Early Autumn in New York with Roxie

It was mid-September when we reached New York--weather as unpredictable as Portland.  But not our Roxie: darling as on Skype with her newly cut long hair-- and our last realtime encounter in December.  And more verbal, "Look, Daddy, Grandma made me a shrug!" 

She shared her preferences with us.   Lunch in Tarrytown required the companion doll, one of those awful pink princess objects all the rage with contemporary little girls on both coasts and in between.  The Disney triumph.

Pink shoes too.  Roxie does include purple in her color range.   As the 1970s Mom who hyper-consciously did not dress my daughter and son in "those colors," even as babies, all the pinkness makes me sad.  Is this what is meant by "be careful what you wish for"?  Or proof once again that advertising and commerce rule in America and tiny social movements like the one by women change some things but resist who controls how clothes designers regard women and girls.

Along with our own dinner-for-the-flight, we'd brought along Ron's rooftop "portrait tomato" the one that elicited a wonderful range of blog commenters recently.  As we were describing it to her parents, Roxie declared, "I love tomatoes!" and transformed it into an ordinary tomato.

Here's the consequence of  her vegetable enthusiasm.  Because we saw a similar tomato from another home garden in Portland (New Seasons would never put one like this on their shelves), I speculate it is a Northwest phenomenon.  Have you spotted them elsewhere outside the PDX "keeping it weird" area?

Roxie also is a careful observer of the natural world.  She called our attention to  the glorious sunsets over the Hudson River from their balcony. Hard to resist taking photos.  At 4.5 years our New York granddaughter has already learned to do the same from her mother whose own mother was an accomplished photographer.