EB and I have been enjoying Auguste Racinet's Complete History of Costume, reissued by Taschen a few years ago. It's not all hoop skirts and silk fans, mind you; much of the book is devoted to civilizations ancient or exotic or both (heavily orientalized, of course, as imagined in nineteenth-century Paris). We lug the enormous thing from room to room over the course of the day, and I've already fielded questions about hookahs, harems, loincloths, bound feet, nose rings, and of course, hunting and warfare, as weaponry and armor figure prominently in the book.
A's mom is here for the month and this has allowed us to see what a trilingual three-year-old really sounds like. EB switches effortlessly between English and Polish, translating for me without anyone asking, after just a week of renewed exposure, and while her Russian will probably get a bit rusty in the coming weeks without Lena, once school begins, she'll have all three vocabularies ready at any moment, I imagine. I am astounded, and a bit sad that I did not have a chance to master at least one more language while my own little brain was so ripe.
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