Another list of unrelated observations:

Atticus had his first dentist appointment yesterday and did really, really well despite the high-pitched, frantic, competing barrages of supposedly reassuring words from the dentist and the hygenist. I wish I had recorded it. You'd have nightmares, and because you're an adult and can make your own decisions, you would never ever go back to a dentist. Atticus cried and said, "no," but didn't fight me all that hard. And afterwards he was chill. He hung out and played with the purple dinosaur the dentist gave him as she talked to me about how to care better for his teeth. It was her usual talk, she said. She didn't find anything wrong with his teeth. But I left feeling kind of lucky she hadn't.

Atticus also has his first case of conjunctivitus. He's doing really well with the eye drops. He isn't happy to get them, but he lies down when it's time and tries very hard to keep still and not rub at his eyes until after I have put in the drops. (His father is putting eye drops into his own eyes because he is a paranoid hypochondriac. Love you, sweetie, but you are.)

I think that today was the first time I heard Atticus make a full-on, grammatically correct statement: "I want a snack."

We did a lot of painting this weekend, and he's asked me to paint every morning and evening since. He likes to put his hands in the paint. Last night he painted his hair, and thought it was hilarious until I put him in the bath to wash it out and red and brown water ran down his face.

The boy loves butter. This morning he asked for more butter for, I presumed, his English muffin, but as I went to put it on the muffin, he intercepted and crammed the pat of butter directly into his mouth.

Did I report that he can hum most of "Baa Baa Black Sheep"? Now he's humming a lot of the alphabet song, getting in a letter or two here and there, but mostly just kind of humming it. He also enjoys singing along to parts of "Ring Around the Rosie" and "Bingo."