Lovelihood

In between bouts of throwing up and being pitifully sick, The Boy mustered up just enough energy to excavate a candy colored dinosaur (a pachicephalosaurus, according to the package), one of the super special rainy-day treats we have secreted away in a drawer so high even I need elevational assistance to retrieve items out of it. The plastic chisel is fine and dandy, but what sealed the deal was the little rubber hammer I let him use. I've got to remember this the next time I've got favors to hand out. A package of plaster of Paris and a trove of otherwise-throwaway toys might just go a long way.

A little more stitching. Lots of little curves to take slowly.

We found ourselves inside the mall yesterday in search of an operational change machine to supply us with gumball money. That didn't happen, but as I lurched past a storefront trying to keep hold of a past-her-naptime Bear, I spied a cousin to the old pinhead I left behind in Houston. And I thought I'd give it another go with the supplied sprout sac before abandoning it for another improvised pin cushion.

Having our deck furniture set up means that we now have a proper workspace available for projects that could easily get out of hand with a grabby, water-obsessed toddler around. The seashells picked up on our ferry excursion last week had been sitting forgotten in Boy's pack until I dumped out its contents into a water-filled bucket handed over with a spent toothbrush and instructions to clean, clean, clean. "Scrub" and "toothbrush" evidently don't have nearly the same chilling effect when applied to even your dingiest clamshell fragment.

I don't know how we, as geeky parents, let it get to this late stage without screening Star Wars for The Boy. But enough of his classmates have been spreading the good word on sci-fi/superhero super-awesomeness that he's already on a first name basis with characters like Yoda and C-3PO and Iron Man and Optimus Prime. So ignoring the morning dishes, I popped in Episode IV (not ready to expose him to the likes of Jar Jar Binks just yet, thank you very much) and sat down to some needlework and the Boy's clarifying questions, mostly involving the goodness or badness of the characters. And what did the hairy one just say? And what is a Jedi? And what kind of a thing is Jabba? And those guys are just pretending to be bad, right? I hadn't remembered it being such a long movie.

Painted the inside of a mason jar. Because I've apparently run out of things to do with them. It didin't quite have the effect I wanted, though. More opaque than I'd like. Maybe I'll take some sandpaper and rough it up a bit. Or maybe I'll just start over with different paint.

With the days more or less pleasant, though not entirely summer-like, I've been throwing open the french doors and letting the kids wander in and out. Bear, the picture of toddler independence, lets me strap on her shoes before she heads out and up the hill to lusher parts of our modest, in-city yard, where she pokes through the ivy and plucks out longer strands of grass and stashes away balls for future use and takes on her brother's mission to overturn all the little stones in search of creepy crawlies. My favorite thing about the new telephoto lens: being able to hang back and let her do all that on her own.