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Journal Key:

Green = Steve | George = navy | Janet = Purple | Evelyn = Black

 

10/2/08 (Thursday)

I have been having what I admit are probably absolutely insane thoughts about starting an allowance. I'm picturing it involving quarters, which could be used in machines. I may be starting to come down off of that idea, though.

I was thinking that Cara could be taught, for instance, to set the table. This evening, I asked her to get forks for everyone. She's tall enough to see into the silverware drawer, and she can open it, so she got out forks and put them in the right places. After dinner, she and I ended up in the kitchen again. I showed her how to put silverware into the dishwasher, and she did all the rest of it. Then she tried a plate, too. It's very cool that she can now actually perform useful tasks.

Somehow or other, Cara noticed our old video game console and of course she wanted to play Donkey Kong. Before bath time, Steve got it out for her. They played for a while, the monkeys throwing barrels, collecting bananas, and jumping around. "I want them to get candy!" Cara announced. Steve was mystified. "And she gives them strawberries!" Still mystified. Then the light dawned. There is a place they can go to see a girl monkey names Candy. (Kandy Kong?) We found her. She blows kisses to the other monkeys, in the form of lipsticked lips floating over to them. Those could, possibly, be misinterpreted as strawberries.

In the bath, we played with the daddy, the little girl, and the boat. Belle also came. When little girls shout "Belle," Belle comes, Cara explained to me when I got back from getting Belle and found the little Playmobil girl calling for her. In a little while, Belle was calling for her mommy. I asked her who her mommy was. She actually "got up in my face" for the next part. "My mommy wears pink dresses, and I wear yellow dresses, and I have lots of yellow dresses in my yellow castle, and I like the prince, but he lives in a house, but I don't like the beast!" So there.

There was, however, a bathing disaster. The new tub has, of course, a drain on the wall for excess water, and Cara's baths always lap up against it. When it was time to get the toys out of the bath, we could only find one of the diving girl's flippers! The only explanation is that it must have floated up into the plumbing. We are very sad.

10/3/08 (Friday)

It's Friday and we're tired. We're all tired. We're glad it's Friday.

In the car, Cara requested Johnny Cash. Alas, he was in the house. It's a good idea, though; I may be ready to get him out again. We've been listening to the Paradio Star a lot, and finding some variety while still making the little girl happy would be a good thing. She also requested the 123s, and we brought the DVD into the house and used it as a motivator to get her to clean up. It sort of worked. It was really great to see some of the videos again, and Cara happened to request my favorite one.

Bath time was fun. We used bath colors, possibly for the first time in the new white tub. The green of the water was astonishing and lovely. We got out the big bucket of toys, the old rubber ducks and things. George the Bath Toy was in there, too. He enjoyed the bath very much. It was nice to see him.

After the bath, Cara gleefully got into her new pajamas, which I bought weeks ago and unveiled last night. They're cuddly and warm and have hippos in pajamas on them. Cara noticed that some of the 'potamuses have pink teddy bears. She's thrilled. Once in her pajamas, she decided she wanted "night toast." We told her she could have it if she just had one book, and it worked! It all worked out OK, and now it's over (I hope).

10/4/08 (Saturday)

We had such a busy morning this morning, because we all slept very late, until around 8 in the morning. Then we had to get up and get ourselves ready: Mommy and Cara got dressed and rushed out to gymnastics, and I went off for a follow-up visit to the doctor. When I returned we all had to hurry up and get ready to go down to Aunt Claire's house!

We had a nice time because we and some other friends all went out to pick apples at a local orchard (as we did last year). Casie got to ride in the car with us, which was a nice treat for us all. Cara picked many apples, with and without help. Evie had the good idea to bring our red wagon. It hasn't gotten a lot of use lately, but it was very useful for carrying around little girls, apples, coats, our camera, and Puma.

Afterward we had a nice extended visit to Claire's house. Cara explored upstairs and down, finding a surprising number of toys to play with: Casie's collection of large rubber whales, for instance, or the tiny magnetic pigs stuck to lighting fixtures in the bathroom. We watched the They Might Be Giants DVD and all of the grown-ups enjoyed it at least as much as Cara. We also got to watch a VHS version of My Neighbor Totoro, which was nice.

We all had a long day, though, and Cara had us play Catch the Girl outside a little, too, so we were all quite tuckered out by the early evening. We packed ourselves up and headed home, where a hungry Cara ate an astonishing entire can of numbers and letters! We had some Curious George, who is very much in the ascendent these days, and now Cara is having a nice bath. Mommy is now the chosen bath provider, and I get to read.

10/5/08 (Sunday)

Yesterday, at Aunt Claire's house, Cara was introduced to Babybel cheeses, which come encased in wax. Casie likes to eat the cheese and play with the wax; Cara got a piece, and it amused her for the entire ride to the orchard. Back at their house, Cara ate at least two of the cheeses herself, and she had a nice ball of wax to play with. Today, I used the idea of getting some cheese as motivation to get Cara to come with me to the supermarket. It was easy and it worked! We did the groceries, and Cara walked instead of riding in the cart, and she carried her cheese through the store and the parking lot and all the way home.

