All The Babies Are Asleep

(And then they woke up – both of them, simultaneously, and ruined my blogging break, and this was Wednesday when I started and now it’s Friday, but I’m going to finish as if it were still Wednesday, because I don’t want to waste my lovely prose with all of the EMPHATIC CAPITAL LETTERS that I was apparently feeling it necessary to use on Wednesday).

Not without some struggles, though.  Margaret DID NOT WANT TO TAKE A NAP, THANK YOU, and then came out of her room holding her ear and crying, so I took her to the doctor, they said her ears were beautiful, and she fell asleep in the car on the way home.

Humph.

So she’s in her room sleeping it off for another 15 minutes, and Ellie has nodded off as well, and I have two hands for blogging.  Whee.

And Margaret at least SHOULD be tired, because for my first day of completely solo parenting of these two little people, we did LOTS OF THINGS.  Margaret started out making bold and bizarre fashion choices.

This effect, should you wish to try it at home, is achieved by putting your arm (in a sleeve) through the neck of your shirt from the bottom.  It doesn’t look comfortable (or for those of us past puberty and of the female persuasion, appropriate for public wear), but it’s certainly something.

Then we went to Forest Park and fed possibly the most frightening ducks that I have ever met.

Well, they weren’t frightening when they were in the water.

But you see the piece of bread just in front of the railing in this picture?  Yeah, Margaret’s not the best at getting distance on her bread throwing, and there was a bit of a wind, and so it wasn’t getting to the ducks.

Ducks get miffy about things like that.

So one of them flew up onto the bridge, and flapped about very aggressively.  I didn’t like it.  And I couldn’t figure out whether to protect the helpless infant sitting on the ground strapped into her carseat like a bear tied to a stake* or the reckless toddler who was happily exclaiming “ducks!” and holding bread out to him in her hand.

Life is full of difficult decisions.

And then we came home, and Margaret decided to take 20 minutes to crawl up the back steps on her knees.  It might be some bizarre Lenten penance, but I don’t think that she a)knows that it’s Lent or b) is into doing things that she doesn’t enjoy.

And then she came inside, took her shirt off, and stuck stickers on her nose until naptime.

Perhaps we have been reading her too much Dr. Seuss, particularly The Sneetches.  Perhaps she’s not old enough to get the message of that story, and has become instead fixated on having stars on thars.

So that was Wednesday.

Except that Leo finished the trial that has been keeping him at work at all hours of the day and night for the past month, and to celebrate, we went out to dinner.  So here’s Ellie’s first dinner out.



Margaret also enjoyed herself, despite her short nap.

*That is very Shakespearean, by the way.  Not that you’d get much sport from baby-baiting.  They don’t really fight back so much as look small and pitiful.  I imagine.