Obsessions, Part 1

Both my kids have some personality-defining quirks.

For Nora, one is that she's a gatherer. She's always picking three or four (or six) things and carrying them around. And these aren't necessarily even fun things. Tonight, it was a folded-up sheet of window plastic, a tube of diaper creme (that I'd been looking for all week) and the booklet from Owen's Cars computer game. She carried them to the kitchen, gathered her blanket and a sippy cup of milk and then carefully reloaded to toddle off into the living room, where she plays with this weird conglomeration of stuff. Oh, the plastic opens and closes like a book, I'll put all my stuff in there and then close it. No, I'll take everything out and taste-test the end of the diaper creme tube. Lookie, this paper crinkles...

Perhaps it's a woman thing and this is how multi-tasking starts.

She also has a new word, apple, though she doesn't quite seem to grasp its meaning yet since she'll deem just about anything an apple. The stuffed dog, the bananas, the chorizo sausage at Trader Joe's, to name a few.

Talk about multi-tasking!