Tuesdays are never very super at our house. Marmot Dad teaches a night class right after work so we typically don't see him all day long. That makes for a loooooong day for Mommy, too. So we've tried to fill up our afternoons with activities to make the time pass more quickly. Today we perhaps overdid it.
Let me mention first, however, that the overdoing it started early on when I went to vote. Usually it's a quick in-and-out process, but today I had to wait in line for an hour with two alternately active and clingy kids, explain several times that my last name is hyphenated and alphabetized under the first last name, and change my ballot card because the poll workers just assumed that I was voting in the Republican primary. All this before lunch.
Anyway, after we picked E up from preschool, we all ran for the car to get started on our activities. M ran a little too recklessly and scraped her knee on the concrete. She cried and cried and told me "I don't see my bnood (blood) coming out, Mommy, but I think some of my skin came off. Did it? Did it?" which of course was very traumatic for her.
Then we headed for the zoological museum of choice. Tooie was entranced by all the dead animals. He kept going from one to the other and laughing and pointing. When I asked him what they said, he almost invariably said "maw," which is what kitties say for him. Except for when we looked at the springboks and gazelles, which he told me say "neigh."
Next stop was the creamery for ice cream bars. M was excited to get one that was "chocolate all the way through."
Finally, we went to ye olde thrift shop because E has been pestering me for scriptures and cutting out pictures of people reading scriptures and taping them to the wall. Since we don't have much of a systematic religious training program in place for her, we thought this would be a great idea. We found a nice book with someone's unsent postcard inside ("Look, Mommy! Mine comes with a bookmark!") for E, while M chose a version in German ("M, this book is in German." "Yeah, that's what I wanted. A Derman one."). They were very excited to read their scriptures, so excited, in fact, that they chose scriptures for a bedtime story. So we read for a little while with some explanatory commentary from Mom. At one point I told E that people were mad at a prophet because he was telling them to do right things but they wanted to do wrong things. "You mean he wanted them to change their ways, right Mommy?" Exactly. M wanted to know why those people kept saying "yay." When we were done, E told me "I love to read the scriptures. Although they're pretty boring." Silly girl.
