Dear Merritt,

Let's just cut to the chase: you use coasters. Intelligently, willfully, purposefully. And that concludes your 22-month letter.

Wait. You also do a spot-on impersonation of Cookie Monster.

And you often walk around with a hand in your pocket and the other behind your back.

And you're starting to understand the concept of pretending. You've applied it to "nigh-nigh" and will now walk up to us, say it, and then flutter your eyelids closed for the span of 2.3 seconds. It's almost as adorable as you walking around with one hand in your pocket. Or devouring invisible cookies. Oh, and using coasters.

Your fascination with shoes has escalated to the point that all your parents refer to you as "Imelda." You will wake from a dead sleep and exclaim, "Seooze!" You like to try them on, take them off, sort them. You love to play the game where we point at a pair and you tell us to whom they belong; your accuracy is staggering. You see a stranger and want to strike up a conversation based on the fact that, "Hey! We're both wearing shoes! In public! How freaking crazy is that?"

If you're going to continue to open the refrigerator to pilfer grapes and berries, then ... I have nothing to threaten here. Your breath is too good afterward to ask you to stop. Please don't stop.

You've made an addendum to the whole "mommies' kisses make everything better" notion. And that's that Merritt kisses do, too. So when you clamped your thumb in a plastic Easter egg the other day (yes, it's August and you're still playing with those), it was totally logical for you to wail for a second and then kiss your own thumb. All better. Right as rain.

Not as much the case when you fell into a table today and procured your first shiner, but some loving from The Mommas and the immediate forking (spooning?) over of some frozen yogurt quickly quelled your "oowwwwiiieeeee"-laden screams. It helps that the table which gave you the black eye was IN the frozen yogurt place. We planned it that way.

You answer "yeah" to almost everything unless you know for certain that the answer is "no." We call your name from another room: "Yeah?" We suggest tacos for dinner: "yeah." We offer up an episode of Elmo: "YEAH. (pause) PPPEA." But then we asked you if you wanted to move to Canada and you said, "Eh?" Seriously, where do you come up with this stuff?

It's more likely that you were saying "A" because that's what you say any time you see letters or numbers, or just randomly, because you can.

Your face met pavement last week and as a result, scrapes cover your nose and lip. It's kind of cute and sad, like watching Chapin run and jump at the couch only to miss it, get nailed in the chest by the cushion, and flail on his way to the ground. I digress.

A couple of days ago we were all in our bed and Mom, fueled by your maniacal laughter and earnest requests of "een" (again), was tossing you onto the pillows and flipping you around and around. There was a scab on your nose when all of this began; there wasn't by the time it was over. And we knew that meant there was a scab in our bed, among the pillows and love. We found it that night when crawling under the covers. Your scab. And yes, I'm nowhere near as eloquent as Oprah when it comes to talking about "Heartprints," especially since I'm talking about how you left ... incrustation ... in the bed. But that's the point: you leave your mark. Everywhere. And on everything. And on everyone. Pieces of you.

And the world has never been luckier.

Love,
Momma (& Mommy)