A friend pointed out to me that I haven't said much about Molly in a while. Kiera tends to grab more blog space because she's going through a period of rapid change -- there's nothing quite like the second year of life for good "and TODAY my kid learned the following new trick" material. But Molly is also a very interesting little person.

About two weeks ago, for instance, we bought a jar of peanut butter to go into something I was cooking. We don't normally keep peanut butter around, because it's a serious temptation to Ed, but having ordered it, I offered Molly a peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich for lunch one day at home. She was really excited -- her friend Rose gets a PBJ in her lunch at preschool every day (Molly normally gets to choose between string cheese and Ritz crackers, and pita bread with hummous). We didn't have any bread, so what I actually offered her was a peanut butter and jelly English muffin. For her afternoon snack, she asked for another one. "You just had a peanut butter and jelly English muffin two hours ago," I said. "Don't you want something else?"

"I had no idea you could make me peanut butter and jelly English muffins," she said breathlessly. "Peanut butter and jelly on an English muffin -- of course I want another one!"

Today she didn't have preschool because it was a school release day, so in the morning I set up the easel so that she and Kiera could paint. She made a picture of a roller coaster; one of her current library books has a picture of a bunch of kids on a roller coaster and now Molly is fascinated with the idea of getting to ride one, though I think she'd be completely freaked out even by a pretty small one if she rode one now. She cut up some paper into strips, wrapped it up in a handmade envelope, and addressed it to Ed as a gift. (He opened it at dinnertime and was rather puzzled.) She helped make Jell-O, and then later helped make bread.

She is still fascinated with babies. When we go to the library, I try to introduce her to the concept of library research by asking her if there's anything she wants to know more about, that we can look for books about. We checked out books about gardens for a while, then wildflowers, then trees; lately, it's been babies, babies, and more babies. Having exhausted the available baby-related books in the Lake Street children's section, I took her over to the adult section to see if they had anything of interest. (A Child Is Born would be shelved with the adult books, after all, not in Juvenile, and she loved that book.) I didn't see anything I thought she'd be interested in, but read her the titles, and let her look inside what they had. She chose Vicki Iovine's The Girlfriend's Guide to Toddlers. And has had us read long sections of it to her. I find this hilarious and inexplicable; I think Vicki's humor is not exactly on a four-year-old's wavelength.

Her favorite thing to do, I think, is draw: she prefers magic markers but will use whatever's handy. I bought her some Cray-Pas at Michael's a few weeks ago but she isn't terribly interested. (She used them a little today, but only because I was playing with them and she got jealous.) She goes through an absolutely astonishing amount of paper. As a project on Sunday, we made an All About Molly book where I interviewed her ("What do you like to do on your own? What's your favorite thing to eat?"), wrote out pages, and then handed them to her to illustrate. I found her pictures really charming and funny. Her favorite thing to do with me, apparently, is play the Dora Game; her favorite thing to do with Ed is to play Candyland. Her favorite thing to do with Kiera? "Ask her for things back."