Kissing Bandits

My children, they are the sweetest. Adam is reaching the age where he finally understands English, and can talk just the tiniest bit. Unlike Ellie at this age, he's not big on repeating things back to us. But he very politely says thank you (tank-gu) and no thank you (no tank-gu.) He can woof and meow, say hi and bye, and is working on saying Gigi (even though she's left us again for vacation!) And the other day when I offered him a banana he said "nana" and made little monkey noises. So cute!

The other thing is that now when I ask him to give me a kiss, he will immediately lean in with a huge open fish mouth. Sometimes he even does it unsolicited - he will just grab my face and go in for the smooch. At bed time, he knows that after we rock and sing his lullaby, it's time for a little goodnight kiss. It just kills me dead. He also likes to squish Lamby into our faces and make kissing noises - in addition to how he will sometimes honk Lamby's face and beep, like he's beeping his nose.

Meanwhile, Ellie has also upped her affection game. She has taken to holding my chin or cupping my face before giving me a kiss goodnight, or I'll be in the middle of her lullaby and she squashes her whole face against my cheek for a big wet smooch. She's spent the past week carrying around one of her stuffed animals (a cat that someone gave her when she was a newborn) and telling us to be nice to her baby, she has to go feed her baby, time to go put her baby to sleep. She also likes for me to wrap the baby up in a scarf so that she can babywear. Hippie!

Our other big fun over the past week or so is petting one of our neighbor cats on our walks. The cat is this enormous ball of fluff - I am not kidding, it's probably a thirty pound cat. When we leave in the morning, he's laying outside in the garden and he'll come over to us if I call, and he lets us pet him and even lets me pick him up and sit him in the stroller, where he immediately snuggles in with the kids on the foot board, and slams his face into them, demanding more pets. We found out from the owners that his name is Star (their teenaged soon caught us mid-pet) and there is also a second large cat who we see much less often (who I have decided is named Storm.) Now that we've seen both cats together, it makes me feel less guilty about my plan to steal Star and make him my own. It's probably for the best that we see him at the start of our walks and not the end. Otherwise I'd be tempted to just let him ride in our stroller alllllll the way home.