Dispatches from the summer that I must have been cryogenically frozen, because there is no way they are growing up this quickly!

To whit, Reni:

- can now sing the ABCs all the way through;
- talks mostly in full sentences;
- counts to five, backwards and forwards;
- knows at least the letters A and T, and perhaps O (but still occasionally refers to letters and numbers, generically, as "A!")
- can "walk big boy" as in walk like a big boy, e.g. not in the stroller or the wagon but next to me, at a reasonable pace, holding my hand at least 50 percent of the time, at venues such as the zoo and the mall. Just last week, I swear, I was chasing him from the polar bears to the crocodile exhibit and now here he is letting me walk leisurely like all the other zoo-goers.
- whispers words he knows he is not supposed to use (gah, he didn't learn them from me! Or maybe he did....parenting FAIL).
- wakes up in the morning, toddles out and smiles triumphantly with the announcement: "Sleep all night! Big boy!" and then asks for his requisite chocolate milk and points to the coffee maker and says, "coffee for mama."
- When you call his name and he's in the other room, he comes running in and says, "I'm right here!"
- When a door won't open, he says, "Need a key."

And Anika, in addition to now sporting very grown-up looking ears:

- asks to wear 'lipstick' (just Rosebud salve or vaseline...made the mistake of giving her a few tubes of horrid stuff advertised as princess lipstick - something her dad picked up - which ended up as glitter globs in an art project gone wrong that now permanently adorns her bedding)
- prefers to lie in bed before bedtime with books, not her iPad, and makes up stories and uses different voices - and requests that we leave the room and give her some privacy, please, she is PRETENDING.
- tells me that she knows it's not grown-up to pinch my arm (a self-soothing habit she still uses to fall asleep) but that she won't pinch Rosita instead because "Rosita doesn't like it."
- builds elaborate garages and towns and schools with her blocks and actually plays by herself for more than 10 minutes at a time.

- can count at least to 23 (sometimes faltering around 17) and to ten in Spanish
- picks out her own outfits and wants to put everything on herself - and, unlike a few months ago, actually succeeds in getting everything on right-side-out and the right shoes on the right feet 99 percent of the time.

- draws people - mainly faces, mostly with cascades of crazy curly hair - and can write letters A, D (looks like a P), B and H. She is also left-handed. Here is one of her creations from last month when the cousins were here, and a picture she drew of herself, Reni, Rosita and me:

I realized today that they really are growing up, because I had my first wave of nostalgia upon seeing a pregnant woman, rather than the "thank god that's not me" feeling I had experienced up until now.

Maybe it's all this baby gushing about His Royal Highness Prince George Alexander Louis. Who knows. All I know is that my little royals are growing like gangbusters.