Shana tova!

That means "Happy New Year"! for our non-Jewish readers.

We had a friend and her two boys over last night to break the 24-hour fast from Sunday night to Monday night. Susan works with me at the newspaper; her 9-year-old, Harrison, and 3-year-old, Davis, stormed through our small house with boyish energy. They were extremely well-behaved and didn't run or break anything but, oh, the energy! It was a preview of what Drew and I will experience in about a year or so...

I roasted a chicken, some potatoes, made a pear/spinach/gorgonzola cheese salad and, for dessert, pound cake with chocolate sauce and strawberries. All homemade. Harrison, upon first tasting the pound cake, pronounced it "heaven on Earth." Needless to say, I was delighted!

Susan kept remarking what a well-behaved baby Rachel is. She is developing some issues with sharing her toys, but otherwise she did her own thing, looking intently at all the action around her. Her latest cute/funny trick is to take a knit doily we have on our living-room coffee table (made for me by my Spanish tutor in Guatemala before I left), pull it over her head and wrapt it around the back of her neck, like a shawl. It looks like a lace mantilla. She grins hugely when she does that, which always gets a laugh. She also wraps bibs around the back of her neck, toys...anything to get a reaction.

Another recent discovery: She no longer needs me to cut soft foods into teeny tiny pieces. I used to do that with cheese sticks, but Drew gave her half of one the other day and she just bit through it until it was all gone!