Last night, PisecoDad took himself to the walk-in clinic (do you sense a recurring theme here?) for two things: a rash on his finger (diagnosis: contact dermatitis of unknown origin) and a weeping ear (diagnosis: the worst ear infection they’d seen this season and a ruptured eardrum).
I didn’t know what to do with myself - or the kids - so I put them in the tub with a big squeeze of my Cinnamon Bun bubble bath and a flotilla of ducks.
Then I took pictures.
BabyGirl loves to have water dumped over her head, and that infectious joy is creeping into my cautious JediBoy, who really hates water on his head or face. Last night he let me dump water on him once. Maybe he’ll actually enjoy swimming by the time summer rolls around this year.
When JediBoy came downstairs this morning, I was reading Dumbo to BabyGirl. She wandered away after a few pages, but JediBoy snuggled in to listen. When I got to the page where Dumbo is in the tree with the crows, JediBoy burst into tears. He told me that when he’d fallen back to sleep after PisecoDad’s alarm this morning, he’d had a very sad dream. In the dream, he woke up to find out that I had moved away. Most of the dream involved JediBoy, PisecoDad and BabyGirl searching and searching for me. Eventually they found me in a teeny tiny house which magically had the same interior as our real life house. He asked me in the dream if it was our real house, and I told him to look outside, where he saw PisecoDad trying to shoo away a murder of crows in the lawn. Seeing the crows in the book triggered it, I guess, and he was so sad at the thought of losing first me and then his beloved house.
We had a long talk about moving - I told him we would like to move in the next five years, just into a bigger house farther away from traffic, but that we would involve him in choosing the new house and we would definitely not spring it on him as a surprise.
This morning, JediBoy helped me clean up in the kitchen, read some board books to BabyGirl, and read four picture books aloud to me (the Audrey Wood titles in my sidebar: Silly Sally, Alphabet Adventure, Quick as a Cricket, and The Little Mouse, The Red, Ripe Strawberry and The Big, Hungry Bear). We’ve played with paperclips - sorting them, making chains and patterns - and done a little subtraction practice with MUS blocks. He has nearly mastered the single-digit addition and subtraction facts up through 9+9=18 and 18-9=9. There are a few he still has to stop and figure out, but most of them he knows within the three-second rule of thumb. He has made several Lego creations to protect me and asked to watch Tarzan (is he working through his fears from this morning’s dream?).
The sun is shining here today, even though it’s still cold, and that makes such a difference in my mood. JediBoy has asked that we head out to a park after BabyGirl wakes up from her nap, so I have boots and snow pants to gather.
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