November Begins

The girls are so ready to move on.

J was in such a rush to close up shop on Halloween that this afternoon she briskly moved around the house, gathering up ghosts and witches and spooky paraphernalia with such efficiency that I was beginning to wonder if she might have a future in retail.  And then there was a crash.  A cute little candy-corn-candle tchotchke from Pottery Barn that had survived three moves and many happy years with us long before the kids was broken all over the living room.  J had stacked four wobbly sofa pillows on the floor to reach it, up on the mantel.  “You know, if you’re having trouble getting something, you can ask me for help,”  I observed.  “But I wasn’t having trouble,” she insisted.  After further discussion of general safe climbing procedures, the Halloween scavenger hunt continued.

Meanwhile, M has  been plowing forward as well.  “I can’t wait for this election to be over.  I hate all of these signs.”   No amount of arguing in favor of  political discourse and community activism swayed her, never mind that 2 years ago she was painting her own posters.  She’s like the pint-sized Poster Child for the Enthusiasm Gap.  And tonight, at dinner, M argued that we should just skip Thanksgiving altogether as well.  “I mean, what’s the big deal?  It’s just some food.”   After a valiant defense by the adults, M and J both remembered that in fact they enjoy Thanksgiving very much, thank you.  We also decided, as a family, that this is the year that Grandma simply must  double the stuffing recipe.  It’s high time we acknowledged that the girls can consume a lumberjack’s portion of stuffing each.

The girls’ unsentimental-and-hurried phase has also manifested itself in a complete revolt against all picture taking.  It’s getting pretty irritating.  Today I couldn’t get J to stand still long enough to get a decent picture of the girls with their new baby cousin.  Years from now they’ll wonder what happened in this era, why they were so ignored and undocumented.  Well, for example, Cute W sent me out to take some pictures of the girls frolicking in the leaves.  Here’s what I got:

They are both completely buried in the pile–occasionally I’d catch a blurred foot.

On another day, I tried to get pictures of them walking home from school together.  They’re so cute:  from a distance, it’s always a beautiful picture of sibling harmony that I would love to capture for Eternity.  Alas, on this attempt, they saw me almost immediately, and in a rare example of sustained cooperation, they walked the entire block-and-a-half like this:

Dang kids.