Puck is getting more and more friendly with Margaret, and Margaret is getting better at not irritating Puck.
Yesterday afternoon, I think that Puck decided that we looked awfully cozy on the couch as she drifted off for her nap, and so joined us.
I felt a bit like I was being used as furniture.
Margaret and I spend yesterday morning in the great outdoors.*
It was bright and sunny and beautiful and warm and pleasant. And tomorrow we’re meant to have snow. Never a dull moment.
Margaret developed a game** which involved picking up the effluvia of the American Sweetgum (Liquidambar styraciflua, for those of you playing at home),
bringing them to me,
and smashing them into my face.
[Not Pictured, as I dropped the camera trying to protect my eyes.]
Sometimes in order to make it look more like a game, she stood like she was going to wind up and throw it at me.
She went into her motion.
And then, because she just spent a week with her baseball-mad cousins, and I’m pretty sure there’s something in the water in Port Angeles, finished up in ready position, in case I fired one back at her.
And then occasionally, she just handed them to me nicely, for my collection.****
And sometimes, thinking that they were in fact real gumballs (which she isn’t allowed to eat either), she prepared to stuff it into her mouth.
*Well, the backyard.
**I’m using the word loosely. I think that the Geneva Convention would have something to say about it, but since the days of swaddling, Margaret and I have had a tacit*** agreement that we are not going to mention the Geneva Convention between us.
***Well it would have to be, wouldn’t it?
****I think she thought they were a treat for me. And of course they were.
I did the hair, she did the singing.
Also, later in the same bath, she demonstrated that she understands how to wipe her own face.
Washing the soap out of her hair seemed to make her dainty. If drinking soapy bathwater from a washcloth can rally be designated dainty. I’m sure there’s some sense in which it is. I mean, it’s certainly daintier than drinking soapy bathwater without a washcloth . . .
It doesn’t get much more gleeful than this.
That is happy, not sad. I’m realizing that people could think that she was winding up for a scream, but that’s not the case. She was shrieking joyfully at the coming of spring. And swinging.
I rather enjoy the first visit to Mr. Wizard’s every year. It does, of course, remind me that the horrible heat is bearing down on us, and that soon the evenings will be the only possible time for decent people* to go outside.
But it also means baseball and ice cream and the nice parts of summer. And not wearing wool socks. All these things are good.
Last year, we went on the 8th of April, so it’s not been quite a year.
And we went tonight.
I think she’s happier with ice cream than the pacifier.
*By which I mean people that don’t go outside in the heat of the day.
Margaret has been refusing to have a bow or any such thing in her hair ever since her arms got long enough to reach up to where they were, and claw them out.
On Sunday night, however, her uncle Brent decided that she needed a pony tail, stole a rubber band from one of the nearby heads (Char’s, actually. Thanks, Char!) and put one in.
It stayed.
But the secret, as I discovered this morning, is to put it in while she is being distracted by something else, like a buzzing cloud of cousins.
Or else she just respected Brent’s authority.
Part of leaving Seattle on a plane that leaves at 10:00 in the morning is getting oneself (and one’s baby, and in this case one’s parents as well) to the airport on time.
If one wants to get to the airport by 8:30, one has to consider all of one’s options to avoid nasty traffic snarl-ups. So we decided to bypass Tacoma traffic by taking the ferry into downtown Seattle, and making our way to the airport from there. Besides, we like to get as many types of transportation as possible into Margaret’s day. It’s educational.
At first, she seemed a little nervous.
But she soon decided that the ferry was a nice place.
And a good place to run.
It isn’t.
