Back in New York

And your school is canceled until Thursday. You will have a patchwork of exhausted parents and new babysitter and visits with your teacher on Zoom, which fills me with helpless rage and despair. But that is the world we are living in now. I hate that you think it's perfectly normal for everyone to wear masks all the time. 

We just got up and you are watching a vintage episode of Sesame Street while your dad and I make coffee, and he just said to me "Will you do me a huge favor? Will you go on the baby blog and just write the words 'snow canoe?'"

We had snow the day before we left to come back to New York. So much snow! Such perfect, wonderful snow! "So much snow!" you exclaimed. We went sledding, and busted the sled. The sled we had was this cheap green plastic thing from a few years ago. You looked at its shape and described it as a "snow canoe." I rigged up a line to haul it with, and we snow canoed you over to the playground and snow canoed down the hill several times and snow canoed back home. 

One of the nannies of a kid we see at the playground in New York once bragged to us that her charge could count to twenty. "Yeah," said your dad this morning, "but he doesn't know about snow canoes."

Your dad asks me to note also that you have developed particular ways of expressing yes and no. Instead of "no," you will say "nope." 

"Succotash, do you want some Cheerios?"

"Nope."

And if you want to say yes and you really mean it, you say "yes, I do!"

"Succotash, can I hide with you?"

"Yes, I do!"

And you will also often say "Hmm" when considering the answer to a question. You just walked in and said "Hold the bus!" in reference to the toy Volkswagen bus on the dining table next to my laptop, and after I handed it to you, you said "Oh thank you, Mama."