Nora's 4th Birthday Party

Nora's birthday party was at the Audubon Nature Center. After a lecture about leaves, the naturalist lead the kids on a leaf scavenger hunt. The kids made crayon rubbings and then "returned the leaves to nature." The kids were wonderful, and Nora loved being with her cousin, Pilar!

During the leaf lecture, Nora interrupted to made a speech of her own. (Nora is fascinated with speech-making, and often raises her hands up to try out speech on us during dinner.) The one she gave at her party actually made sense: "I want to tell everyone that there are children who don't have water or food or doctors, so we need to collect money for them so that they can have those things." I suppose it was on her mind after collecting for Unicef at Halloween. (The brain-washing is nearly complete!)

Halloween, one year closer

Nora was a white rabbit for Halloween, since we couldn't find a good dog costume. This year, she marched right up to the spooky house -- the one with shrieking music and scary decorations. "Four-year-olds are not afraid of THIS," she said to steady herself. But instead of congratulating her (which is what Nora expected) the guy replied: "That is because you are one year closer to your DOOM!" She high-tailed it out of there. Surprisingly, she did not ask us what "her doom" was. Anyway, she had enough courage to do all the other houses on the block before heading home. Last year she had little interest in the candy, but this year she organized them lovingly by type, and ate 2.

Nora's first media interview

On Saturday late afternoon, Nora and Lisa went by Metro to downtown Washing DC to an anti-war march. Nora gave her first interview, with a woman reporter for ABC radio. Nora spoke into the reporter's mic: "I came here to tell the President -- because this is where he lives -- that he needs to stop the war so that the soldiers can come home to their families." I haven't been able to find out if the reporter used the quote. That was pretty much the message of our group, Military Families Speak Out (http://www.mfso.org/): end the Iraq war, bring the soldiers home, and take care of them when they get home.

At home that night, Nora found a purple sticky note pad and began “writing.” She produced an indecipherable scribble on each of about 20 pages of purple note paper. But, on one note she wrote quite legibly:

"ViO

Lin"

Running to her first violin lesson

After two years of observing other violin students in the studio outside of D.C., Nora (3 and 3/4 years old) started violin lessons this week! She is so excited! Mima will chronicle her lessons at http://clemantinesviolin.blogspot.com/, for anyone who wants to know the all the details.

Nora on jellyfish in Duck, NC

"You can make lemonade out of lemons, but you can't make jelly out of jellyfish."

(Nora enjoying her last summer tooling around greater DC with Lil and their nanny Mimi.)

Note from Grandma Mima: "Nora's blue blankie is the most Linus-like blanket I have ever seen. She goes under it, wears it as a shawl, or a Senegal-style wrap dress. She assigns blankie to be any number of people in the pretend play scenarios that she and Lily make up. Nora will say something like, "you will be the big sister and I will be the other big sister, and Willa [her rabbit] will be the mommy and blankie will be the daddy. And Lil is just fine with "blue blankie" being a person, sometimes even the teacher in one of their games!"

A dragon from Kevin Schwartz

Nora: "I can't get down it's throat! There's not really a hole there!" Then, a hopeful inspection of anything that might be sharp. Teeth. Horns. Spikes down the spine. The naming: "This dragon's nickname is Put-put. But her real name is Bye-bye." Finally, this solemn demonstration of the limit of the esophagus.

Loot

Nora surrounded by her favorite things: animals, Percy the tank engine, and chocolate.