Then she ate one. And then she had some wax. Then she asked me to make a girl out of wax. I said I wasn't sure I knew how. "Casie knows how," Cara told me. I asked whether Casie had made one yesterday. No, she hadn't. I suspected as much. Finally, I gave it a shot. I made a cone, for a princess dress, and then I managed to give it arms and sort of turned the top part into a knob for a head. It looks like a cone of wax, basically, especially since Cara shushed its arms down. It is much beloved. So are the next three I had to make. At the end of the day Daddy tried one, but it was rejected. Cara needed a genuine cone, right from the source. She's got them all set up on her dresser, in front of the tiny pumpkin we bought her yesterday. They look vaguely seasonal, being of yellow wax. They also sort of look like little cones of ear wax.

Yesterday, also, we were walking outside and talking about landscaping. I said that we should take out the rocks from the beds in front of the house. Steve asked what we would do with them. "Make girls!!!!" cried Cara.

For the first time in a while, we had nap time. Cara made her lunch last a good long time (it involved the production of two wax girls), so I got her down around one. The nap involved singing, talking, at least two trips to the potty, some periods of quiet, but no actual sleeping. It was over two hours long, though, which was good. When I went in to let her up, Cara went over to her basket of toys and told me, "This guy was noisy," gesturing to a toy which does, in fact, make noise. Why was he noisy, I asked. "Because I was shaking him." Oh.

Cara got to spend the evening at PJ's house being baby-sat. She brought her baby doll over in her stroller; Cara lifted the stroller over each crack in the sidewalk. It was a nice evening. They went around the block; Cara rode a bike all the way, but she had trouble getting up the steeper parts. I believe there was some retrograde progress involved. They also did some drawing. Em expended her repertoire to include a prince for each princess she drew.

10/6/08 (Monday)

I have a vague recollection of Ev and Cara being up in the night, and Evie warned me this morning that one of us was staying home today. It was me! Cara has picked up a fever from daycare and was hot and mostly immobile for the whole day. She was not very unhappy or crabby, just quiet and inactive. We watched a lot of television, and I played some video games on my Super Nintendo, expanding my repertoire of acceptable games to include one more (Super Marioworld). Cara ate some toast eventually, but even with her toys on the couch next to her she didn't have the spirit to play with them. We actually watched so much Curious George that Cara requested periodic breaks from it, and I did read one or two books. We also looked at some of her activity books; she wasn't up for mazes but was willing to look at matching games and silly pictures. She was also a spectator to some coloring.

Mommy came home and we had a quiet evening, once I'd run out to the grocery store to get Jell-o. In the late evening she saw a George episode with hot cocoa, so she requested it for herself. Over a period of maybe half an hour or more, she managed to slowly sip about one fifth of the mug. She was very pitiful today and I feel for her. Tomorrow Evie will take over daycare services, and we'll see if the report of the day is more action packed.

10/7/08 (Tuesday)

Cara was much better today, of course. I didn't give her any medicine, and she stayed at sort-of-almost normal all day. She was a lot more active, though we did still spend some time just cuddling. In fact, though I had showered and dressed before she was up, Cara asked me nicely to change back into my "cuddly pants," my grey pajamas. I did, even though I cherish any weekday when I can wear jeans. Cara was still a little bit delicate today; she had two screaming fits. One was because, after her nap, I changed back into jeans. Hysteria. Real tears. A little while later, while Cara was doing her Cinderella puzzle, I moved an old card with pictures of Disney princesses on it out of her way. Hysteria. Real tears, rolling down and falling onto her shirt. It took me a while to figure out why it was happening.

It was those two incidents, along with clocking her temperature around 99, that helped me to decide to beg my mother-in-law to please come up and stay with the little girl tomorrow. I think maybe I could have sent her, but I'm pretty sure she'd have had a rotten day. I feel a lot better knowing she'll be home, and I know she'll be thrilled to have her grandmom to herself.

We did have a really nice day, though. Cara wanted to play computer games, and she directed me towards a Backyardigans Halloween one. You get to pick a scene, place the characters, give them costumes, and then accessorize. We put all five, one at a time, and they all dressed up as the Swamp Thing. "Swamp hat!" Cara would cry, then, "Swamp shirt!" and finally, "Swamp pants!" Each also got a black cat, a giant bowl of candy, and a candy basket. When we had done this all to Uniqua, I thought maybe we were done. Then I had to find room for the other four. Cara wanted to print it out, and it gave us the option of either printing in color or turning it into a coloring page, which I thought was pretty cool.

