heard on the street

"She loves embroidering me with her slobbery kisses!"

-Lucy, on Fife before bedtime

reformed

Remember not long ago when there was a lot of frustrated grunting in our house due to misplaced tape? Well, every since playing with duct tape and Aunt Wendell in Virginia, Oscar is like a new man:

Stickers, tape, give it over, and let him put it on paper, a chair, or somebody's face. Yesterday Shaggy's wake-up call was layered strips of bright blue duct tape all over his forehead. Oscar could not have been more delighted.

me, thinking of you, thinking of me

Lucy spends multiple hours a day doing art. It's strange because it's one of my favorite things about her right now, this creative explosion, but I think I've only mentioned it here in passing, about wanting to put her stuff on the walls.

Well, I did put it on the walls. We also have drawings on the refrigerator, sculpture on the bookshelf, and bits and pieces of her creations strewn all over the house.

This is one of my favorites right now, she drew this when I headed off to the airport for a day-trip to San Francisco and back. I told her most Mommies leave for work every day, but she is used to me being in the basement with lots of upstairs coffee breaks, so she was feeling sad. So she drew this picture:

It is me, standing under a rainbow, and in my thought bubble you can see a tiny little Lucy, who I am thinking about as I go to work. And there are hearts around my thoughts because I love her.

friday cute shot

heard on the street

“I’m going to put on a beautiful dress! You’re not going to think it’s beautiful, you’re going to think it’s dirty.”

-Lucy, classically insightful, as she puts on her butterfly dress for the 7^th time this week

superheroes

On our walk to the library yesterday afternoon, Lucy told me all about superheroes.

Superheroes are all VERY strong. 
Some of them can fly. 
They are small, but not as small as a mouse, because mice are very small.  
They save your life. 
They only come out in the dark, and never in the daylight. 
There are girl and boy superheroes, but the one Lucy saw yesterday morning before it got light outside was a boy. She was picking tomatoes, and the boy superhero wanted to eat some of them. Not because they make him strong or help him fly, he just likes tomatoes. 

let's put on betty davis and dance

Lucy loves to dance, and lately, whenever she wants to put on a record to dance she also wants to put on a dress. It's usually a toss-up between one with a built-in tutu and one that Gramme made, all of which have proven wonderful for twirling.

Mama: "I know a girl who likes to twirl and dance."
Lucy: "Twirl means dance! Silly! You said, 'I know a girl who likes to dance and dance.'"

gnome houses

Sometimes I walk outside and find these: little houses that Lucy tells me she  has built for the gnomes.

Building materials include twigs, rose petals, broken bricks, wood scraps, rocks, moss, greeting cards, and other found objects. Things gnomes and little girls like, obviously.

"i wish i had some towels to fold"

Warning: This video interesting only to the truly committed.

building "castles"

the ins and outs

Lately Lucy has been very interested in putting things into other things. She has a nice wooden egg and cup toy and a nice plastic ball and ring and funnel toy, and both of those will hold her intrigue for many minutes at a time, but she (of course) likes to venture into non-toy items as well.

So we might walk around the house and find a bath toy in the bathroom garbage can, a hair clip in a glass of water; diaper spray on the record shelf, or, in a feat that still puzzles me, the knob of the hepa filter inside a sock. Usually we find these things when we aren't looking for them and cannot find them when we are, so very often these days diaper changes involve a wipe wet with water instead of spray and we have a pair of pliers handy for turning on and off the white noise when the knob goes missing.

We've taken to storing the bathroom garbage can up on the counter, because even worse than what she might try to put in is what she might try to take out. Curious monkey!