The snowman is melting. If we let her, Magnolia would watch the snowman melt all day long, like old people on their porches watch the grass grow. She explains to us over and over that he will melt all the way down. It will get warm and the snowman will melt. Once when we were driving in the tour van and she was watching the Frosty the Snowman movie with her headphones on, she suddenly started crying and screaming. We couldn't figure out what was wrong until I looked at the DVD player and realized that Frosty had melted. This might have been a little traumatic for her at the time. But now somehow she is able to make the connection that sun melts snow and snowmen are made of snow. And she is totally enthralled in this process. She is similarly fascinated when butter melts on toast.

Magnolia decided last night (a.k.a. the day before we are due to fly to Seattle and go on tour for a week, sleep in hotels, fly on airplanes, etc.) that she wanted to mail her pacifiers to babies who need them. She said she was ready to start being a big kid. In the past month, she has potty-trained herself and now, after a year of our unsuccessful attempts to remove the plastic from her mouth, she has decided it's time. The binky has been causing her front two teeth to stick out and has been making her breath smell absolutely foul in the morning (the smell is termed "paci breath" in our family). And we've gotten pretty sick of other parents passing judgment when they find out our very verbal two-and-a-half-year-old still uses a pacifier.

We were pretty overjoyed that she came up with the notion to get rid of all pacifiers on the spot and to mail them in an envelope to "babies everywhere" last night. At the time, she seemed to clearly understand that once she sent them away, they would not come back at bedtime. But of course, now the withdrawal has begun. Last night, she had to sleep in our bed (something we gave up a year ago due to severe lack of sleep on my part), and she woke up every hour and cried. So you can imagine the amount of crankiness we've been dealing with today. Plus, I didn't sleep at all. If I don't get any sleep, I am capable of adult tantrums. Then when I just put her down for her much-needed nap, she screamed, pounded the floor and acted like the baby that she doesn't want to be anymore — for over an hour.

What Magnolia didn't know yet was that, when you give your pacifiers away, the paci fairy comes. So Magnolia earned some new dress-up princess clothes from the "paci fairy," and she spends her overtired minutes putting them on, taking them off, putting them on, taking them off, etc. And although she needs help, she thinks she doesn't. So I get yelled at every time I help her pull the pink taffeta fluff over the princess tiara. At one point, Magnolia broke down and told me to "go find more pacis in the house right now!" And when I came back, she had already cried herself to sleep. I might go buy a pacifier for the plane ride tomorrow. No one will be able to bear an overtired, paci-grieving toddler on a six-hour flight.

Oh, and we bought a house! We thought about going back to San Francisco, or moving to Chicago or Austin, but we came to the conclusion that touring on the east coast is easier, it's nice to have grandparents nearby (free babysitting) and we can't quite afford living in the heart of any big cities yet. So we're still in Connecticut, only a lot closer to New York. And now we're off to Seattle.

Next week: A very surprising plane ride.

See this post in its original format here.