I'm pretty sure I've never seen Cara do as much sustained coloring as she did on that Halloween picture. She colored in the Backyardigans' costumes, making each a different green. Then she made the cats pink, each a different shade. She colored the candy bowls all the same blue. She also started coloring in the letters, where it says, "Boo! We scared you!" We colored in parallel; it kept her happy that I was also involved.

In one of her activity books, earlier, we had been coloring a picture of two bugs in a mushroom house or something. Cara asked me about the letters on the welcome mat, and then she took her markers and traced them all in different colors. It was beautiful; I was very proud! I encouraged her to keep coloring, trying green for the grass. I stepped away, and I heard a cry. She had colored over all of the letters.

Having done our Halloween picture, we had to go look for Cara's candy basket, which is of course a plush Pooh head. I did find it, but somehow our search led us to the office, where we came upon the suncatcher kits I'd taken out yesterday. Cara wanted to do one, so we got one out. A long, long time ago, when Steve and I lived in our apartment, I had done a lot of these; I have about a dozen. When I opened the new one today, I remembered something. I looked in a cabinet, and I got out my old paper cups of extra crystals, in eight or nine different colors! I saved them and kept them and brought them along when we moved, because some day they'd be important again. It was really nice that today was that day, that I got to share this fun thing with my daughter.

Of course, soon she got bored and ran off to watch TV, but she was involved. This one is her suncatcher.

There's an episode of Curious George that mentions pizza. I'm pretty sure that's why Cara decided she wanted pizza for lunch. I said we hadn't any, and she said, "No, from a guy!" I waited a while and brought up lunch, but she still wanted pizza. She hadn't really eaten in over 24 hours, so I called and placed an order. Cara ate most of a slice for lunch, most of a cold slice around five, and most of another cold slice later. She's bouncing back.

Cara's been playing with the sock monkeys lately, and this afternoon she decided they needed a walk. She got out their stroller and she let me help her change into real clothes (finally). Off we went. I suggested that we walk down the block a little way, to see the house that has a lot of Halloween decorations. It's a longer walk, I think, than I've ever taken Cara for and not carried her. She did it, though. I carried the stroller for more than half of it, but she walked. It was great just to be outside.

This evening she continued to teeter-totter, being fine in some ways and not quite fine in others. Culinarily, it was a thrilling night. Cara had been surprised earlier when I hadn't saved the final third of her pizza from lunch, so I kept around the final third of her second piece. I served her some carrots and stuffing for dinner, but she didn't even want to come see what I'd made. I ate her stuffing. After dinner, when Cara showed up, this was upsetting. We gave her new stuffing. She ate some carrots. Then, I believe, she went back to her third of a piece of pizza.

10/8/08 (Wednesday)

Of course, Cara had a lovely day with her grandma! She was very much herself, I believe, and she really enjoyed having her grandma around. They played with all sorts of things; I noted that the dollhouse is now far tidier than it's been in weeks!

Well, there I was at 3:30 with a few hours in front of me and a little girl who must have some cabin fever by now. I asked her whether she wanted to go somewhere, perhaps the park. Immediately, she replied, "I want to go to . . . Chuckie Cheese!" She sounded thrilled. I was astonished, I admit, though in retrospect it seems perfectly logical. I just couldn't picture us spending the entire afternoon there.

In a few minutes I had made a counteroffer of the mall, and it had been accepted. There was some confusion as to which mall we would go to. Woodbridge is better for us to hang out in, but the Care Bear machines are in Menlo Park. So we went to both. I got out three quarters and gave them to Cara, who held them clutched tightly in her hand the whole way there.

At Menlo Park, we found our machine and put in the quarters. Out popped a pink bear, which somehow disappointed Cara. I thought that it must be identical to the one we had, but it turned out not to be. I'm not really sure why she's not excited about it. I had brought the Big Three and their bears along, and I had added Snow White, figuring she could also have a bear. It really worked out nicely.

It was a really, really gorgeous day. As we were walking through the parking lot, I remarked on this. "Yep," said Cara, "it's a beautiful day to go to the mall!"

We headed to Woodbridge, where we played on the Reatrix pad and sampled pretzels in the cooking store. Cara talked me into getting a bear-shaped cookie cutter that was on clearance. We played in the Playmobil Store until it was about time for Daddy to meet us, and then we went to where he'd be coming in. He called, and he told us he was stuck in traffic! The only thing was for us to go and have dinner ourselves.

In Friendly's, there were about four other tables full, all of them being occupied by parent-child pairs. I was quite amused. Cara and I had to sit next to each other. We were almost done eating when Steve called; he was almost there. I ordered his dinner and then our ice cream, and then there he was! We all finished together and went back to the Playmobil Store to show Daddy the circus, the new toy line that's available for play. I don't feel any inclination to buy it, but it's fun to play with!

I was picked as the parent to drive Cara home. As we left the mall, I explained to Cara that we were going to take Route 1 to get home, but Mommy was going to go a different way. "She's gonna take Route Two!" Cara replied.

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