In this week's news...

Frederic finished mulching the pile of hedge branches and will, I hope, finish trimming the rest of the hedge tomorrow. That's the good news. The bad news is that the more we get done, the more there seems to be to do. I'm not quite sure how that works but I am hoping that by the time we are ready to sell in about 28 years we'll have made some good headway on it all.

Benjamin doesn't know why Noah gets to have all the fun.

And Noah is showing some cannibalistic tendencies.

And they are both as cute as ever.

Noah is fascinated by Benjamin and is a very happy baby these days - a far cry from those first few fussy months! He is almost able to sit up on his own. He turned 5 months old last week - I don't know where the time has gone!

He is gaining weight again but I still have to supplement him and at this point it looks like that may continue for quite some time. We hope to get him in for his 5-month check-up this week (no shots this time), and in less than a month we will get to start him on solids.

Not much longer now before our American family gets to meet him finally. We'll be home in about 3 months for Thanksgiving.

One of Benjamin's favorite things to do now is play with his foam letters & numbers puzzles, and he really enjoys the website starfall.com (check it out if you have little kids at home!) for learning his letters. He repeats everything he hears - he came out with "extraordinaire" the other day after having heard it on TV. His French Rs make us laugh because he exaggerates them so much. (And of course it took me 8 years of French classes and a few months of living in France to get it down, and here he is at 2 saying it almost effortlessly!)

I do feel like a speech pathologist many days, though, because we work with him on things like "sp" ("spoon" instead of "foon") or "sh" ("shower" instead of "fower"). He is at the "telegraphic speech" phase now and we understand 95% of what he says these days - and the other 5% we wonder if he isn't just pretending to speak English, the way Jordan used to make up words...

He also teases now, telling us he is Noah and Noah is Benjamin. And he knows that "Daddy's at work" and that Daddy works with airplanes.