The Uppet Show

Tristram used his first imperative verb today. We let him watch "videos" on the computer after dinner. He likes Planet Earth, Life of Mammals, Life of Birds, and the Muppet Show. Tonight he came up to Jonathan and starting saying, "Uppets! Uppets! Uppets!" Jonathan said, "After dinner. We only watch videos after dinner," and Tristram said, "Cook! Cook!" He usually says that when he wants to be taken into the kitchen to see the cooking in process and taste all the ingredients (especially raw onion), but it seemed pretty clearly to be a command.

He also walked home from the library with me yesterday. It was the first time that he's seemed to have a sense of direction--I mean, he knows where our usual landmarks are and can run right to the playground, but he's never shown any clear sense that we were setting out to go from point A to point B and consistently headed that direction just because I said that's where we were going before. We stopped to watch a frog and a rat swimming in the pond, and to sniff a very high percentage of the flowers in the park.

Those flowers now include peonies! I am going to miss the peonies--well, all the flowers, but especially the peonies--a lot once we're back in the horticultural wasteland of Orange County. At the same time, I'm looking forward to a lot of things: stores that are actually open, peanut butter cups, Mexican food without a bunch of peas in it, Netflix, BabyPlays, doing paperwork with people who are not completely mystified by the concept of a middle name...

Preparations for the move back continue. We've got our hotel reserved for two nights in Santa Cruz, figuring that after 22 hours of travel with a 17-month-old (more like 24, if you count getting luggage and drive over 17 we'll need a while to recharge for the 400-mile drive down the coast. We get into Irvine on the 17th, if we stick to this schedule. I am worried that we don't have housing yet. We thought we were subletting a place on campus for the summer, but its owner seems to have flaked on us. We were all set to schedule key pick-up, and then we never heard another word. So now we're trying to figure out how to set up a lease from overseas when we can't fax signed documents from here, and more than that how to afford OC prices. It'll be easier to get a job once I have a local address, but to get an off-campus place we'll have to show that we have 2.7 to 3 times the rent in our monthly income, which is hard to do when you're moving back and switching work situations altogether.

We have been talking to Tristram about the move back, since kids hate change and we want him to be ready for it. His favorite song to dance to is, by a long margin, "The Luckiest Guy on the Lower East Side," and we have been promising him that Pat will play it for him. It occurs to me that we should probably have you guys send us photos and make your own promises though, lest you be held to our promises on the threat of breaking a toddler's heart. Pat may not want to do baby concerts. And Robert may not really want us to come visit the cats every day, if we do get the cat-allergic sublet for the summer. Also, it would help us to have pictures or videos to show him. He loves to look at pictures, but is a little fuzzy on the concept of people from names alone. For instance, every time we say Mia's name he says, "Meow!" Were that a comment on her pulchritude I would be inclined to agree, but I am pretty sure he thinks that in California we know a giant talking cat who is going to play with hats with him.