Abby hands Amy her Pooh blanket and says, "You be bay-bay monter."

Amy throws the blanket over her head, then lumbers after Abby through the living room. "Ugh, I'm the blanket monster!" Amy growls. Abby runs squealing around the downstairs. "Save me, Daddy!" she shouts, taking cover in my lap. (She finds the notion of rescue alluring; she's constantly saving her Little People from drowning in the bathtub.) When Amy quits to sit back down, Abby hands her the blanket again. "Be bay-bay monter, Mommy. It fun."

That night Abby has a nightmare, or at least we deduce she does from the sounds of protest she makes in her sleep in the middle of the night. The next morning we ask her if she had a scary dream last night. She nods her head. We ask if it was about the blanket monster. She nods her head. But this doesn't necessarily mean she even knows what we're talking about. (Does a toddler know what a dream is?) Nevertheless, Mommy decides there will be no more blanket monster.

But Abby, like so many children, likes to be scared, at least within reason. She likes flirting with the concept of fear. "I 'cared," she'll pronounce matter-of-factly, before walking into a dark room. She likes it when I move my fingers over the lampshade in the living room, because of the spooky shadows they cast on the ceiling. But after a few seconds she tells me to stop.

I take her to the car wash, because I think she'll think it's funny and thrilling. (I know I did when I was a boy and my mom took us to the car wash.) She watches the whole thing very closely, looking at me every few seconds to verify that everything is still okay. But when the tentacle-like sudsy cloth-strips swoop down over the car, washing us in a close quiet darkness, Abby cries, "No like, no like!" from the back seat. I reach back and comfort her with my hands. Strange sensation, to see the car moving without my steering it.

As soon as we get home, she tells Amy all about it.

When she doesn't want to do something we ask her to do, she always very cleverly says, "Your turn."

When she wants us to do something we don't want to do, she very cleverly says, "Please? It's fun…." Which comes out as "Plea? It bun…"

Sometimes we can't get her to do anything. The price for her disobedience is time-out. Let me just say that time-out has always worked very well for us, up until about a week ago, when Abby realized that there was nothing, despite what we said, that dictated she remain in her time-out chair.

When she struggles against time-out I take her upstairs to her bedroom, put her in her chair up there, leave the room, close her door (but not before seeing that she's getting out of this chair too), and tell her she can come out only when she gets back up in that chair and sits still for two minutes.

After a lot of crying, of defiant refusal to sit in the chair, she finally, finally quiets down.

I yell through the door, "Are you in time-out?"

"No!" she says petulantly.

I open the door and see that she is in fact sitting primly in her chair. "Honey, you are in time-out. That's good!"

Her face wrinkles up in frustration again. "No! No time-out, Daddy!" She gets back down again and makes a run for the door. I block her, pick her up-she scissors her legs in the air in protest-put her back in the chair, leave the room, close the door. The whole routine starts over.

After about fifteen minutes of this, she finally sits in the chair. After two solid minutes I go in and get her. She's compliant and sweet the rest of the night, and I, like every parent concerned with getting kids to behave, am reaffirmed in my belief that children secretly are grateful to you for imposing limits and rules on them.

We're in Sears, ostensibly to look for speakers for our computer, but really we're here because it's Saturday night and we're all three a little restless. Abby holds our hands the entire time: she wraps her fingers tightly around my outstretched index finger. (You have no idea how long it took us to get her to hold our hand whenever we're in public.) She walks along, touches the occasional nearby object in curiosity. "What that?" she'll ask. And we'll patiently explain.

We meander over to the baby section, to look at infant car seats. We have our eyes on the kind that has a base, so you can detach the part the infant is in and use it as a carrier; then, when it's time to get back in the car, you just reattach it to the base, already belted in. We find one for $49, which seems like a good price, but we hold off. We haven't shopped around yet.

By this time Abby is sitting on my shoulders-she loves being perched up high like this, and for limited periods of time I love it, too-and I get an idea. I start looking through infant clothes for girls. "Do you think Olivia will like this?" I ask her.

"Olivia baby," Abby declares, for my information.

"Yes, she's going to be so tiny when she's born."

"I big girl."

"Yes, you're a big girl," I agree. "And you're going to be such a good big sister."

Abby reaches down and touches a little nightgown with charming John Lennon illustrations printed on it. "Baby like this," she declares.

For the first time, I get a clear glimpse of just how great this whole having-two-girls thing is going to be, and I feel like dancing.

As planned, before we leave the mall we reward Abby's good behavior with a ride on Lowly the Worm, near where the food court is. A few weeks ago we took her on this, and I think she had never been so thrilled by anything in her life. At that time we hadn't planned on her riding it, and we hadn't had any change for the machine. The dollar bill changer was broken, so Amy had broken into her collection of brand new state quarters she keeps in a special pouch in her purse, so that she'll someday have a complete set to give to each of our children. (I think we used New Jersey to get the Apple Car going.)

