Catching Up

For any not fully apprised of our current life situations, we dedicate this post to you. The most imminent event on the horizon is the birth of our second child, a little surprise due exactly 7 weeks from today on April 3rd. If it's a girl, we'll name her Katherine Dorothea (yes, all you Middlemarch fans, yes); if it's a boy, Justin Michael Collings, Jr. and we'll call him J.J. after the star Duke basketball player J.J. Reddick. Here on the right is my 33 week belly.

In other world events, Justin has been accepted to law school at Michigan, University of Pennsylvania, Stanford, Columbia, and Harvard. Stoic though he be, we were able to capture this moment of candid feeling regarding these admissions.
He hasn't heard back from Yale yet, so he hasn't turned in any letters of intent or disintent.

Julia continues to delight, try, and amuse us. She has developed a great love for singing; "I Am a Child of God," "Popcorn Popping," "Clean Up! Clean Up!," "Do As I'm Doing," and a little cassette of action songs currently top her list of favorites. She can even do most of the actions to "PAH-corn" and provide all the me's in "Of God."

She can identify a few letters by their actual names (Y, B, A, C, and sometimes H), and most of them by pictures for which they stand, most especially Ice cream, Owl, and Zebra. It takes at least ten minutes longer for us to get to the car now that I can't carry her there because she stops at every sign to identify all the letters she knows.

She also has become quite adept at identifying words she knows in speech she hears around her. This sometimes results in some embarrassment; yesterday, for example, when the speaker in church read a verse about seeking riches for the intent to "clothe the naked," Julia yelled out exultantly, "Naked! Naked!" then quietly went back to her business. She's certainly a dolly and we can't imagine life without her.