" And Alek's best line, in regard to the fruitfly infestation: "We should buy a new house and let someone else live here." Personally, my own observation is that a toasted fruit fly is still a fruit fly.

I know you were expecting to see another round of adorable photos of the family. Well, they're all there on Fotki, of course. Kids playing in the sand, swimming in the pool, applauding the sunset, and having immense amounts of fun at the beach. But I was in the mood for something more narrative, and I discovered it's hard to come up with captions for photos of beaming gorgeous children. So I picked some more "expressive" photos to share with you, photos that really capture the essence of our trip. Guess who was always holding the camera? Yep, that's why there are no pictures of Erik (here, or in the entire Sanibel album it turns out - oops).

Life may be good, but you can't make me look at it	Ooooo, that Mama thinks she's so smart! I'll show her someday!	Shh. I think I just heard Dada fart.
If I sit here and stare at my book long enough, maybe Erik will put Erin down for a nap.	I've had enough, I'm changing my name. I will now be known as "Henry James Gordon The Express Engine".	Mmmm, I wonder if that's something in Erin's diaper I'm smelling. Time to give her back to Heather.
Man, those kids don't EVER get tired. I'm gonna go back to the room and have a drink.	I am going to get these darn things on my head even if it rips all my hair out and makes me cry. I'm a big girl, and I can DO it.	Waaaaaaaa!
No, I don't want to go down to the beach that we just drove 14 hours and 830 miles to reach. I just want to stay up here and play with my trains from home.	If I sit here long enough and stare into the woods, maybe Dada will let me have a turn on the tricycle instead of my supposed "big boy" balance bike.	I have no idea how we got through those years. Thank god it's them and not me!

Living in the belly of the shark.

This is the first entry from our new house, and the last entry in Freather that will be widely available without a password. As our kids are getting older and cuter, and as the world is getting scarier, I'm beginning to think that maybe we should limit access to this repository of highly personal information. I know, I know, it will really cut down on our web traffic - sorry, advertisers! - and who knows what the "Anonymous Comment Spammers" will do - find someone else to harass with on-line poker schemes! - but I think the rest of our viewers will adjust. Mom, I'll send you the password, don't worry.

In the mean time, we're settling in quite nicely to the new house. Alek has had no sadness or regret over leaving the old house behind, and Erin of course never missed a beat. Or a nap. Compared to the month of December, with over 5,000 miles traveled between three coasts (Lake Erie counts, right?), a simple move up the street was hardly a struggle.

Erin's almost 10 months old and starting to provide us with daily challenges. Things that used to be easy are suddenly NOT. For instance, naps - it used to be as easy as lying her down and watching her flip over and find her thumb, and now it's uh uh, no thanks, don't you dare walk out that door, Mama, oh, OK, there's my thumb. It seems like just a month or so ago she started crawling, and now she's already trying to walk. Baby gates are up everywhere, and just like her brother at the same age, she's obsessed with the dog water. Lots of noise coming from the little girl, and some words: "Ba ba" could mean Mama or "bottle" depending on the context, or maybe both, but "Dada" is clear as a bell, ringing through the house at 7:00 almost every morning. And a real landmark - thanks to Tonya, Erin has a hairdo. Little pink rubber bands and a topknot. She's looking more like Pebbles every day! Solid foods are getting more solid, but she still is a little bit of a puree princess. We tried bagels a couple weeks ago, and after watching her turn just a little bit red . . . redder . . . blue . . . trying to get it out of her mouth, we backed off on actual solids. Why do I list all this? Because I can't even remember when she stopped taking her third nap, and I know it was less than two months ago (for the record, she's still taking two). Really, I swear I'll remember this stuff forever, yet the data suggest otherwise.

Alek, of course, has his ups and downs when it comes to both sleep and food. But his world is a little bit bigger - toys, friends, books, imaginary snakes, and sticks that are pretend remotes that make pretend water (or fire, like the Aim-A-Flame), which you must protect yourself from by wearing the imaginary snake, i.e. umbrella. It's complicated, but actually makes sense if you see it from his point of view. I suspect. He went quite a long stretch without naps but, it turns out, he does still need one and is a LOT happier when he gets one. Sometimes his endless negotiating and demands wear on us ("No! I want the serving fork! No! I want the door a little bit open! No! I'm all done taking a nap!") but at the same time, it's very entertaining to see how his mind works. (Like when I told him that no, I don't think we have a serving "knife" and he immediately responded "You have to go get one?", or when he saw the "new" garage and said "I have two garages???").

