You know the separation anxiety is getting bad when your daughter cries because you’re going to the grocery store.

Your older daughter, that is.

Since we’ve moved to Texas, both girls have become only more clingy, more anxious when away from me. I expected it a bit when we first moved – new environment, no friends, and so on. And when we moved in January Cora was 8 months old and four months into her official separation anxiety stage, so I was trying to grit my teeth and deal with that as well. I kept thinking it would get better – that gradually Cora would begin to become more confident without me, let me go to the bathroom by myself, for pete’s sake!

Maddie loves playing games, and makes up half a dozen new ones every day: “Now we’re going to play the Baby Game.” “Now let’s play the Telescope Game!” “And now this is the Balloon Kite Game.” She’ll spy an everyday object – say, the blinds cord in a window- and be off. Her favorite games involve someone (usually Mommy) making up rules or chores or tasks to be accomplished, and giving them to Maddie to complete one by one.

Combine this with Maddie’s innate love of movement, dance, and exercise, and you’ve got one hundred different versions of Simon Says meets Imagination. So when Maddie discovered our Twister game sitting in a pile of board games, she was immediately intrigued.

I make this one tea periodically – it’s a yogi tea, tastes like the chai tea lattes you buy at Starbucks minus the sugar and milk. Anyway, I like it because there’s no caffeine and it’s mildly sweet on its own, so I make a few quarts at a time to keep in the fridge, adding honey and milk as needed.

At any rate, a friend of mine is in her first trimester and having a hard time with it nausea-wise. I gave her a quart of the tea – one of the primary ingredients is ginger, and I thought it’d settle her stomach. The result? Two enthusiastic thumbs up, and a request for more tea. Kindly enough, she refrained from calling me at 2 a.m. when she actually ran out, and waited until the next day to make the request.

My grandmother Gypsy (about whom you’ve heard a great deal in these blogs, I know) loved nature – being outdoors, gardening, growing things, bird-watching, the whole she-bang. So I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised when her great-granddaughter is the same way.

Maddie’s always loved being outside, and walks were a big part of her day from the very beginning. We’d stop and look at flowers growing in front of apartments and talk about what type they were, smell the blooms, stroke the soft petals. And Maddie has a serious thing about rocks: she can’t resist picking them up. In New York, we had a collection underneath our shoe bench of tiny rocks –sometimes just cement chips – that she’d pick up on all our walks. She’d keep the bigger ones in the back yard and exclaim over them periodically, pointing out their interesting aspects. Since we moved to Texas she’s been an even bigger fan of the outdoors, and revels in the birdfeeders we’ve got hanging by our breakfast window. Just yesterday she heard a bird cry and said, “I think that’s a morning dove! I bet he’s saying good morning to me!” (She was right, by the way!) And of course, gardening with Daddy is one of her favorite things to do. Which means I can see her great-grandmother in her on almost a daily basis.

But this article isn’t about Maddie – it’s about Cora. And if I thought I saw Gypsy in Maddie, she’s doubly magnified in Cora.