kiya

Okay so yesterday involved going to the falconry class and encountering pointy murderbirbs and then puttering around Northampton briefly before returning home and briefly hiding before being called upon to help manage the Well of Infinite Drama (otherwise known as 'the monkeys').

Today was another up-early day to run to church, where the Coming of Age kids were giving their speeches, and opened up with the hymn that was the ... basically the theme song to the religious education module that I happened to assistant-teacher those specific kids, so I have a sort of warm fuzzy about that. "Something I did somehow made an impact on those kids! Which ... well, I wasn't sure it did at the time because the 12-13 year set is, um. Well, it's hard to tell if one's making an impact...."

After the service was the church picnic which was supposed to have happened last week but was called off for different weather. KJ and I performed "Stand By Me" at the 'parishoners sign up to do a five-minute gig', I have a video (taken by FM) that I haven't done anything with yet, the tent we were under attempted to depart partway through due to wind which led to me grabbing it, slamming it back onto the ground, and proclaiming "stand by me!" before several helpful gentlemen arrived to seize the relevant poles and hold the thing in place. There was much chatting. A polite I-read-a-book Wiccan enquired about the symbolism of my hat, which ... well, she's got decent instincts there. (Also I came up with an excellent summary of the core problem of IRAB paganism chatting with her.) The kids ran around making giant soap bubbles and playing in a sprinkler on the town common and eventually we went home (and made the relevant children change into dry clothes).

After about 40 minutes downtime we packed up and all went out again to a cookout at some friends' new house, slightly complexified by a plague exposure at work but we are dealing and there was masking. ER apparently picked up heat exhaustion while running around earlier and spent much of the evening asleep on an ice pack. Seeing friends was good.

I am very tired. Also I sunburned the tip of my nose yesterday and it's remarkably distracting.

So there is a custom among certain of my people that the test for someone being Excessively Punchdrunk is to say "A stick!*" at them and see if it makes them fall over, under the principle that the relevant joke is really only funny at about 3am.

KJ is bouncing around being kind of hyperkinetic and chatterboxy so I addressed her with "A STICK!" and she cracked up, but of course then I had to explain why I had addressed her with "A STICK!"

Long story short, we have now determined that dogs are assistive devices for disabled boomerangs.






* "What do you call a boomerang that doesn't come back?"
"A stick!"

ER vomited suddenly a few days ago, or maybe yesterday, I genuinely have no conception of the passage of time here, startling nobody more than herself, I think, but that has meant keeping her at home while flailing about trying to get her plague-tested so she can go back to school even though we have no real plausible vector other than school and she's otherwise fine. (I am reasonably comfortable with her school's precautions at the moment though who knows what the future will bring; I am not comfortable with the older kids' schools' precautions, so.) Fortunately she and AR are playing nicely together, mostly.

I, of course, keep showing signs of having another cold, because life is just like that. artan's meds are keeping the sore throat punted down, mostly, but I just took my last NyQuil.

I am... keeping chapter-a-day pace on Nano so far, amazingly enough. I really want to finish ITS so I can edit it and CP together, at this point, and I'm pretty sure a Nano push can finish it. Need to work on my Cinderella inversion some more, that has a deadline that is real.

I have been rewarding myself occasionally for finishing things by playing Hades, and on run 16 I managed to get past Meg (and nearly got the Hydra as well). Sheer luck in boons, honestly.

The plan was fairly straightforward: church service, maybe take KJ to RE (and picnic sushi if I did), back and work on the office. That is indeed a thing that happened, and also I grabbed some curly fries from the pizza place next door to the sushi place, because I didn't get any last week and I like curly fries a whole lot.

While I was doing this there were other things going on: getting AR a zombie plague test (not that we believed she had it but it was due diligence and also, y'know, general paranoia) and artan going to get supplies for the sukkah. There were complexities with the plague tester with the paperwork (I probably typoed or something when setting it up, or put the date in European order instead of USonian order or something) but I wasn't the one to fix them. But also artan's car broke down.

So on the way back from zombie plague test, the children were dropped here and Teine went up to jump artan's car, which ran for a bit and then decided Nope. The world is complicated, AAA was called, et cetera, et cetera, and so forth. I couldn't do anything useful about that (the car I had access to is a hybrid and the last time we needed to jump something we tried that and determined that it was not plausible with our accessible tech) so I went to work in the library. whispercricket came home with the kids and expressed her state of angst and stress so I handed her curly fries because I could not do anything useful about the rest of it but knew she has a love of curly fries too and so that was a thing that would help. Also I fed the other kids some 'sushi egg' (tamago is a favorite, obtained for them when I was getting lunch) which staved off some amount of chaos.