Nanna and Pappa have been here this weekend, and Nanna is staying around to help with the rest of the settling in, much to Alek's delight, who got to drop Pappa off at the airport and go to "Chicks Fill-A" for lunch afterwards. This ranked second only to watching Curious George in Pappa's chair for making a toddler's day. You'd think that with an extra person around all week we'd find time to catch up on endlessly ignored chores, but a lot of that extra manpower (or better yet, Nanna-power) seems to just get sucked up by the Cute Vortex - and if you actually read this whole entry, than watch out, you too may be affected!!!!

Pictures coming as soon as we unpack those electrons. Stay posted for news on the password implementation - we have to actually figure out how to do it first!

Erin and Jack - born less than three months apart, sharing 25% of their genetic material, and both cute as can be . . . yet one of these children can sit still. Can you guess which parents are the lucky ones?

Erin at almost nine months is pretty much as hilarious as Alek was at the same age (and every age thereafter, really). She has recently acquired so much personality that she deserves her own bulleted list of accomplishments:

Erin being a big girl, and without a bustle!

• Crawling with gusto and speed
• Waving bye-bye! Even if it's with both hands at once!
• PPPPBTH-ing up a storm, with heavy precipitation
• Two front teeth, coming in crooked, just like you-know-who's
• Developing her own language: "Click click, clack, click click". She'll go on for hours as long as someone clicks back.
• Playing games - taunting mom with the bottle, trying to get it into mom's mouth, then veering wide and smacking mom in the face with it, laugh and giggle outrageously, repeat.
• Clapping her feet, which she has not outgrown in the least, has expanded to include "Clap the belly" and "Clap the knees", on command.
• Speaking of feet, trying to stand on them, all the time.
• Imitating her big brother - Erin's own version of the "Peanut Butter Jelly Dance" is truly something to behold.
• Speaking of big brother, she is already fascinated by buttons, knobs, and light switches. Uh oh.

Meanwhile, Alek has 17 teeth! When did THAT happen? He's still exploring the world of pretend in new ways every day; tonight he told me he was a little guy like the tug boat, and he was mighty too, and he was going to bring the big Dog ship and the big Pirate ship and the big Car ship into harbor. He's turning into an honest-to-goodness not-so-little boy in front of our eyes - when I picked up his DVD by sliding it across the table, he said "No, don't scratch it! It's scratched already!" (It was, he was right.) The innocent stream-of-consciousness toddler-ese is becoming more deliberate and focused; way beyond "I wanna go there" and "No, Alek do it", we're now in the realm of "Don't pick that up because it's mine and I want it to go there, not over here, where you put it."

The longer I go without updating Erin's and Alek's baby books, the more Freather entries you can expect to see - an attempt to fill in the void, without any clear plan of how to carry it into the future much less preserve it for posterity. The way Alek is heading with computer skills, I'm sure he'll find a way someday to delve into the archives . . . because I'm sure he'll really need to know exactly how many teeth he had by the age of 2 years and 8 months. Maybe I just hope that they'll read this when they are adults, and realize that their "Mom" and "Dad" were not only once "Mama" and "Dada" but actual people, too! (Don't worry, Mom, I do finally realize that you went through all this too! Yes, it's the moment you were waiting for all those years ago when you said "I hope you have a child just like you" and "Just wait until you have kids of your own".)

Erin in the window seat

As predicted, Erin's endless land-swimming has finally culminated in progress. She gets her knees way up under her, rocks back and forth a few times, and flops forward - it moves her a few inches, and involves levitating her butt off the ground, so we call it crawling. She loves it - whole new worlds have opened up, worlds that previously existed inches from her grasp. Combined with her ability to roll and swivel, she is pretty much mistress of her domain. As long as there isn't a big wall in her way, or at least one higher than a couple inches.

And today, she said her first word and it wasn't "Mama." Of course, she is Daddy's little girl. And the "D's" are easier, I hear. She even said it twice on command. Now she can combine her first sign with her first word and make a sentence: "No, Dada!" Ha ha. It's just a matter of time.

