Bobot!

Saturday and Sunday composed One of Those Weekends, with so much bad behavior, ridiculousness, crying, and fighting that to write even the shortest summary would be, like, a total bummer.

So instead of that, I’ll comment on one of the several nice things that happened at the end of the weekend: Genevieve getting very excited by a little wind-up robot toy that she likes to watch stagger noisily across the playroom table. She requests him by name – “Vivi wan wine-up bobot” and even caressing its little square head as it walks. Little did I know, when a coworker gave me the toy years ago (as a going-away present?), that one of my little girls would love it so much…

Bobot!
Bobot!

E-Day Minus 1

I rode over to the playground this afternoon to meet the girls and let Shannon head out on her run. The weather was beautiful – high 60s, a slight breeze, clear golden light. The playground was buzzing with at least twenty kids – a cluster of tween girls talking by the swings, some rambunctious boys climbing over things that weren’t meant to climbed, a lot of elementary-age kids going up and down the slides. Gigantic flights of geese trailed overhead every few minutes – one had at least a hundred birds in it.

The happy activity in the beautiful setting seemed like a fitting end to what had been a hellacious day, and an almost cinematic start to what I hope will be a wonderful 36 hours.

Date-En

Julia and Genevieve are presently running around the upstairs, from one room to the other, playing the “comb game” (1. Grab the comb or brush from the extra bathroom. 2. Run back and forth with it, yelling, “I don’t wanna brush my hair!”) and enjoying being naked – or as Vivi adorably says, “Date-en.” Ask her, “Vivi, do you want to put on your pajamas?” and she’ll yell delightedly, “No, Date-en!”

The trick is figuring out how much date-en fun is enough. You want to get in there with a diaper before post-bath usual.

Roman Around

There’s some sort of Rome theme here today. First, on our morning walk, both girls evinced great fear of something they called the “sun god,” which I eventually figured out was some sort of sun-faced decoration on a house along our usual walking route. Needless to say, today’s route did not include a trip past this house. Sol Invictus, indeed.

And now, as I try to write some stuff for a proposal that’s due on Monday, Vivi is doing a world-landmarks puzzle which includes a picture of what she calls the “Non-eeum” – the Roman Colosseum. It’s her favorite picture in the puzzle, the one which she always puts in place first.

90% Treats

Shannon already provided a full rundown of the Halloween festivities (and anxieties), and I’m buzzing from too many Milk Duds (I should have Milk Dudn’t), so I’ll just share this picture of the little witch helping the little ladybug make her way up to another door:

Witch and Ladybug
Witch and Ladybug

Anyone who can guess why Julia is wearing different witch hats gets a prize – all the Almond Joys we have in our house! (Shannon wants to give up the Milk Duds, too, but NEVER!)

Fraidy Tot

Walking through the subdivision last week, Julia was musing aloud about how scary she finds skeletons. I pointed out that we all have skeletons inside us, and we don’t find them scary, and then made the unfounded argument that QED she doesn’t need to be scared of Halloween-decoration skeletons or skulls.

Not only did she accept this bill of goods, she’s passing it on: Shannon told me yesterday that Vivi had been frightened of a skull they saw somewhere, and Julia stepped right in: “You’re not afraid of your own skull, are you, Genevieve? We all have skulls, and they’re not scary!”

No Good Deed

This morning, Julia had a colossal meltdown that, had it been taped and put up on YouTube, would be an excellent argument for abstinence.

The whole ridiculous mess started when I told her that her breakfast included a surprise. She got very excited, literally rubbing her hands together, and then crashed to earth on discovering that the “surprise” was that I had used a cookie cutter to make her toast into the shape of a ghost. Just as Shannon had predicted a few minutes earlier, Julia reacted not by asking for a different piece of toast, but by going ape – screaming, crying, shouting angrily at me, even, finally, throwing her favorite toy across the room, which merited a time out. I felt surprisingly insulted by her screams that “I don’t like this piece of toast!” but on the other hand, I couldn’t resist laughing out loud when she shrieked, “This wasn’t a surprise, it was just a piece of toast!”

(For what it’s worth, Vivi giggled when she found she had her own “ghost toast,” and made hers disappear very quickly.)

The Natural World

Genevieve
On a walk last weekend, Vivi looked up at the sky to try to find the moon. She’s usually disappointed when she can’t find it, but this time, she did spot it, and was so excited that she yelled, “Noom! Noom! Play wif me?” This was hilarious, most of all for Vivi, who almost tipped over from trying to laugh and look straight up in the air.

Julia
While having a little snack at the downtown coffeeshop on Saturday, Julia discovered that she had an Asian beetle on her jacket. Deftly, she got the little bug to climb up on her finger, very proudly showing it to me and to Vivi and then watching with complete fascination as the bug wandered around her hand. She almost fell out of her chair when it suddenly extended its wings: “Look, it grew a tail!” “Actually, honey, those are its wings; it just stuck them out because it might be getting ready to fly away.”

The bug didn’t fly away, and in fact clung to Julia’s hand while we finished our scones, cleaned up our table, and then walked down the block to the library. Though I worried that Julia was going to accidentally squish the bug, she was immensely careful, ferrying the creature all the way to the library (a five-minute walk, when you’re with a preoccupied preschooler and a short-legged toddler) and even showing it carefully to Vivi whenever she wanted to see the “wady-buck.”

As we went up the steps to the library, Julia asked, in her “now announcing something serious” voice, “You know why I like this ladybug so much, Daddy?” I said, “No, honey, I don’t. Is it because it’s so little and cute?” She replied, staring at the bug, “No, I like it because it’s science.” On the way to the children’s area in the libe, I had to steer Julia around a few things that she didn’t notice, since she was holding her ladybugged hand about three inches from her face. Then, just as we sat down at the puzzle table, the ladybug extended her wings and really did fly away. Julia was so disappointed, I thought she was going to cry. But then she got very excited about trying to find the library’s bug puzzle. We never did it, but she’s been talking about “my Asian beetle” ever since.

