Kylie is apparently as much an adrenaline junkie as her brother was at the same age. Which is, by the way, not quite eight months. She can be a grump, as I’ve documented very well here, but she has a piercing giggle that seems limited to the times when she is being roughed up by Aiden or tossed in the air by her daddy.

It’s been two weeks since I’ve seen any of the family, two weeks that I’ve spent mostly laid out and squirming with misery. But there is no misery in the House of Many Children, at least not for outsiders. Babies who refuse to take naps might be a big drain on the energy of the adult inhabitants of the house, but an uncle can come and go without having to pay that price.

D.J. and Dakota were in their pajamas and nearly ready for bed by the time I got there. This is, after all, a school night. I didn’t get much of a chance to talk to D.J. because he spent a long time on the phone with a friend. How they can spend that much time talking about Mace Windu I don’t know. And Dakota was content to play with his dinosaurs or his cars, whichever one Aiden wasn’t interested in at any given time.

Aiden moves so fast that either he has learned how to be everywhere at once, or there are at least two of him. And despite the fact that he won’t be two years old for more than a month, he narrates everything that happens in clear, complete sentences. (Well, okay, sometimes not so clear to the rest of us. But it’s obviously clear to him, always.) It’s not just that he’ll repeat anything (so be careful), but he makes things up out of the unpredictable workings of his mind.

Shortly after I got there, we were all standing in the kitchen and he found the gift bags I had brought their Easter presents in two weeks ago. He pulled them off the shelf, one by one, handing one to me (“Here you go, Uncle Mike”) and one to David (“Here you go, Daddy”). Then he put one over his arm. That wasn’t exciting enough, so he decided to slam it on the floor, football spike style. Then he informed us he was going to throw it up over the curtain rod (he didn’t quite make it).

David asked him what he was doing, and Aiden said, matter-of-factly, “Playing bags.” Well sure, that was obvious to me, but I didn’t know he had a name for it.

Aiden still likes his vacuum, or any other appliance that makes a noise. If it doesn’t make any noise by itself, he’s happy to supply it. He came into the living room at one point with a canvas belt draped loosely over his shoulder. He pointed one end at the floor and moved around going, “Zhzhzhzhzh.” None of us could quite figure it out, but I guessed leaf blower. We asked him, “What is that, Aiden?”

“It’s a belt,” he informed us.