Land Of The Midnight Sun

We’re farther north than usual.  And here’s how I can tell.  It stays light for a very long time in the evenings.  I may notice a little more because my room doesn’t have curtains (well, it has one in the window facing the neighbor’s house, after an unfortunate experience when I was in high school with a shower and an entire 12-year-old boy’s baseball team practicing across the pasture), but it is still very light at night.

Here is my evidence:  a picture of a sleeping Margaret taken at 9:30 pm.

No flash.  There’s just that much light.

At Nana’s House, Everybody Works

Margaret wants to drive the tractor.  We’re not sure this is a good idea.

If she could talk a little better, she’d be saying “gas it up, Grandpa.”  But she can’t, so she just said “Ah!” emphatically.

And then when we wouldn’t let her drive the tractor (for no reason other than that her feet don’t reach the pedals), she tried to find other work to do.

She’s very helpful.

Summer Hiatus

I’ve been bad about this recently, which is, of course, unfair to my vast reading public.  My excuse is that at least half of my vast reading public is, in fact, getting to see Margaret in the flesh, and so doesn’t need to have the daily updates.  Also, they have a really slow internet connection, and I’ve had a cold.

Anyway, a little over a week ago, Margaret, Ron and I drove across the country.  I very carefully packed all sorts of interesting toys and books to amuse her as we drove.  Here she is in the latter half of Kansas, playing with an empty pop bottle.

We stopped with friends in Denver on the first night, and Margaret enjoyed playing with new toys.

She also enjoyed playing with the friends’ son in the park near their house.

Though this picture clearly says “Hey, Mom, how come HE gets to swing so high?”

We then continued on our way, and Margaret shamelessly texted while driving.

I’m just impressed that she knows that the screen shows up better in the shade than the sun.

Anyway, she’s a very good traveler, and I can face the return journey without too much fear and trepidation.

Margaret’s Toilette

(No, not like that).

Margaret has developed an interest in what is going on with her hair.  She likes hairbows.  Not enough to keep them in her hair, but she brings them to me, tries to put them on the top of her head, and then squawks at me to make them stay in for 30 seconds so she can tear them out all by herself.

Some mornings, I brush her hair while she’s eating because she is immobilized, and it makes it easier.

Some mornings, when I do that, she demands that I give her the hairbrush as well as her breakfast, because she likes to have everything she could possibly want within her reach.

And then she tries to brush her hair, though she gets the back of the brush more often than the front.

At the very end of this video, you can hear Margaret’s new word.  She has learned how to say “uh-oh,” though for her it doesn’t so much mean “whoops, oh dear, that was a mistake” so much as it means “did you see how far I threw that thing, Mom?”  I cut off a bit of it, because I was already in the process of stopping the camera when she said it, but it’s mostly there.

Morning In The Backyard

It was cool this morning.*  Margaret and I got back from taking Leo to work, and I gave her a choice: she could go in and have breakfast, or she could play in the backyard.

The wheels in her head turned visibly, which was very cute.  She knows what breakfast means, but she wanted to stay outside.  Outside won for a while.

She is perfecting her running

And she loves her soccer balls, but I begin to despair of explaining the rules to her.

Another place that she enjoys practicing her running is downhill on concrete, which is, as you know, the best place to practice.

 

And then, of course, she gets to the bottom of the hill and realizes that Mommy is cruel and unsympathetic, because the gate is shut.

Since I had made it so that she couldn’t play in the real traffic, she decided to check out the car.

And she knows that she’s not supposed to play under the car, you can tell.

It was at this point that I repeated the word “breakfast,” and she decided that that was a good idea.  Pausing only to inspect the propane tank,

and sit for a moment on the stairs,

and perhaps play a little on the stairs,

she went in to breakfast.

*I lie, you know.  It was 82, which is not cool, not at all.  But it has been in the high 90s, so 82 felt bearable.

Raising A Snob

We are.  I’m not sure whether to be proud or ashamed, but we’re definitely raising a snooty little girl.

Look, this is camembert.  What sort of decent, well-regulated baby chows down on a wedge of camembert?  I ask you.

Also, notice how she has the bangs down over her face and an expression of ennui. 

Of course, it may just be tiredness, or resignation at being photographed again, and it soon faded as she crammed the cheese in her mouth.

She also had the chance tonight to have – besides the camembert – a local Missouri goat cheese, handmade from milk produced on the farm where it is made, and given by goats that have lived a very pampered life, as well as some Jarlsberg.

She disdained the Jarlsberg. 

It as, as the link tells you, available in over 30,000 supermarkets in the US, and I’m tolerably certain that that was why she didn’t like it.  It’s a very mild cheese, comparatively, since it doesn’t taste like either moldy gym socks or pepper.  But Margaret – our budding snob – was in the mood for some strong flavors.  Last night she made inroads into our Stilton.    Goodness.

Swimming!

It turns out that when it’s approximately 185 degrees outside, and there is a gentle slope into the water, Margaret is very happy to go swimming.

We had tried to put her in the water last weekend, in a swimming pool, and though she didn’t really complain, exactly, she also didn’t really seem to be enjoying herself, since the moment she came near the edge, she started reaching frantically for it.

But on Monday, we went out to a lake, and she thought it was marvelous.  So marvelous, in fact, that she wanted to run deeper and deeper into the water, which was ever so much fun, as I hadn’t been expecting her to want to swim much, and so was only equipped for wading.

Luckily, after much walking up and down the beach on our part, we were rescued by a grandmother and a great-aunt, who were willing to turn themselves into a fence.  This intervention also meant that I could take some pictures, because strangely, I had not been particularly interested in the combination of my camera and the wriggly, attempting-to-plunge-into-deep-water baby.

Margaret appreciated it. 

In her corral, she got to try out splashing,

And she stood up for a bit,

But it wasn’t as exciting as she’d thought, because it somewhat curtailed her splashing opportunities.

I think that the upshot of this is that I will be taking her swimming more often this summer.  Outdoors.  In the heat.  Oh boy.