So glad when Daddy comes home!

Rachel tip-toed into our bedroom early (well, early-ish...it was before 8:00) on Friday morning. She came over to my side of the bed and whispered,

"Mommy..."

Whatever she had been going to ask flew out of her mind when she noticed that there, beside me, was a snoozing Daddy.

"DADDY!" she screamed. 

She pulled herself onto the bed, hopped over me, and leapt onto her daddy, who was now very much awake. (That girl has lungs!)

Daddy helped the girls get breakfast and then we went on a family bike ride to the park. Both girls wanted to swing so I started pushing Miriam.

"Mommy—no push! Daddy push! Daddy push! Daddy push!" she told me.

Rachel had very much the same attitude. She kept asking questions, addressing no one in particular, and if I answered she would say, "I wasn't talking to you! I was talking to my daddy!"

Uncle Patrick stopped by in the afternoon to drop off a movie he had borrowed and he and Andrew had a grand old time swapping stories about Ghana. While he was there, Miriam uttered her first four-word sentence, which was: I kick my daddy. 

She raises vowels* like a farmer raises cattle, though, so all her vowels are very intense. Kick sounds like "keek." It's really cute (and kind of reminded me of Bartok on Anastasia).

When she had finished saying her sentence she walked over and kicked Andrew. 

The girls were excited for their gifts from Ghana. Andrew brought them some "mommy" dolls, complete with a "baby to their back."



Rachel's doll's name is Afua; she named the baby Miriam. Miriam's doll's name is Yaa and the baby's name is Baby. Both my girls are very original when it comes to naming babies. The mommy dolls had "birth certificates" of sorts on their backs so they were already named.

We've certainly been enjoying having our daddy home!

* There's this linguistic phenomenon known as Canadian raising, or as I learned it, Canadian vowel raising. It always made me think of barn raising for some reason; I'm not sure why. Anyway, Canadians raise vowels—which means that my little girlies say "bay-g" instead of "bah-g" when they say "bag" and I couldn't be prouder that I'm rubbing off on them!