When Leina was still a bun in the oven, I used to call her mini-me. HA! If I knew then what I know now I’d have called her Kevina ’cause this kid is an exact replica of her father. Sometimes, when he’s holding her, they’ll both look at me at the same time in the same way and I’ll nearly faint from the double shock. But it’s not just the way they look. Oh no, it turns out Leina has her father’s temperment as well.

Just my luck.

Kevin is a wuss when it comes to hot food. Anything over lukewarm and he starts chanting “ow-ow-ow” and spitting it back on his plate. At dinner, he usually starts with his salad because this way the rest of his meal will be nice and chilly by the time he’s ready to eat it. And leftovers? Anything microwaved for longer than 30 seconds brings cries of protests. It’s beyond pathetic.

So I was making lunch for my family and set down some soup and chicken for Leina. Kevin proceeded to help her eat it. He got a scoop of soup and shoveled it in her mouth. Leina made a face, spit it out, and said “hot….dada bow pease.” Kevin, concerned that the soup was, in fact, too warm, tasted a bite himself.

“That’s not hot Leina,” he exclaimed as he proceeded to blow away as commanded by our little tyrant. “Man, this kid is a wuss about hot food. Where’d she get that from?”

Of course, about 2 seconds after uttering this phrase, Kevin had the good sense to look sheepishly at me and say, “man, she sure is my daughter.”

Like there was every any question!

Leina has a new weapon in her arsenol. She’s gotten pretty good at using her little “pease?” to her greatest advantage but yesterday, she took it up a notch. She added the hands.

She approached me and looked up from under dark lashes. Then she clasped her little hands together with her fingers interlocked and held them under her chin as if in prayer. Finally, she uttered in her littlest, sweetest voice…

“ice ceem, pease?”

Now, do I even need to say that we ended up watching Elmo’s world snacking on a bowl of vanilla bean at 9:30am? It was the little hands I tell ya. I have no defense.

Boy, am I a sucker.

Getting ready this morning I passed the full lenght mirror just right to get an unobstructed view of my butt and O-H-M-Y-G-O-D it was huge! And I was wearing black pants! Slimming black pregnant pants! I’ve been so fixated on my every growing belly that I seem to have neglected the sad fact that my rear end is valiantly keeping pace with my stomach.

I guess that makes me very symetrical but that isn’t much comfort. And the worst part is that I don’t have any “feel good” pregnant clothes to run to. When in non-childbearing mode, I have a few old reliables that hang just right to cover all the unwanted extra bits but with maternity clothes? Forgetaboutit. It’s all about being huge in three, four, five dimentions.

So the simple fix is to avoid the full length mirror until I’m back in shape which should be around…..lets see….huh.

How about avoid full length mirror. Full stop.

I used to think Artie was pretty smart for a dog. At least when it came to food and walks, it seemed Artie’s intelligence skyrocketed to impressive heights. Like most dogs, he knows the word “walk” and can hear you utter it from any room in the house in a magnitude of decible levels. We only use “walk” when we are 100% sure it’s going to happen. It’s the only humane approach really. It just isn’t fair to say, “hey, Kev, you wanna take Artie for a walk now or after lunch?” All Artie hears is “blah blah blah Artie blah walk” which is enough. He’s off the sofa like a shot, bounding around the room, raring to go. How do you explain to him that you were merely contemplating a walk? So we use “walk” to mean “leaving for a walk right now” and we use “W-A-L-K” to discuss a walk in the general sense.

Up until yesterday, this method served us well seeing as how Artie has yet to learn to spell.

Unlike some other small beings in our household.

Lately, after dinner, Kevin will take the dog out for a stroll. If it isn’t raining and above 30 degrees outside, he’ll toss Leina in her baby backpack and take her along too. We’ve been having an unseasonably warm winter here so almost every evening, he’s packed up Leina, hooked up the dog, and headed out. So the other night, after dinner, Kevin asked me, “think it’s warm enough for me to take Leina on the W-A-L-K?”

Artie lay on the sofa, unmoved by this remark.

Leina, however, looked up from putting a fresh diaper on her Elmo dolly and declared, “Walk?” She then toddled over to the closet where her backpack is kept and began pounding the door saying, “open….packpack….open…packpack…WALK!”

This was more than enough for Artie who leapt from the couch and began to hurl his body in twenty different directions to show his joy at the thought of a walk. Kevin and I looked at eachother in disbelief.

Leina is learning how to spell.

And it’s not just “walk”. Oh no, she now understands “E-L-M-O” as well. I’m telling you, Kevin and I are going to have to start brushing up on our French and Spanish if we hope to stay one step ahead of this kid. She’s absolutely amazing.