Playing with Fire

I've been remiss in posting these, perhaps because I am a bad person, but also perhaps because I am a busy person.  Next week is exam week, which I think will help me have more time where I am sitting in a classroom staring at children taking tests and feeling that I ought to do something other than stare at them.

Anyway, I wanted to share pictures from last weekend.  Ellie was being small and sad and gelatinous in her fever (which has cleared up, but has left her a little small and sad and gelatinous).  Margaret, however, was glorying in the fire-pit that her grandfather has built on the back part of his acreage.

Well, not actually in it, thankfully, but around and near it.

She was actually very good around the fire and didn't immolate herself even once.  She felt that the fire-pit, while all very nice in its way, wasn't quite finished to her exacting standards, and so she went and picked up some more rocks (or bits of mortar) and fixed things.  Her grandfather has many fine qualities, but he lacks her discerning eye.

My Day Off

Since June, when I first saw the calendar for this new school at which I am teaching, I have been unaccountably excited about yesterday.  The sixth of October.  Whee!  Why was I excited about the sixth of October, which is not a naturally exciting time, you ask?  Because I was off, and the children were not, which meant that I could loaf around the house for 4 precious hours in the morning, doing nothing and seeing no one and being accountable only to myself.

It was a glorious dream.

A lovely, wonderful, rose-pink bubble sort of dream.

Ellie popped it.

It wasn't really her fault; I can't accuse her of going out and getting sick on purpose just to rob me of my morning off.  And no one invents 103 degree fevers just for the fun of the thing.  But there she was, at home, in the middle of my day off, exerting undue influence on what was going to be watched on tv.  Actually, who am I kidding?  I'd probably have spent the whole morning watching Pixar movies anyway, but she wouldn't let me watch The Incredibles, which I found upsetting.

Anyway, this was her morning:

She watched Cars, and then some episodes of various pink-washed television shows.  

She supervised me while I folded and put her clothes away.

She sat on the couch and watched me iron my clothes for the week and made comments about how it would be nice if I ironed Daddy's clothes too.  And she's right.  It would have been.  But I spent an hour ironing mine, and that was really all I had.

She's a bit better this morning (woke up with a temperature of 99) and is spending the day at her grandmother's house, no doubt harassing her about her laundry practices.

Outsourcing

Our master plan of outsourcing our parenting of Ellie to Margaret is coming nearer and nearer to fruition.  I originally imagined it as a reading system -- Margaret would learn to read, and then would delight in reading her younger sister the eleventy billion renditions of The Very Hungry Caterpillar that Ellie's soul craves.  It seemed like a dream come true.

And that has happened somewhat.  Margaret will read Ellie a bedtime story, but usually only with our help, which means that the labor-saving aspect of this system really hasn't kicked in.

But this weekend, we saw a new side of the arrangement, and I'm hooked.

I mean, there's the slight problem that she can't steer it effectively (or at all) and she sees no reason to avoid obstacles anyway, and she doesn't have a lot of sense that a breakable Ellie is in the front, but it's a good step, right?