Child Labor

When Margaret was a small person (well, a smaller person) she had a railing on her bed and a tendency to jump on said bed while holding the railing.  The railing was not designed for this harsh usage, and cracked both itself and the bed frame.  We continued to use the bed frame, and were careful of this weakness at the end.  Until a few weeks ago, that is.  I was sitting on the edge of the bed, and my abilities to stand up have been adversely impacted by this small internal person of mine, so getting up off the bed was not done as gracefully as has been done previously.  To put it another way, I leaned on the crack, and finished the job.

Margaret insists on telling people that I broke her bed, which is partially true, but also partially false, and I feel it important to point out that if she had not jumped excessively as a small 2-year-old, we would not be in this position.  She broke all the slats that way, and we had to replace them with solid oak.

This weekend, we had a grand bed shuffle.  Margaret's bed frame came out of the house, as it was no longer useful.  We made the children to most of the work, since that seemed the most efficient way to accomplish what we wanted.

Ellie seemed to dislike having a large bed (and I disliked that there was room for me to snuggle with her, since she had a habit of demanding it at 3 am when my reserves of resistance were low), so we set the crib back up in her room with the side off.  She seems very happy with her small bed, and when she came and asked me to snuggle and I said there wasn't room, she said "oh" and went back to bed.  That's a win.  Margaret is glorying in having a double bed, so that's good.  I also feel that Margaret will be more amenable to being shifted when we have visitors, since she is a more flexible person at the moment.

Baby Steps

Those of you who have spent any time around my younger daughter may be aware of the fact that she is a tad picky about what goes into her mouth.  Just a little.  Not much.

She has been getting slightly (slightly!) more adventurous, though.  Yesterday she tried a purple jellybean and a red jellybean, so that's something.

The other night, I made a bargain with her -- she wanted strawberry cereal bars instead of dinner, and I said that if she would eat some real strawberries, she could have cereal bars after.  Because I bargain with her sometimes.  You know, to get nutrition down her throat.

It worked, but her little face as she ate strawberries was the funniest thing that I have ever seen.

One of the big draws, apparently, was getting to cut them herself, so we let her do that.  It degenerated a bit into mushing up the strawberries and then complaining that they were "too juicy," but she choked some down.  It was slow progress, but progress nonetheless.

Spring is Here

Not that we're going to start singing Tom Lehrer songs about it, of course, because although we went to the park, we were relatively careful of the avian life, and besides, I don't let my children carry poison around.

Anyway, in the last week the weather has become quite pleasant, and the days are getting longer, so one afternoon, I picked up a picnic supper on my way home from school, and we took it to the park by Leo's office, so we could eat and play.

The children were very excited to be outside, running towards playground equipment.

And they seemed to enjoy playing, although Ellie felt that I was being a little too generous with the pushing on the swing.

Leo also seemed to have fun, though I assume that since he can come over and swing on the swings whenever he wants, so it's not as novel for him.

An Igloo of One's Own

Virginia Woolf posited that one of the reasons that women were less likely to have been recognized as geniuses and less likely to have contributed to the life of the mind was because they didn't have space in which to think and imagine.  In order to remedy this, she suggests that women need "A Room of One's Own."*

I think that Margaret and Ellie have perhaps been reading my literary theory shelf when I'm not looking, because when faced with a great deal of snow, they immediately decided that they would build an igloo all their own.

They labored to make snow bricks.  Of course, they soon realized that it was a lot faster to have me pick up snow on the shovel and drop it into the boxes for them to pack, but they were still working.  Of course, Ellie wasn't clear that you needed to pile the bricks on top of each other for effective igloo construction, but they tried. 

And then they realized that an igloo of their own was a much more plausible goal if they got other people, people with more design experience, and larger hands, involved in their building project.

Of course, we only really built a pile of snow before they got cold (there's a difficulty with gloves; either they are waterproof, but you lose all mobility in the hand, or they aren't, and your hands get cold super-fast. If someone were to invent a glove for small fingers that was waterproof, warm, and had mobility, I would be very pleased with them).

And then we went inside and watched Frozen.  Because we were.

*Also money, but that's not really the point here, and if my children can become independently wealthy, that would be great.  Less likely than the plan of theirs that I am about to discuss, but still, an admirable aspiration.

Home Decoration

This weekend was cold.  Cold and wet.  Cold and wet and snowy and full of soggy mittens.

In other news, while Ellie is avoiding naps as if they will give her cooties, she is also has entered a phase where apparently the only acceptable clothing once she walks in the door of her home is pajamas.

As she is still struggling somewhat with the instructions she received when they gave her a bladder, this can become problematic, as her acceptable pajamas cannot keep up with her need of pajamas.

So on Saturday, we were at Costco, and they had a lot of pajamas.  I bought her another two sets, and that meant that she spent most of the weekend in her pajamas.  Both my children have, for reasons unknown to me, decided that pajamas are the best costume to wear under their snow pants, so that did add to the time she spent in pajamas, but it was ridiculous.

That afternoon, Leo and Margaret trooped off to the Art Museum to do a survey of which countries different works of art were from.*  Ellie wanted to stay at home because she wanted to take a nap.  I was right in my assumption that when she said "wanted to take a nap," what she meant was "wanted to put on her pajamas and do anything other than take a nap."

So that she then did.

I'm certain that disassembling the couch and then spending an hour leaping from couch to cushions while wearing pajamas is almost as good as a nap.

When she tired of this, she dug a catalogue out of the trash and perused possible bedroom furniture.

She has relatively good taste -- she wanted a twin over full bunked to share with Margaret -- but she lacks a good eye for space.  There's no way that bed would fit in their rooms.

*Seriously, they took a printed-out world map mounted on cardboard so that Margaret could note where everything was from.  It was ADORABLE.