I took my daughter to the matinee ballet the other day at the Opera House. We walked there. In blue jeans and purple overalls we were definitely in the tiaraless minority. So when we got home, she naturally wanted to put on her fancy clothes, her mermaid crown, and ballet dance around the living room.

Luckily her mother knows all the ballet moves and their French names.

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God fall went by fast, he thinks as a car shedding snow from its back window passes him on the highway.

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At her own request, Juniper is a mermaid: the "Queen of the Sea." Her brother, also at her request, is a merman: Poseidon, the "King of the Sea." My wife made the costumes from scratch, including Juniper's shirt. I made him a beard, but it only made him angry. I don't have any long sea voyages coming up, but decided it was still unwise to anger King Poseidon. I managed to snap a couple pictures before he ripped it off, and I'll post those to the main site soon.

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She's running through the main hall at the Detroit Institute of Arts. A couple months ago I let my membership to the museum lapse so we've been going on Fridays (when city residents get in free) but I just won a membership in a photo contest so we've been going on other days when the museum isn't as busy. I try to keep her quiet and respectful for the most part but when there is hardly anyone around I let her chase down echoes.

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The neighbor girl had a princess party. With a pony.

We talked a lot all day before the party. "But what do princesses do?" she asked.

"I don't know," I said. "I don't think princesses do anything. I think that's the whole point."

We went through her dress-up clothes and found whatever had the most tulle. I even painted her fingernails and toenails. As much as I've tried to distract her from the princess industrial complex, I don't have a heart of stone.

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A few night ago we had some friends over and they brought their houseguests with them, a German art professor (from Sweden) who photographs, collects, and lumbers ghetto palms, his wife, and their 11-month-old baby boy. It was amazing for me to watch the little guy play with Juniper---and to think that in only five months or so she and her brother are going to be able to interact like that. She is dying for it, I think, to have him as a playmate. She smothers Gram with kisses and hugs to the point where he always cries and I need to interject. "Stop smothering him," I say. But how can I explain to her that she's showing her brother too much love?

I caught the tables turned the other day, with him on top of her, grabbing her hair and trying to gobble up her face. She was shrieking with delight.

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Every week we go to the art museum. We start at the cafe, which is one of the few places in Detroit with a decent salad bar. She eats chicken and tuna fish and broccoli and black beans and hard-boiled eggs and I tell her it's all healthy and at the end of the meal she asks me how much she's grown and I hold my forefinger and thumb a few millimeters apart, smiling. After lunch she runs at a breakneck pace past the suits of armor and through the Diego Rivera court all the way to the Picasso room, where she stops in front of her favorite painting (which I wrote about here).

I come into the room to find her like this.

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All summer these two have been my patient little buds, sitting in this massive jogging stroller while I push it as far as seven miles around the city. The older one usually brings a book to look at, the baby seems content with the scenery. A month or so we started running up and down the 1.3 miles of the Dequindre Cut (I wrote about it here) which isn't yet officially open to the public but no one has ever hassled us about it. The graffiti artists have been working overtime down there lately, some in broad daylight. I know it's like the ultimate hipster dad BS you've ever heard, but I swear the kid (without provocation) wants to talk about the letters written on the wall, as in, "What are those letters and what do they say?"

You try explaining graffiti tags to a three-year old. Not easy. I asked her why she thinks they write on the walls and she said, "Maybe they ran out of paper."

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We're not used to this child growing out of clothes. Say what you want about growth charts and percentiles, we've been lucky to parent this petite little thing who still wears some of her 18-24 month clothes. Yesterday she wanted to wear the same dress she wore on the first day of school last year. Remember how hard that was? This year things went a lot easier. She still hugs and kisses me goodbye, though. And it still hurts me a little to go.

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I took the kids with me to Ann Arbor for a magazine story I'm writing about Eero Saarinen in Michigan and after we got done shooting the music school (and seeing mermaid tails slip into the pond) we went on an "adventure" through the buildings and forests on north campus. Part of this involved walking up and down this fibonaccian staircase in the computer science building. I took the elevator up and down while she took the stairs, mainly so I could watch her. She talked to herself the entire time.

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