Two good Mercy stories from this trip:
1) The other night Mercy and I were engaged in our Seattle before-bed routine of lying on my old twin bed together, singing and talking. As we were lying there her stomach growled, a good long gurgly growl. I looked at her with big eyes and told her the frog in her tummy was awake (it’s all about frogs right now in her world so that was the first animal that came to mind). She looked at me with those blue saucer eyes and she slowly reached down to touch her tummy.
That next week we were down in Portland at Doug’s dad’s house, and Mercy was running around in their front yard before dinner. All of a sudden she stopped dead in her tracks and got the funniest, most sober look on her face. She looked up at me: “Frog. Aweeeeeeeek.” It took me a second to figure out what she was talking about. I laughed out loud and called her over. I was holding a cracker and I held it out to her and told her that frog must be hungry. She took the cracker, lifted up her shirt, and pushed it into her side.
2) Grandma Peggy bought those fun foam letters that stick to the side of the bathtub for Mercy to play with during her bath. At one point, she picked up the letter J. I started rattling off “J is for…” with as many of her favorite J words as I could think of: Jordan, jam, Jack (yes, as in Bauer), jammies, etc. I ran out of good J words to name so I said, “J is for…” and left it for her to finish the sentence. She paused for a second and then looked at me with a big grin: “Jouch!” (as in, Oscar the…).