Abby watches Richard Scarry on videotape all the time, and here was the Apple Car, and here Lowly was in it, and now here she was too, riding it. She grieved, literally bellowed in grief, for hours after we took her out of it.

Tonight we've saved up a couple of dollars in quarters just for this occasion. But Abby would rather ride the "horsies" on the tiny merry-go-round next to Lowly. We say that's fine, but could she please ride Lowly first so Daddy can get a picture of it on his camera? "Alright," she says, and climbs up and gets in the Apple Car.

I run out to our car in the parking lot-also according to plan-and get the video camera. (Yes, this is how we spend our Saturday nights: getting footage of our kid riding the little rides at our local shopping mall.)

"Daddy take picture?" Abby asks when I come back, already behind the wheel of the Apple Car. We feed in a couple of quarters; the Richard Scarry theme comes on, and the car begins a rhythmic rocking motion back and forth. Abby gets a look of fierce concentration on her face, leaning forward, steering the steering wheel. I get it all on tape.

The song ends and the ride comes to a stop. In sharp contrast to the last time, when we had to pry her fingers off the steering wheel and lift her flailing body out of the car, Abby now eagerly steps out of the car and says, "I wanna ride horsie now."

So we put her on one of the four horses on the merry-go-round and watch her go.

"Do you think she's scared?" Amy asks, concerned. "She's not smiling."

"She's digging this so much," I say. "She's taking it very seriously. That's why there's no smile."

After the ride Abby gets off the horse with the green saddle and walks over to the horse with the purple saddle. She gets on it. Amy and I look at each other: why not? Amy puts more quarters in and away she goes.

After the second ride it's time to go: it's quarter to nine, the stores are about to close, and we're out of change. But Abby can't believe we would take her away from this thing she loves so much. She protests. Vigorously.

The difficult thing about being strict is that sometimes I can identify with where Abby's coming from more than with where I'm coming from. Abby, who doesn't quite get the concept of money or of closing times or of just plain moderation, is understandably outraged that we are dragging her away from this wonderful, harmless thing. And to say we're dragging her at this point is scarcely an exaggeration: we are picking her up, only to have her collapse her body in such a way that we have to set her on the ground before she falls head-first from a height, whereupon she writhes and wriggles all over the dirty mall floor while we struggle to pick her back up again. She is screaming so hard it comes out as a primal growl. Her face is beet-red, and she's breathless with rage.

And sometimes lately she wants to be a baby. "I little baby," she'll say, reclining in our arms and smiling up at us as we nuzzle her neck and cheek. "Waa, waa, waa," she'll say.

Amy and I both agree this seems natural and healthy, in its place. Abby knows another baby is on the way, she already sees how much of our attention Olivia is going to divert away from her, and so she pretends to be a baby. I think it's also her way of rehearsing what it will be like to have a baby in the family. So long as it's just every now and then, we indulge these little fantasies of hers.

At work, I'm on the phone with a sales rep, and he asks me how the weather is "up there."

"It just started snowing. We're supposed to get three to five inches overnight. Tomorrow's commute should be fun." (I'm not very good at the good-ol'-boy small talk that must take place between buyer and seller in such transactions, so I'm fairly happy with my not-inept answer.)

"You're married, aren't you?" this guy says.

"Yes."

In a lower voice, he says, "You know what the difference between sex and snow is, don't you?" He's from the deep south, and there's a residual gentility in the way he has preluded this dirty joke with a qualifying question about my marital status, and with the way he's nearly whispering the joke to me now.

"No, what?" I say.

"You never know how many inches you're gonna get, or how long it's gonna last." At this, he explodes in laughter, drowning out my fake-laughter almost completely. "Now, Tony, you ain't a man if you don't think that's funny!" he says.

God, I hate jokes. Plus, doesn't the joke only make sense if you're a woman?

There's a feature on the nightly news about George W. Bush's wife, and we kind of half-watch it while we putter around the house doing other things.

"What's a strong woman?" Amy asks after a few minutes. We're now sitting down on the couch, snuggling, relaxing.

"Um, you tell me."

"Well, they're calling her a strong woman, and I hear this term a lot, and I don't know what it's supposed to mean. What makes a woman quote unquote 'strong?'"

"Um,"I say.

"Is it that she's defiant? Or headstrong? Or opinionated? Or bitchy? Or powerful? I don't get it."

"It does seem like kind of a patronizing term," I agree. "You don't hear people referring to George W. Bush as a 'strong man.'"

"Exactly. So basically when a woman is 'strong,' they just mean she's strong, for a woman."

I nod my head. I'm having two daughters; I have two daughters. I'm getting the picture.

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