The Usual
It was a good weekend, overall. Mainly because Red�s tantrums were minimized by being on the go. As long as that child is in the car or not in the house with all four of us present, she is pretty happy. It's being home, though, and begging for a twelfth bowl of oatios and milk (and being denied it � I mean, come on, there have got to be limits) that sets her off. She hates to be told �no,� hates to be denied what she wants. Not that you can blame her but still. She can�t always get what she wants. It�s not like she doesn�t get what she needs. Which is apparently eleven bowls of oatios and soy milk for breakfast followed by destroying the newspaper and putting Vanilla Head Baby �nite nite� for about twenty minutes. Chinese water torture doesn't hold a candle to the torture of toddler repetition.
Her vocabulary and sentence making abilities are developing. When someone�s missing from the room she�ll ask, �Where Sissy go? Where Daddy go?� She particularly likes to talk about the fact that �Sissy go bus.� It thrills her to no end that Dusty rides the school bus now. Vicarious thrills.
Her favorite phrase this weekend, though, was �Go �way!� as in �Go �way, daddy! Go �way, Sissy!� Over and over and over at the top of her lungs. If you didn�t know she already spoke at top vocal range normally, you�d think she was REALLY VERY ANGRY. But, no. She�s just latched onto a new phrase and has to wear it (us) out.
Saturday, while Dusty and Daddy went to have Dusty�s ear checked (making sure her recent ear infection is really gone), I took Red to the library and then to the grocery store. Red loves to be in the car, on the move, in transit. She is often at her quietest while gazing out the window and thinking her post-Scribbletown thoughts. She loves the library because it has puzzles and train sets and a stuffed kitty cat. Red walks around handing me books she�s pulled off the shelves (poor librarians � they really have a clean up job when Red comes by), hugging Miao-Miao under her free arm. She hates to part with it when we leave (insert mini-tantrum here).
Then, the grocery store is also popular. There are free samples for her to eat and food for her to want most desperately, and a Halloween kitty made out of weird prickly pipe cleaner type stuff. We round the aisle, �Where miao-miao go?� she asks over and over and over. �There! There�s the kitty. No, we can�t have him.� (insert tiny protestation here.)
She�s also growing more adept at drinking from a real cup. Until she decides to put food in the cup. At dinner last night, she drank all but half an inch of water and then began to add corn kernels, black beans and noodles to her cup. Then, she dumped it all on her plate, flooding her dinner. (insert miniscule mommy moment of irritation.) I poured off the water and set the plate back down in front of her. Considering that all of the food had either recently been packed in water or cooked in it, including the steamed carrots, it was none the worse for wear and perfectly okay to eat. Which she eventually did. Sigh.
Sunday was shoe day. We met my mom at the mall and Dusty scored big with a new pair of tennis shoesand a pair of fancy shoes. Red got an adorable pair of shoes that look very similar to these but not exactly. Penney�s didn�t have her exact ones on their website. Go figure. But, they�re brown suede with little flowers and have a zero frustration factor. What look like buckles are really velcro which means they are 100% Red Approved. She wore them the rest of the day excluding bath time and was a bit put out when she had to remove them for bedtime (insert the eensiest little bark of toddler displeasure here).
And, so the little people got out of the house and were rewarded with new shoes. The mommy made mac and cheese to complete the wonderfulness of the day and, for the grownups, made an eggplant casserole and a corn pudding (w/ soymilk) for dinner from Linda McCartney�s cookbook.
To top it all off, Dusty lost one of her top front teeth shortly after bedtime. The tooth fairy came and is expected back soon because the tooth�s next door neighbor is on its last legs. Dusty never takes matters into her own hands but prefers to let her teeth go softly into that good night. Nature taking its course, and all that.
