afternoon letdown

Due to extreme and indescribably frustrating technical difficulties, the posts for Sunday and Monday are late, late, late! But now they are here (I checked!), so settle in and read on (or begin there and work your way up)...

Caedmon and Mirella (and Kristin) left today after lunch. The kids all had a nice morning stroll while I made breakfast (using Uncle Denny's famous homemade biscuit recipe) and then ate and played a while, then napped, then played. Like yesterday, they pooped in threes. One would go first, then the other two would follow suit. While unpleasant most of the time, this event was grossified further by the sheer volume of blueberries the three of them consumed over the course of two days. Ewwwwwwww.

We posed them together in the wagon (hoping it might contain them long enough to snap a few shots) and then fed them lunch. They played some more with the aforementioned Fisher Price camper (which you will not know about yet if you are not reading these in chronological order) and before we knew it, so much time had passed that the party had to end. They were not sad goodbyes, as Dennis will be spending the weekend with his cousins and Gran will be traveling out to see them in Washington.

After they left, Dennis didn't know what to do with himself. He didn't want to eat lunch, and he seemed kind of tired. He walked around looking for them for some time before deciding that he could settle for me. We played with his toys and then he wanted to go outside and see his Daddy. He asks to go out now, just walks up to the door and says "side?" several times until you get the message. Just getting out to the porch isn't enough anymore, especially since he knows where the sprinkler was set up. He walks to the outside door and repeats his plea. Sadly for him, we didn't go outside today. We played in the screened porch until he walked up to the door and asked to go inside (same way he asks to go outside). He said "eat? eat eat" as we were walking in, and to make sure I got the message, walked over to the refrigerator and pointed to it as he repeated himself. Then he climbed on the bottom rung of the high chair, said "high chair" and "eat". When I had him settled, he said "blueberry" as he was eating some cheese, so I got him some blueberries and added some peach slices and leftover biscuit. He ate messily and happily, and demanded "joosh" (juice) in case I was planning on sitting down at the table with him before I fixed his drink. I am happy to report that he has gotten so much better at setting his drink on the table after he drinks rather than tossing it to the floor. He still tosses food pieces he doesn't like to the floor, though. It's fine at home because we have a canine garbage retrieval and leftover consumption service, but when we're out places (like the lake house), we have lots of cleanup! Especially today, when I had to vacuum the house twice because I cooked homemade biscuits, and they crumble very appealingly when crushed by little hands.

After he ate, he played quietly with his car for a long time, putting the people in and driving it across the floor. I tried to see if I could get online to post his reports, to no avail, and while I was working on the computer, he brought me a plate and spatula from his play kitchen and set it on the tv tray I was using as a desk. I thanked him profusely for cooking me a (pretend) meal and sampled it and gave my compliments to the chef. He was very pleased with this, and pretended to eat off the plate like I did, giggling and saying "Mmmmmm....". I had to put the computer away and get down on the floor and play with him because he was being so cute and fun. When he went down for his nap, the place was so very quiet and empty, and I flirted with depression for a quarter of an hour before taking the baby monitor and phone down to the dock to David and then heading out to explore the lake on my SeaDoo. Mommy time on a high speed watercraft. Good cure for the blues. We are home tonight, and it was hard to put Dennis to bed because we were enjoying his company so much. He plopped in my lap with his Over in the Meadow book and he learned to point out the animals I was reading about. He liked to find each animal in the big picture at the end that had all the animals in it. His favorite were the bees, which he pointed to with that chubby little damp finger while gleefully buzzing and then saying "BEE". Can you even imagine the cuteness? I don't think so.