Addendum
A clear marker of the generation gap is whether you call this

Lady Bug - or Asian Beetle?
Lady Bug - or Asian Beetle?

a “ladybug” or an “Asian beetle.” <fogey voice> When I was a kid, they were ladybugs, and by gum that’s good enough!</fogey voice>

Pumpkin Questions

While playing outside this afternoon, Julia told me, with a silly smile on her face, that “Pumpkin seeds keep coming out of my body and asking if I’m grown up yet.” She’s said this before, but it makes less and less sense every time she says it.

11 Moments

Like I said, the solo-parenting weekend went very well for everyone. A few highlights from the domestic scene:

  1. At the “Enchanted Forest” event at River Bend Nature Center on Saturday afternoon, we went on two hayrides, both pulled by immense Belgian workhorses like the ones my grandpa used to have. The girls were duly impressed by the sheer size of these “neigh-neighs,” but were still willing to go around the front of the team to pet them on their massive noses.
  2. Belgians at Work
    Belgians at Work
  3. In keeping with their penchant for bizarro games, the girls have invented a funny chase/tag game which can only be played in the living room and which is initiated by Vivi walking up behind Julia, tickling her shoulder blades, and saying, “Opie nonnie, opie nonnie, opie nonnie!” Julia laughs and runs away; Vivi laughs and chases, reciting “Opie nonnie” the whole time.
  4. With the weather turning cold and windy on Sunday, we didn’t even bother to try any outdoor activities, but instead headed to the indoor playground at Menards. The girls had a great time running around doing “Halloween Olympics” (“Ghost Race”: run twice around the play structure while moaning like a ghost and waving your arms – “Witchy Slide”: climb up the ladder and go down the slide, cackling), but were mildly traumatized by the possibility of seeing the really horrible-looking life-sized zombie statue that lurks in the store’s seasonal decoration area. I’d accidentally walked with them right past him the last time we went to Menards, and though I avoided that area like, ahem, the undead on this visit, they were still deeply worried about seeing him. Vivi bit her fingers and murmured, “Die! Die!” – “Guy! Guy!” – over and over, which was actually kinda fitting.
  5. The girls knew that Shannon wasn’t home, but they didn’t really understand it. Overall, this was fine: nobody broke down in missing-Mama tears, but there were a few poignant moments. On Sunday night, Vivi thought her messy post-bath hair was so funny that she ran off down the hall, calling out “Mama, dook!” (“Mama, look!”), but then came back, eyes downcast, when she realized that Mama wasn’t in fact anywhere to be found.
  6. The bad weather meant that the girls had to wear their winter hats, which takes their inherent cuteness and turns the dial to 11.
  7. Horizontally-blown ice is an excellent first snow of the season.
  8. Except for certain fantasies about mimes, I never even thought about face painting until it became The Thing at all kid-oriented public events. I know I already blogged it, but the “Enchanted Forest” face painters were pretty good:

    Vivi, Face Painted
    Vivi, Face Painted
  9. Over the weekend, Vivi really started saying, “Yeah do!” when replying to questions. “Vivi, do you want to put your clothes on/have peas with lunch/read this book with me/go for a walk?” “Yeah, do!” She says it so brightly, happy to be able to finally express herself. (Of course, there’s also, “No do!” but that’s another blog post.)
  10. While cleaning up after dinner on Sunday night, I asked Genevieve to take her bib and the napkins down to the laundry room and put them on the washing machine. She chirped, “Oh-hay!” (“Okay!”), grabbed the stack of things, raced off, and came back an appropriately-long moment later. After Shannon got home, we discovered that Vivi had actually – surely by accident – put everything, and a random fork, in the laundry-room garbage can. Oops!
  11. In keeping with their penchant for bizarro games, the girls are now playing “Sea Otter” in the tub. This entails biting a little toy crab by the tail while saying (or trying to say), “I’m a sea otter, eating a crab!” Everyone else must then mishear the sentence and offer all kinds of incorrect guesses – “You’re eating a chair? You’re seating a dad? You’re peeling a dab?” until the otter is laughing so hard that she spits out the lobster and the other otter can pick it up. The fun only ends when someone needs to actually get bathed.
  12. The event on Saturday ended after the sun went down, so the girls had the novel experience of driving in the dark. As we finally turned onto our subdivision’s streets, I mused aloud, “Boy, these streets look really familiar… I wonder where we are?” Immediately, gullibly, Julia piped up from the backseat, “Yeah, they do, Daddy! Maybe you took a wrong street and now we’re in a town that looks just like Northfield!” Thank goodness the resemblance was so strong that a house exactly like ours was just around the corner.

In short, the girls and I had a blast. I fully endorse the idea of Shannon going on a little break at least once a year!

All’s Well

That ends well. The girls’ first two and a half days – five girl-days! – without their mother are over. Everyone is healthy and resting. The mother seems to have enjoyed her trip to the Large Southern Red State. The girls definitely enjoyed their various outings in the Northfield-Dundas-Faribault area. The weekend’s activities will be more thoroughly blogged later.

Halloween Cats

More on this later, but the girls and I went to River Bend Nature Center today for their annual Halloween event. Facepaining was one of the many activities. By coincidence, both girls wound up as kitties. First, Vivi revved up by the experience:

Vivi as Cat
Later, on a dusk hayride, the two of them showing off their worn-outness:
Hayride Cats
Hayride Cats