Anything else you want to know will have to wait for extreme pain and...

If that is a required ingredient I hope we all wait forever.

They are so madly in sibling love it's just... it kills you ded, being in its presence. It'll be very interesting, when Emmett is a bit older, to ask him about his only childhood and his dread of her and how her arrival broke him wide open. For her, he'll have always been there, part of the landscape of her family and her heart; he'll have a before and after that he can remember and maybe even talk about.

Requisite adorkably cute story: Hec recently played Harry Belafonte's "Matilda", which various adults have been singing snippets of to her for ages, for Emmett.

Emmett was completely, earnestly and utterly horrified. She's a terrible role model! She's a thief! She takes all his money and runs away to Venezuela! Matilda must never, never hear that song!

Emmett and Matilda are such adorable siblings!

Matilda looks calmly at home in that second picture. "This is my Emmett."

"He is a safe place."

And Emmett's all "This is my Matilda. You don't have a Matilda. I do."

And Emmett's all "This is my Matilda. You don't have a Matilda. I do."

Yes, he is. I was quite genuinely surprised for him to tell me that she was better than a finger monkey.

Emmett and Matilda

They love each other.

Soooo adorable!!!

He'll let you bask, won't he, Hec? But not borrow. That's how he looks. I mean, you can play with her, but you can't borrow her.

Photos of Emmett and Matilda are wonderful!

I've read days worth and can't remember specifics, so I offer ~ma and yays and glitter to all.

I did note to myself that I wanted to chime in with this:

I think there have been some weird anecdotes where flatlining patients have described events in a surgery theatre that they couldn't have observed from their prone (and at the time, DEAD) position,

My stepfather said this happened to him when he flatlined during open-heart surgery. After he woke, he asked the surgeon who was the other guy in the operating room who died on the table. Turned out it was him. Apparently he told the surgeon exactly what he'd said while it was happening, and freaked the doctor right out. My stepfather was a singularly unimaginative man, and was surprised when I told him that other people had reported similar things. I don't have any idea what did happen, but I don't think he was lying. I might think that he just came out of anesthesia a little, except that he was clinically dead at the time. I dunno. Things like this fuck with my worldview. And that story about the blue-jean girl gave me creeps. I get creeps easily. I'd really like to think that every time I felt "haunted" it was just a subsonic hum from something.

Are alligators only in the western hemisphere?

Interestingly, no. There are Chinese alligators too. But not African ones.