For Keeps

We walked to my Grammy's on Thursday. On the way back, Lily was trying to explain something to me. She said "I have a...guess about that flower,," but clearly that wasn't the word she was looking for, so she tried again and said "I have a hype-pot-toe-cyst about that flower." She kind of garbled it, but she was trying to say "hypothesis", and she clearly knew what it meant. Apparently, she picked it up from a show on PBS, Dinosaur Train, where one of the characters uses the phrase regularly. I'm just continually amazed by how much she absorbs. The other day she was being super whiny about something trivial and I almost said "Sucks to be you!" and now I'm glad that I didn't because I'm sure that's a phrase she would have retained and repeated.

It's funny how she's becoming the sum of her experiences and there are factors that don't come from Jen or me, but from what she experiences as an independent entity. She wants to be smart, and it's good that have that as a goal, but after I complimented her about her use of hypothesis, she asked if she were the smartest kid in the world. I told her that she was very smart and she replied, "I want to be the smartest kid in the world, so everyone will love me!" and I'm rather ambivilent where that line of reasoning is going to lead us.

Lily went up at my father's house on Saturday (where she canoed. Pictures will be forthcoming) , and Jen and I wound up watching a movie. It was "For Keeps", which did not in fact star Kevin Bacon, as each of us had remembered. Apparently there was a 1988 movie about youth pregnancy directed by John Hughes and there was a 1988 movie about youth pregnancy starring Molly Ringwald and they are not in fact the same movie. Consider my mind blown.

I'm sure I'm not the only one who has observed how odd it can be to have two fundamentally identical movies released at almost the same time. On one hand, it's not entirely inexplicable, as these similar movies are not pulled like a rabbit from a hat, but rather arise from factors already present in the environment. (This still does nothing to explain how we had two movies about middle distance runner Steve Prefontaine released back to back, however.) Examples of this phenomenon abound, like Antz and A Bugs Life, or Serenity and the Human Centipede.

Anyway, the movies was okay despite it not being the one we thought we were getting. I like Molly Ringwald. She's pretty and speaks French, and seems to be an all right person. (I'm sure that Molly Ringwald is happy to know that she has my approval. (Then again, it's been a quarter century since the Breakfast Club was released so maybe she is.)) She's engaging enough to carry the movie. It didn't change my life, but I don't regret the time we spent watching it.

We attended a birthday party for one of Lily's little friends on Sunday. It was a little tumbling party at a local community center, pretty similar to Raphael's party earlier in the year. Lily was impossibly cute, in rather stark contrast to how she'd been behaving earlier in the day. It's funny how much personality she has. When the kids were in a semi-circle around the people running the party, I knew how she'd sound when asked her name, and the exact tone of voice. "Lily!" very distinct and assertive. And I knew that she'd say "Mint chocolate chip!" when asked her favorite ice cream flavor.

When the woman running the party pretended to forget the lyrics to Happy Birthday, and started singing "Row, Row, Row your boat" instead, Lily said "I can help you. 'Happy birthday to you...'" Jen called that one from miles away.