Tummy Time à Deux

We have a routine in the morning (who am I kidding – we have a routine most of the time, because I find something that works and then we DO THAT OVER AND OVER.  I am boring) where we (Margaret and I) eat breakfast, and then Ellie comes out of her bouncy chair and we put down a blanket, and she does tummy time.  And soon after that, it’s time for her morning nap.

So, you know, that’s awesome.

Anyway, Margaret likes to join in on tummy time, even though I have tried to explain to her that she doesn’t still need to do it.  If it’s the going thing, she wants to get on board. 

It looks in this one like Ellie’s glaring at Margaret, but I don’t think that she is.  I mean, she might be, but she tends to look at Margaret as if she thought Margaret was the most interesting person ever.

Anyway, she certainly stopped glaring when Margaret got the rings out again.  Because the rings are – for reasons that completely elude me, since I am old, and so DON’T UNDERSTAND – the most fun thing EVER.

Not Acceptable

I’m not sure what she wanted instead*, but this finger is CLEARLY NOT WHAT SHE WAS LED TO BELIEVE.

*All right, I do actually have a pretty good guess what she wanted, but it’s rhetorically better if I say I don’t.  I mean, “She clearly wants food and this hand is a poor and miserable excuse for a substitute” just makes me sound mean, an we go for light comedy here, not a hard-hitting examination of the cruelty of parents.

Pyaying Wiv Her

One of the more nerve-wracking (and sweet; let’s not forget sweet) things that Margaret does these days is play with Ellie. 

It’s very nice, and Ellie likes it, and there is snuggling and laughing and general cuteness.  Oh, so heartwarming. 

And strange.  Because Margaret has been playing with Ellie recently by means of piling things up on her.

Like teacups.

Or Lego cars.

Or rings.  The rings are a favorite.

And Ellie gets into it, of course, since if something comes in range of her hands these days she tries to stick them in her mouth.

Or on her mouth, as the case may be.

And then, as is only to be expected, Margaret decided that by putting the ring on her face, Ellie was trying to play peek-a-boo with Margaret.  So she helped her do it again, and decided that she needed them on her wrists and ankles.  You can see one going on over the left foot.

But Ellie seems to like it, so who am I to argue?

Happy Father’s Day!

Margaret made breakfast.

It was pretty good.  She cracked the eggs (thoroughly – those eggs know that they’ve been cracked) and poured in the liquids and stirred.  I may have helped a little bit, and I certainly cooked them, but she did a lot of it.

She also picked out Leo’s presents.  She thought that he needed a tie (Daddy yikes ties, Mommy), and some big Legos (so he can play wiv me, Mommy and build a house with a roof, a big one), and a blue hippo (because Daddy likes the zoo and the hippos and the blue one he likes so he wants it).*  So she’s doing pretty well, I think.

*This last reason was a little less coherent, which I attribute to the fact that it’s much harder to explain why Leo would want a blue hippo.

Helping Bear

Our attempts to move all of the things in our house to other places before rooms of our house become migratory this summer proceed apace.*

Margaret went out this morning with her grandmother, and Ellie stayed home to nap, which she did for a part of the time that we had set aside for cleaning, but not as much of it was we would have liked. So she had to come upstairs and help.  She managed to be a quite congenial upstairs-cleaning companion.

But I could have done without her disdainful splutterings.

On the other hand, she probably doesn’t mean to seem disdainful.  Spluttering is the only thing she does that we seem to understand, and you can’t blame the poor child for trying to communicate with us in some way that we might get.

*I promise that this is a grammatically sound sentence.  It doesn’t seem that way, but it is.  I checked.  Twice. 

Horses! Driving!

So Margaret thought that the farm was the sort of thing she could absolutely get behind, largely because her grandfather let her do all sorts of things like drive around in the little car.

And, of course, be driven around as well.

I’m not entirely sure why the fact that it had a back seat she could ride in was so cool, because she rides in a back seat all the time, but it made her happy, and who am I to argue?

There was also a flag that she could put in the bracket, and – as she is very interested in flags right now, as anyone who has been in a car with her could tell you – she thought that that was pretty exciting.

I know we’re not supposed to let it drag on the ground, but she’s not tall enough, so what can you do?

But the most important and exciting event of the day, according to Margaret’s discussion of it after the fact, was seeing the horses. 

She was very intent.

And a little serious about it.

But she soon decided it was fun.

And then when her grandfather got up on the horse,

she was all attention.

She tells me that she got to touch the horse’s face, his white face, and nose, and that when she is bigger, she will be able to ride him like granddad.  She has told me this several times.  She is insistent. 

Working on It

Yesterday, we went out to the farm, and did farm-like things, farmishly, all day long.

At the beginning of the day, while Dan was locating horses and moving them to appropriate locations for viewing by Margaret, Margaret played with a jumprope on the porch, and I think that she got the hang of it.  A little.  I mean, she jumped, and there was a rope.  That’s really the essence of the thing, right?