Meanwhile, we're hanging out in The Sea Ranch on the Northern California coast with Mimi and Papa Alan for the week. We flew into San Jose last Friday and stayed with Sara and Rene and their little girl, Isabel (who knew that her shirt said "Purrrrfect" and that Isabel starts with "I" - so cute!). It was so wonderful to stay with friends who so graciously and gracefully absorb all the chaos that comes with the Frederick family! Isabel had Alek up in her bunk bed in no time, "picking berries" on her starry tent, and he showed her how to jump off the top bed - he was by far the worse influence. After a couple days that just flew by with fun and adventure, we drove up the coast to the only city in California that starts with "the" (according to the Garmin GPS). Erin has stubbornly clung to "EST", or as we have come to call it, "Erin Standard Time." Alek is loving sleeping in Mama and Dada's bed, not that sleeping has been a big part of the trip for anyone but Alek, since Erin is getting up at 4 am every day. On the dot. No matter when we put her to bed.

Alek wants "up" and to see some pictures. I'll go get some and put them right . . . here. Below: Alek and "Tigger" overlooking the ocean; Erin in the highchair; Erik pointing out seals to Alek.

There are no end of beautiful photo opportunities out here, even without our kids in the pictures. We've really enjoyed walking along the trail every day - there's "Pee Rock" in one direction (so named by Alek for obvious reasons) and "the big log bench" in the other. The best thing about the trail is that it's only yards from the house and provides a way to get Alek away from all the fine china in the cabinets with the most-compelling sliding doors. Papa Alan is actually encouraging Alek to play with the DVD player (so he can get it replaced, he says) and insists that he can still get work done with Alek in his lap. He even found "dancing banana" with a single Google search, at Alek's request. Meanwhile Mimi is getting used to the complete lack of privacy that accompanies a toddler and the complete lack of peach and quiet that accompanies Erin - she's either screaming with displeasure, or giggling with delight, but either way you know she's there. Other than constantly worrying about keeping the house safe from the kids and vice versa, it actually is relaxing!

(Place cute pictures here, as soon as we put them up.)

December. So far, it's a month of extreme sweetness. By which I mean:

• Christmas cookies.
• Frosting Christmas cookies.
• Candy canes (a special treat for Alek from Tonya for trips to the mall to see the singing bears and he knows the rule is "always brush teeth after candy", right Papa Joe DDS?)
• Brown sugar in oatmeal (Alek actually started eating his oatmeal with the wooden sugar scoop this morning)
• Erik just announced that all Alek wants for Christmas is a "big chocolate candy cane." This from the child who didn't see a refined crystal of sugar cane for the first 18 months of his life. We screwed up somewhere. It may have been with the chocolate milk.

In less sticky terms, Alek and Erin are both treating us to a lot of adorable sweetness. Alek gave me a big kiss goodbye this morning, complete with runny nose. He says "please" and "thank you" almost every time he says "I want", which comes out a LOT still. But in more sophisticated ways each day - "I want that!" has become"I wanna touch that thing over there on the mantel by the fish . . . right there, yes, there you go" and "I wanna press the cramera button" has become "I wanna take out the memory card and plug it in right there and take the battery out and charge it until the light turns green."

Erin, of course, is still full of yummy-ness. She sits up like a champ, and is getting better and better at expressing herself. She's been a bit cranky with her first tooth and those still coming, which may be why her first real "sign" is shaking her head emphatically "no." It started off as the "shake the head game" and now, there's no doubt about it, it means "No Mama, I don't want the bottle, yes I want some oatmeal," and five minutes later, "No Mama, no more oatmeal, I want pears." She's generally well-rested and happy though - sometimes she goes down for her 5 o'clock nap and sleeps through the night. She's longer and leaner every day, and her hair is still inspiring comments from strangers on the street - naturally, we think she's gorgeous, but it's sweet to hear other people say it too.

Meanwhile, we're off to California tomorrow to visit Mimi and Papa Alan, home for a week after that, then up to B-lo for Xmas with Papa Joe, Nanna, and the gang. I start the new job in January, and unless I have another baby (a thought that still makes me more than a little squeamish, honestly) I will likely never have another 5 weeks off in a row for the rest of my life. Good thing I'm taking advantage of it and sleeping in every day, taking lots of time for myself, catching up on my reading . . . . ha . . . ha . . . ha. But with these sweet kids to keep me company, I wouldn't trade it for anything.