Inspired by posts like this one at Melissa Wiley’s blog, I’ve been trying to be more aware of connections in our discussions, our reading, things that each of us are learning as well as the emotional connections that come during the best kind of family time. This weekend we had lots of lovely moments like these, and I wanted to write them down to remember them.
I wrote earlier about M’s love for Gooney Bird Greene, and on Thursday night, we finished another Gooney Bird book, Gooney Bird and the Room Mother. In that story, we learned how Gooney Bird cajoled someone into donating dictionaries for each member of her class. The students use their dictionaries frequently and thus M learned lots of cool new words. The next morning while M was still in bed, she was flipping through some field guides and she told me she was pretending they were dictionaries. This led to a discussion about ordering her a dictionary and then to looking at wildflowers in one of the field guides and talking about their names and whether we’d seen them in our neighborhood
On Friday morning we met some friends at our local nature center, a small zoo with animals native to this area (all of which have been rescued and could no longer live in the wild) and an educational farm. M got to see a turtle whose shell was broken when it got hit by a lawnmower. They had put fiberglass webbing over the break and the turtle was healing well. M fractured her wrist a few weeks ago falling off the ladder on a friend’s swingset. She’ll be in a cast for another week and a half, and she was fascinated that the turtle had a “cast” just like hers.
Both girls slept late on Saturday morning. By late I mean until shortly after 7, but it was nice to start the day a little slower. Before they get up, they usually play in their room for a little while with M entertaning C and putting toys in her crib. When I came in and got C out of her crib, we all snuggled in M’s bed. C will now actively crawl on M and hug and kiss her and it is so sweet to see them together. You can see the love on their faces when they hug.
M and I pulled out some Color Wonder paper and some puzzles that we hadn’t played with in a long time and had a nice playtime during C’s morning nap. I never cease to be amazed when we do puzzles how I can see the thought process M is going through to find the right pieces and see how different it is from my the way I would solve it. Once C was up we took a trip to the library to pick up some books we had on hold and look for a few others. I made a comical attempt to read a Magic School Bus book to Meg while C kept crawling off heading for a shelf in the kid’s non-fiction section where she kept trying to get to a big thick book with a very crinkly cover.
In the afternoon we all went to the local botanical gardens and enjoyed warm, almost summer-like weather. M really needed to run out some energy, and she kept dashing ahead and calling for us to come on. Every few yards she would call out about another wildflower she’d discovered or exclaim over a field of violets, her favorite flower. She is so happy when she’s outside running and looking at spring flowers. It is one of her favorite things in the world, and I can’t help but smile as I watch her.
After our trip to the botanical gardens, we came home and M and her dad did some gardening while I took the opportunity to bake some scones. I love baking, but I don’t get to do it nearly as much as I’d like. To keep C content I had to keep opening cabinets and giving her new kitchen things to explore. The entire floor was covered in bowls, cups, spoons and pots but she was happy and we had lovely raisin scones with our dinner.
I’m not very good about sharing new music with Meg. We tend to listen to the same things over and over. I know far less about classical music than I’d like, but I want us to learn more together. This morning I put the spring segment of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons on. M immediately began dancing and pretending to be a butterfly. Her dance evolved into a pretend game about butterflies and then about the Breezies-tiny fairy-like winged ponies that are friends of My Little Ponies. (Unless you have a My Little Pony crazed daughter you will likely never encounter them.) Later in the morning, we did more dancing to a CD of Strauss Waltzes. M loved them and I’ve resolved to work harder on pulling out more music for her.
Lest anyone get the impression that our weekend was perfect, the evening ended with a serious meltdown and M has gotten out of bed more times than my patience can handle, but I’ve stored up lots of happy memories to ease myself through the rough spots.
