little beach bunny

Sage left town with us on her first beach outing this weekend, and made us even more proud of her than usual. She was completely fearless on the ocean, obediently clinging to the side of the raft in her nanny's grasp as instructed, but constantly trying to convince said nanny that she should be allowed to float off on her own to join her parents in the deep water.

"I want to go to Mommy," she tried. "I'm a big girl now!" Also: "I want to go to Daddy; Daddy will take care of me."

"But how will you get to them, Sage?" her nanny challenged her.

"I'll swim," Sage said, flailing her legs determinedly behind her. "See? I'm learning!"

The next day, we took her wading in shallower water; and after some initial squeamishness, she was able to nerve herself to reach down and pluck a starfish out of the clear surf on her own. "What are these wiggling things it has, Daddy?" she wanted to know.

"Those are its feelers," her father explained. "It's trying to find the sand that it used to lie on."

"Then it wants to go home," Sage decided, "to its mommy and daddy." So she gently lowered it back into the water and let it go, calling "Bye, starfish!" as it sank downwards.

She also showed off her increased ability to share by allowing her new friend Giselle to borrow her sandcastle-making toys. Giselle is the daughter of the cook at the beach; and somehow the two of them became fast friends, despite the prodigious language barrier that separated them.

"Punta tayo sa taas," Giselle would say, referring to the second floor of the beach house.

"What?" Sage would reply. Moments later, she would be struck by the same notion: "Hey, let's go upstairs."

"Ano?" Giselle would ask.

But our little girl is nothing if not adaptive. By the time they finally agreed to go upstairs to the second floor balcony, they got to see a flock of birds taking flight from the shoreline.

"Ay! Ay!" our little English-speaker cried out, in a perfect Tagalog accent. "Birds!"

Sagey's Latest Story

Once upon a time, there was a Big Bad Cat who went to the house of the little boy and the little girl. Then he cooked them!

Later, the mommy came home, and she said to the kids, "What happened to you?"

The kids said sadly, "We're not alive..."

--very loosely based on Hansel & Gretel and Dr. Seuss's The Cat in the Hat

We may be raising the next Clive Barker or Grant Morrison.

dress sense

I have this particular housedress that has somehow become Sage's special favorite: a skinny-strapped, short white number--patterned with purple leaves and brown teddy bears--that I actually would not be caught dead wearing in public. Possibly it's that very contrast with my usual all-black attire that makes Sagey love it so--whenever she watches me getting dressed for a day at home, she will try to dig up the housedress and say, "Mommy, I want you to wear this one."

Generally, I'll oblige. So I was wearing the aformentioned dress as we were watching TV yesterday. "Mommy," Sage wanted to know, tugging at my hem, "what is this called?"

"It's called a housedress," I told her.

"Mommy!" she laughed, as if I had just said the silliest thing imaginable. "It's not a housedress; it doesn't have houses on it!"

"No, no," I tried to explain. "It's a dress I only wear in the house, so we call it a housedress."

"No, Mommy," she informed me decisively. "It has bears on it, so it's a bear dress."

And of course it is. Silly me.

her latest poetic phraseology

"The moon has clumsy teeth."

--Sage Alfar, telling her mother a bedtime story

princessly pronouncement

During our day at the mall last Tuesday, Dean and I bought Sage this jewelry-making kit for being good at the doctor's. She wanted to play with it right away, but as it contained a lot of loose beads, Dean asked her to wait till we were seated at a restaurant for dinner, so that the smaller pieces wouldn't get lost.

As we made a stop at Powerbooks to check out the selection, Sage oh-so-wistfully asked me, "Mommy, can we please open my new toy?"

"No, princess," I said. "We agreed to wait till we sit down for dinner, remember?"

"But I want to play with it now," Sage stated, forehead creasing into a frown.

"Well, you promised you'd wait," I told her. "And princesses always keep their promises, don't they?"

Looking up at me, Sage drew herself up to her full three-foot-four-inches. "The princess," I was informed loftily, "did not promise."

I swear, any day now, she's going to start saying, "Mother, we are not amused."