Look What She Did At School Today

Margaret went to school again today, and it was the first day that she went for the whole three hours (last week was orientation, and only lasted an hour and a half).

When I went and picked her up, she was very excited about what she was bringing home.  I asked her what she had done at school, and she told me that she colored a picture of an apple (very school-like) and she had cut paper up with knives.

Knives?!?!

Knives.  Two knives that go together like this, Mommy, like the ones that you have.

Scissors, it turns out.  They gave her scissors.  Which is bad enough, but at least they didn't give her knives to career about with.

Anyway, we brought her picture, and her envelope of sliced-up paper home and put them on the fridge, like so.

Knives, indeed.

She's Onto Us

Saturday night at dinner, Margaret looked at me and said "Take my picture."

"Why?" I asked.

"I want you to take my picture and put it on the computer for Nana."

So I did.  I'm not sure what it was about the way she ate her eggs and biscuit that she felt was particularly important for Nana to see, but I do what I'm told (within reason).

So there you are, Mom.  Margaret wanted you to see her dinner, and here it is.

But it does mean that she's becoming conscious of the fact that her life is being shared with an audience, and she's becoming interested in curating her life for that audience.  I'm not sure how I feel about this.  I mean, I'm the person who imagines and frames her life for an audience, not her.  Seriously, I would have had much more interesting things to say about the pictures of her eating dinner if I had planned to write the post.  But she made me write it, and I don't have anything to say about them, beyond pointing out that this is dinner, and she is wearing her pajama shirt because she wanted to, and Leo was working all day Saturday, and I didn't have the energy to fight her on it.

Humph.

Dancing Margaret

Margaret decided this morning that she was going to wear boots.

She has a pair of pink rubber boots, because I got them for the snow, continuing my streak of refusing to buy snow gear for the children until such time as the snow is actually on the ground.  And when you do that, you can't exactly choose colors.  So they are leopard print and pink and have Hello Kitty on them.

I despise them.

She adores them.

And this morning, she put them on and asked me to take her picture in them.

So I did that. But she was so excited that she couldn't stand still, and danced around the dining room.

It was something to see, certainly.

Attack of the Ellie

Ellie, like Margaret, has become quite possessive about our phones.  She has not gotten quite as obsessed with phones as Margaret did, considering that I distinctly remember Margaret answering her cheese sandwich at lunch, but she certainly feels that they are her property that she allows us to use very grudgingly.

And when she decides that she wants them, we should turn them over immediately, and not waste time doing silly things with them like taking pictures.

Margaret, the Intrepid Explorer

Some of you may recall a post last week about going out in the snow and dropping a bunch of icy snow on top of Ellie.

That wasn't all that we did.  The motivator of this trip outside was none other than the heroine of this blog, Margaret.*  She wanted to go sledding, and proceeded to detail for me a sledding expedition she went on last year with Helen and Bruce to Bruce's mother's house.  I feel that that sort of elephantine memory is going to get annoying in the future.  And then she told me that she was going to put on her snow pants and her coat and her hat and her boots and her scarf and her gloves, and she was going to go outside and find her sled and bring it to Mommy and Mommy was going to pull her around the yard if we can't find a hill.

Apparently she was hopeful that our backyard had spontaneously sprouted a hill while she slept.  It could happen.

So we went outside, and Ellie went in the swing to await bombardment.  Margaret careered all over the yard, but finally brought the sled over.  I think that these pictures tell a rather eloquent story about Margaret's optimism.  They also tell a story about how her mother appreciates and records her optimism, but does not encourage it, by which I mean, I didn't pull her about the yard in the sled because I was too busy swinging Ellie toward her doom.

And here's where she realized that I wasn't going to help her, and so she went off to find other snowy pursuits.  But she came back, because she couldn't play make effective snowballs (or, you know, do anything at all) with her gloves on, and so she took them off and then couldn't get them back on.  So I am sometimes helpful.

So, you know, sometimes I help her.


*Ellie is also the heroine of this blog.  It's a large, accommodating sort of blog, where no one gets left out.  And those of you who think that Margaret is getting a lot of the press over the last few days would be right, but I maintain that a certain degree of parity is maintained between the two children.  Besides, Ellie's going to get a huge amount of coverage in the next month or so as she learns to walk and talk and all that stuff.  I don't think we need to worry.

Ennui

Now that Margaret has started school, she's clearly planning on being one of those bored, coffee-house visiting, French intellectual types.  She may find the fact that she's not French something of a handicap in this pursuit, but I'm not completely sure that it bars her from the profession.

Actually, the story behind this is that she acquired this scarf from her grandmother's house, and has been insisting on wearing it ever since.  She adores it.  Unwrapped, it comes down to at least her knees on each side, but that does not deter her.  It, like so many things Margaret is deciding to do/wear/think/be these days, is equal parts cute and annoying.

Tea for Two

For Christmas, my mother made Margaret an absolutely amazing Madeline doll which Margaret adores.

And really, the Madeline doll was what everyone got, because the amount of time that was spent crafting her doll-size duffel coat and her doll-size school bag and her doll-size shoes is truly mind-boggling.  But my mother felt that Ellie should get something; unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on one's view of this sort of thing) Ellie is too young for obsessions.  And so she got a talking tea set. Which Margaret immediately annexed to herself.  Honestly, I think she had her eye on it before there was any unwrapping, because when we put it under the tree, it made noise, and she was so interested in what could possibly make those noises.*

Anyway, we have been insisting to her that it is Ellie's tea pot, but I'm not sure that we're making much headway, because it is at the moment camping out under Margaret's bed.  But they do occasionally have tea parties when Ellie gets to touch some of her toy.

*I think that we put it down, and she accidentally pushed a button, causing the tea pot to say "Thank you."  She thought this was the greatest thing ever.