Three weeks, or Jack teaches Sadie about animals

I had this idea where I would take a minute of video of Sadie every week, not doing anything in particular, just being her. My hope is that by doing so I will be able to track when exactly my baby stops being a baby better than I did with Jack, who very suddenly, it seemed, was walking around telling me what to do. I had already forgotten about this idea by the time two weeks rolled around (which means, yes, I only actually did it once before I forgot), but I got my head back in the game for three weeks, and hopefully I won't forget again. I won't bore you with a whole minute, and I probably won't even post these every week, but hopefully I will keep remembering and then at some point can make one of those magically edited movies and we'll be able to literally watch her grow up. So here are 16 seconds of Sadie, at week 3.

(click for video)

And because that's kind of boring (sorry Sadie!), even for her adoring mother, I also have a more interesting one of Jack telling his sister what's what. A neighbor gave us a beautiful little cloth book of black-and-white sort of ink-blot style animals, abstract enough that the identity of a few of these critters stumped me at first, but not Jack. He knew right away what everything was and started telling Sadie all about it. It was too cute, so I made him do it over again for the video camera, which of course was not as sweet and spontaneous as the first time, but you get the idea.

(click for video)

He is going to have so much fun with her when she starts really paying attention to her world. She is already focusing much better; this was the first day that we really noticed her fixing her gaze on something solidly (and without crossed-eyes). Or maybe we just hadn't given her anything interesting or high-contrast enough to look at until this book. In any case, Jack loves showing her things and so far doesn't seem too disappointed that she doesn't really look, but once she does, oh I think he's going to really LOVE being a big brother.

Incidentally, he was making bats out of playdoh today and there were two big ones and a little one and a really little one (which started out as a moth for the bats to eat), and he told me very emphatically this was the daddy bat, this was the mommy bat, this was the Jack bat, and this littlest one, this was the Sadie bat. He also told me, while watching a mama polar bear with her two cubs on the Planet Earth DVD, that was mommy, and Jack, and Sadie. For a while I wasn't sure if he really got that she was here to stay, but I think he does. And I think he's pretty happy about it!