By the Hour

Occasionally, Annalee's eyes are such a dark brown as to look black. A couple of elderly people have remarked on her "black" eyes, which to me connects to the princesses with "black" eyes in nineteenth-century literature. All such comparisons and determinations aside, her eyes do take on a depth of dark-chocolate brown that you don't see every day. She has begun not only to laugh at our jokes but to tell her own, by the way. Her personhood and personality grow by the hour.

Dada Dig

"Dada sit," Annalee said, herself sitting in a sea of pebbles under the playscape at the park. "Dada sit," she said again, even though I was on my way to honoring the original command. She was digging with a stick, quite a lot like a monkey in the forest. "Dada dig," she said. I did some of my own monkey digging, complimenting her on the work she was doing and explaining, a little academically, why the pebbles were moist a couple of inches beneath the surface (from last night's rain). "Ohhhh," she said.