I decided the shelves were probably cured enough to not stink up the place and so I started putting things in the deeper shelves. And then I did some rearrangement of things on the shelves in the office-that-was, and measured space. And AR was driving her sisters batty so I brought her up to help me with things like "bring me four shelf pegs and hand them to me one at a time" and "could you put this pile of magazines on that shelf". The tall/oversized books have been pulled onto the deeper bookshelves; some shelves have been consolidated and rearranged; the obnoxious four-inch-tall shelf has vanished from the center unit of the shelves from the office-that-was, though there is still one on the left one. Various things have been moved around to new and improved locations so that I have a hope of unpacking the remaining boxes. Anyway, there is progress (I think that should be visible). (Three white boxes remain, bottom center, and then I found two other boxes of miscellaneous books to put away.)

Chinese food was ordered for dinner because there was too much day. ER actually ate some of my dish and declared it really tasty so that is exciting, actually, since she is extremely food conservative and mostly wants to eat apples with cinnamon on them, bread, plantain chips, and cookies. (We had drama earlier in the week where the three younger set demolished an entire challah during FM's Hebrew school because the bread consumption was not being monitored and they decided they wanted more than the one piece they were permitted. FM appears to feel that if her little sisters tell her to do something she wants an excuse for that is sufficient.)

Bedtime routine was interrupted by ER having a coughing fit, staring at her hands in bewilderment, and proclaiming, "I fink I lost a toof. My first one!" and then having to parade her around to show all the parents the hole and the tooth, with the tiny herald that is AR shouting at the top of her (very loud) voice about how ER has a hole in her mouth. Eventually they were herded into bed and I went and did more shelving.

I am very tired now. Also, sore throat, so I've clearly caught whatever AR had.

Today FM led the junior monkeys in some sort of extended fantasy scenario (there was a The Floor Is Made Of Lava sequence, and a ... rope bridge timing challenge? and some other things) in costume (giraffe for FM, dragon for ER, and cat for AR). This was fabulous in many ways, not least because it occupied them entirely for I think about two hours.

Before they embarked upon this fabulous journey, I heard FM in the other room carefully herding her sisters with a "Before we begin, we need to make a prayer to the god of adventures, to keep us safe."

I do not know who the God of Adventures is but I can totally see her setting up a shrine to it.

KJ is singing "Let it Go" in her sleep.

This is at least more coherent and comprehensible than most of the things teinedreugan says in his sleep....

Dance around singing "Happy birthday to Han'kah! Happy birthday to you!"

"She's like a vegetarian wolverine!"

There is a little playground about a quarter of a mile down the road, hidden in the trees and fences such that we only noticed it was there when we saw a tandem stroller trying to make the cross to get to it.

Today I brought KJ there.

It was ...

She spent a while sitting snuggled in my lap filling my socks with sand, and a more apt metaphor for parenthood I know not. I sang to her, and she jumped and startled every time a truck went by beyond the fence.

After a bit, I put her midway down on one of the plastic slides - there was a sort of twin slide, and I put her on the inner curve - and slid her down. We did that one or two more times, and then she sat at the bottom, dug her toes into the sand, turned, and started to climb.

She clambered up the slide to the first curve, and slid down. And dug her toes in, planted her hands flat on the blue plastic, and kept going. I lay down on the other slide and watched her climb. Every failure made her laugh, gleeful in her experience of unsuccess. She gripped the sides of the slide, pulled herself to her feet, and clambered, a little higher this time, making it partway up the curve before she slid, cackling, down to the bottom again.

Each setback inspired new joy, new experimentation, and each slide to the bottom was a reward.

And there is a lesson.

I stood next to her as she climbed, and as she reached the curve, I rested one hand under her foot, giving her just a little more purchase.

She made it around the curve. I put my other hand under her other foot, and she kept climbing.

We climbed the slide together, like that, her putting forth the effort, the drive, the desire, and me giving her a place to stand.

She reached the top, and sat there, turning back to me, radiant and laughing, triumphant. She had done the work, and I had helped her find her way up.

A more apt metaphor for parenthood I know not.

Really, the Very Hungry Caterpillar is kind of a genius take on the board book genre.

(What with the drilling holes through the pages and all.)