Minky & Me

This morning while taking Rocky for a walk around our neighborhood, Coco spontaneously ran to me, hugged my leg and said, “I love you.”

My family gets home tonight and I am very excited to see them.

This week I have done all the things I’ve wanted to do for six months–hung photographs, put up curtains in Minky’s room, reorganized all my kitchen cabinets, scrubbed the floors. Besides that I’ve slept late and relaxed.

The last few weeks of summer will be hectic. We go on a camping trip next weekend. I take a week-long class starting the 14th. Labor day weekend we go on another camping trip with friends. Then it is back to school and work for me and Minky starts a new daycare.

I’m glad I’ve had a break.

Floyd Landis, the third American to win the Tour de France, has tested positive again for elevated testosterone. French officials tested his “B” sample yesterday and it came back positive. There was some speculation that a negative on the second test would make Landis’s claims of innocence more believable. Not so now. What an embarrassment. Phonak has fired him and he may be stripped of his title.

Kathy and I had an uber girl day yesterday. We started with manicures and pedicures, a massage for me while Kathy shopped, a sushi dinner and then a trip to the mall where I got acquainted with H&M. What a luxury spending an entire day and evening with a friend. Heaven.

Kind of a momentous thing happened last Wednesday night. Minky learned to count. She’s known the numbers for awhile but the connection between numbers and what they represent wasn’t there–though that didn’t keep her from rattling them off at a quick clip if you asked her how many of something there was.

The exuberance with which Minky would count was highly amusing.

Sometimes she’d count something correctly–say there were three magic markers–but then add on a bunch of numbers after three or point to one object and say “one, two, three” and move her finger to the next object and say a few more numbers. It’s interesting how kids go along not getting it and then suddenly it gels.

I was told at the Harvard Developmental Lab that once children understand the concept of counting, they get it completely. Children never learn numbers out of sequence. In other words, learning the number five would never precede learning the number three.

Now we’re waiting for colors. Most everything in the world currently is blue, green or pink.

Coco’s most recent pronouncement: “I am not baby. I am Coco!”