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Journal Key:

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

6/18/09 (Thursday)

For reasons that have become obscure, Cara's drinking cup that is shiny and has a picture of Belle on it (from Beauty and the Beast) ended up in the upstairs bathroom. In the way of these things, it stayed up there for quite a few days. Cara decided last night, as one of her many stalling procedures before finally getting into bed for good, that she had had enough of the Belle cup being upstairs, and that I should take it downstairs when I left her. I said something on the order of "Yeah, whatever," and put the cup back in the bathroom (fully intending to bring it downstairs, but not having the inclination to do it just then). I then went down the hall to talk to Evie. After a few minutes I turned to look down the hall, and there was the Belle cup, sitting on the floor at the top of the stairs. The child has taken to doing this: finding something in her room or thereabouts that does not belong there, and silently placing it at the top of the stairs to tacitly remind us of our parental duty to put things back in their place.

Today PJ and Casey were back at Susan's, after having been out sick a couple of days. It is also the night of eighth grade graduation at Evie's school, so I left work early to pick Cara up at Susan's. Cara had built a big tower out of some interesting-looking plastic building materials, which she excitedly showed me. Then she kindly said, "PJ, I don't mind if you knock it over, because I'm leaving." PJ took the hint right away and dismantled it, and there were no hard feelings. Susan showed me a nice picture Cara had done of a caterpillar--as usual, it also featured a self portrait. Susan was very impressed, because in order to show that the tiny self-portrait was running away, Cara only drew half of herself right at the edge, running right off the page. I think she picked up this idea from a book we read last night: she had pointed out to me at the time we were reading it a picture where a pig is running away, and only his bottom half is visible on the page.

Evie had suggested we go to the library this afternoon to return some books. However, neither Cara nor I had the inclination to perform this simple chore once we'd arrived at home (I hadn't thought far enough ahead to pick up the books before I left for work in the morning). Cara was also not interested in going out to dinner, so we stayed at home and watched TV. These days, that usually means watching Monsters Inc. Since Cara didn't immediately bring it up, I decided to just turn on the television. I'm not sure how, but we ended up watching most of a cooking show on the Food Network. Cara said she wanted to see cooking, and so we did. We watched with identical interest as a middle-aged woman put together some fresh salmon, soup, and mozzarella-and-tomato sandwiches for a group of people who had apparently helped to build her a barn. We were both bored with the follow-up show, however, so now we're back to Noggin.

6/19/09 (Friday)

At the library today, I signed Cara up for their summer reading program. We'll record the library books she reads, and, after she's read twelve, she gets a medal. For every book after twelve, we get a raffle ticket. I'm not sure what the raffle is for. We got out ten books today, so we're well on our way. This, as well as my needing YA fiction for the summer, is a great motivator to go back to the library more often.

For family fun night, after I painted Cara's nails, we went out to a fair in North Brunswick. Lina and Sarah went on Wednesday and got their picture taken with sea lions, so that was the first thing we went and did. One has its head on Steve's shoulder, and another has its head on my head. We had hot dogs for dinner, and then we saw a bit of a tiger show, too! Cara sat on Steve's shoulders and got to see a tiger stand up and walk backwards. What the little girl really wanted to do, though, was to go on the Ferris wheel. We walked past all of the other rides, we walked past the pony rides and camel rides and elephant rides, and we paid a ludicrous amount of money to get the three of us into a big gondola.

After that, I had just enough money left to get us a bag of cotton candy, which Cara had never tried before. I'm pretty sure I haven't had any since before she was born. We went back to the sea lions and sat in the bleachers to wait for the show. We could see them swimming around and we could watch people getting their pictures taken with them, too. We started at the bottom level and slowly moved up and up until we were at the very top, which of course made me awfully nervous and I insisted on sitting with my arm behind Cara the whole time. We could see bands performing live music from there, so it wasn't bad to wait.

The sea lion show was fabulous. Three of them came out and balanced balls, leaped in the air, clapped, danced, and caught rings. They threw frisbees. They did magic by making bits of fish disappear. One of them played hide and seek by staying right behind the trainer so that she couldn't find her. (Casey did that to me just the other week.) Cara loved it. She jumped up and down and squealed with glee and waved and applauded through the whole thing. Seeing her enjoy it made the whole thing twice as fun.

When the show was over, it was time to go home. It was past bedtime. We were cold. We were out of money. (I brought only a limited amount.) Cara was ready to get her picture taken with the sea lions again. She was also ready to be carried back to the car. We got home and washed the sugar off and read some library books and now Cara and Puma are off to dreamland.

6/20/09 (Saturday)

This week, Cara was the only kid at Susan's who didn't get sick. Last night, she woke up wet around one in the morning, feverish. I medicated her, changed the sheets, and hoped for more rest. She was up a little after six. It was a nice staying-home sick day. We cuddled and watched movies, and we also played some games. We played the Curious George beach game, but Cara forgot the part where you don't get to actually take the card you draw unless you see the object under a window. She just took all the cards. We eventually convinced her to go back to the real rules. We also opened up Twister, which Cara got for her birthday. Cara and I played with it, which was fun. The challenge is that she doesn't know right from left yet.

6/21/09 (Sunday)

For Father's Day today, Mommy made french toast for breakfast. Cara decided she did not like french toast and ate many pieces of regular toast in succession instead. The girls put my card together and Cara brought it to me--it was a very nice card, and she had drawn a nice big picture of herself holding Puma on a leash on the inside.

