the girls.

She hasn't started walking yet, but she is thinking about it. Each day feels a little closer. Feeling out the sides of the room, carefully. She focuses on the length of the couch, then the bookshelf. The table. Her papa's hands. She thinks it all out and watches it all. Especially her sister. Most absolutely, her sister. Like our sheep dog from when I was young, she has to know where everyone in the house is, at all times. She keeps tabs, checking from room to room. Standing at the various baby gates and pushing doors open. She has perfected the opera-singer scream, especially if she wants something that isn't coming directly. I try not to laugh when she yanks my glasses off and smacks me over the head with them. She then very carefully tries to put them back on, but they usually end up somewhere between eyebrow and hairline.

At dinner making time, she sits by the stove and stares up at me. Her papa has more then once compared her to a puppy, and in this instance, it is absolutely true. I feel like she is waiting for something to drop or for the split second I open the fridge to grab something so that she can crawl inside and start searching the vegetable drawers. She gets a puppy like pleading in her eyes, but I know it has more to do with the fact that she'd like to be in my arms, watching every single move on the stove. When she was a tiny one, I would strap her in the Ergo and make dinner with her on my back. We might be back to that, just because she loves the action.

Her sister, more often then not, loves to play with her, and I can hear their giggling from the next room. It simply melts my heart. This weekend I found the dolls I played with a child. My grandmother made them for me, complete with clothes and amazing blue eyes. I hauled them all over from the age I could walk until I out grew dolls...whenever that was. (Admittedly, I brought a teddy bear with me to college. Nothing like good ol' fashioned comfort, huh?) The girls loved them.  The little one especially loved holding them in her arms and looking into their eyes, even though they were close to her same size. She loves dolls. And because of this, her big sister is newly loving them too. They play together with their babies, cuddling them and then throwing them into the doll pram and pushing them all over the house. Reading them books and changing their clothes. It's adorable.

That being said, I don't know what I would do if I became the mother of boys. I think I could handle it- I mean I like climbing trees and shooting bow and arrows. I had brothers. But there are certain things I just can't understand, and somehow the girl's mama-ness seems a whole lot less far out there and crazed. (Although, yes, there are days I make my big girl run the length of the block so I can time how fast she runs....or when I convince her to play jump rope in the driveway for an hour or so...)

Our days. Mid February. Sigh. This time of year just feels a little like waiting.