Little Ladies.

I bought Marley a delightful little coat this morning. She's coveted it for a while, often with dramatic announcements like, "I've always wanted a coat like this! My whole life!" every time we've passed it at Target. And she was thrilled when she saw it hanging with her other jackets after school this morning, even though it was a day too late for her to wear it to the Nutcracker. (More on the Nutcracker, and the entire Thanksgiving weekend, which involved a high school reunion of mine, later.) And then I remembered the jacket Marley wore to the Nutcracker last year, and figured it would be just a little too big for Rudy.

And when both of them were all cozy in their lady coats, and spinning around and admiring themselves and their feminine grace with little self-satisfied smiles, I got the camera out.

My daughters are two little bespectacled maniacs. And sometimes they drive me positively bananas with their demands and their frustrations and their selfishness. But mostly I love them so much that my heart gets all throbby and achy and I get a frenzied sense of time passing way, way too fast, and then the frenzy passes because a mom can't actually experience that feeling for long without some vital part of her body exploding.