Cara was quite taken with the holiday and assigned herself the task of making many crafts projects in celebration. She carefully drew a family portrait consisting only of our clothes--a nice shirt and slacks for me, and dresses for Cara and Evie--standing empty in a line. Then she thoroughly taped it to the inside of her door. We had a nice lunch and Evie went out food shopping; I got very sleepy and basically took a nap. Cara, understandably bored, found a back-pack full of art supplies and dumped it out. Once I'd set her up with some of the watercolor paints she found, she made two watercolor paintings. (At her insistence, I woke up enough to paint a little bird on one picture, to which she supplied the beak.)

Then she took out a pile of construction paper and told me she was going to make something special for me, because it was Father's Day. The resulting project was a girl in a dress made entirely out of cut-out and taped-together pieces of construction paper. I said it was very nice and made the appropriate responses. Having seen the way she is able to cut paper lately, I didn't see this project as all that out of the ordinary for Cara. But perhaps I should have seen it, with a father's pride, as more of an accomplishment. Mommy at least was very impressed.

The child was still ill today, running a fever and coughing once in a while. She didn't really act sick, except perhaps in a certain heightened lack of attention span. In the afternoon she was wandering outside, losing interest and wandering back in, deciding to watch a movie and then deciding she was tired of the movie, wanting to play computer games with me and then wandering off somewhere else.

Evie is on summer break now, and Cara was not going to go to Susan's tomorrow anyway, so they will have another day in which to rest and recuperate.

6/22/09 (Monday)

Cara and I had a nice "staying-home day" today. She was a little warm in the morning, so we really didn't go anywhere. Like yesterday, I gave her medicine in the morning and then she didn't need any for the rest of the day. We took it easy, though, and watched way more tv than was good for us. We pulled out Tinkerbell again, and that inspired me to put on Peter Pan. It was pretty scary, but Cara made it through. She claims that she liked it.

We also played the Curious George game, first by ourselves and then with Puma. Cara and I did have to help Puma a lot, but she managed to win one round. Cara and Puma, by the way, are twins. Because they're both girls. I did manage to do some cleaning, which the house sorely needed, and Cara helped. She also helped me make corn bread for dinner. Then she ate corn bread for dinner.

6/23/09 (Tuesday)

Today was my first day bringing Cara to Susan's, and we relaxed a little in the morning. Puma was very excited. She jumped around a lot. Cara explained that Puma was "chasing meat." I asked whether that meant animals. No. Meat. Meat with legs.

Ron had a procedure today, and things ran late. Around four, I got into Em's car and headed to Susan's to get all three kids. Just when I was about to leave, Susan called to tell me Cara had woken up feverish from her nap. It was a good thing I was on my way! We parked over there and walked across the street holding hands; we saw a bunny and a deer. We all had something to drink and we watched some Curious George, since I wanted to take things slow. Everyone got distracted and we played downstairs for a while, building things with both of our sets of blocks.

Casey noticed the bag of cotton candy we have left from Friday.

Casey: What's that?

Me: Cotton candy.

Casey: For the gerbils?

Me: . . . . yes.

After they went home, we played some Curious George games on the computer. One involved using a series of ramps to get a meatball into some spaghetti. That was how Cara decided that she wanted spaghetti for dinner. I'd been planning on sandwiches, but I was open to change. Now we have leftover pasta for lunch tomorrow!

6/24/09 (Wednesday)

Cara had a tough time sleeping last night. Steve and I went into her room a couple of times because we heard her making noises, but she was coughing a lot and talking a little in her sleep. We had set up the humidifier, but my theory was that the coughing was exacerbated by the fact that her fan was on and was blowing from the foot of her bed, right into her little respiratory passages and drying them out. She had to have the fan on, because she was wearing her very heaviest pajamas and could not be talked out of them. I do feel that I helped the situation by building a little wall of blankets across the foot of her bed, to block the breeze. She did, however, sleep until a normal time today, unlike any other day this week. This, of course reminds me that she woke up at ungodly early hours during the entirety of the last week I had off, spring break. My theory on that is that the shower I take at 5:20 in the morning is the white noise she's used to, and that without it, she wakes up. Last night, the fan replaced the shower. (None of this takes into account her sleeping until normal times on the weekends.)

She stayed home with me today, but we had no repeat fever. She does have a nasty (but productive!) cough. For a treat, Grandpapa came up for lunch. We went to our local ribs place, which we hadn't been to in months. It made me a little nervous because I recalled that they do not serve a corn dog. I tried talking up macaroni and cheese, which I know Cara's had from there. Naturally, Cara remembered that they serve mini corn dogs. So, it was okay. Cara got her almost-daily dose of hot dog. (sigh) She talked to Grandpapa about how great corn dogs are. He was not convinced. He tried pointing out to her that she is only four. I'm not sure she saw the connection. Cara spent much of the meal snuggling up to Grandpapa, which made it somewhat difficult for him to eat.

We had given him his Father's Day card and gift, and we let him choose the restaurant. Cara was adamant about making sure he got the appropriate treatment. On the way home, she had a great idea about something we could do because it was Father's Day: we could play the Curious George game! We did. Even Puma played. Halfway through, Cara decided that she'd played long enough and was ready to do something else, so we cleaned up and Grandpapa headed home.

When we got our living room furniture, I was delighted that the couches were so easy to move. They slide very nicely on the hard floors. Cara has now discovered that she can move them herself.

It was a great challenge to talk Cara out of wearing her heavy pajamas tonight. I explained about the fan. I explained the nature of compromise. I reminded her that she'd changed into shortie pajamas this morning because the heavy ones were too hot to play in. This all went on for a while. Finally, we got her in silky long pajama pants and a long-sleeved daytime shirt because we hadn't an acceptable pajama shirt. Her fan is not on. I think she'll sleep better, but I bet she gets up earlier!

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