Backyard Thoughts

As we wrote, we played outside after we got back from visiting Dr. Harrington and dinner at Chipotle. Ted worked from home part of the day and Julie took the day off entirely so we could tend to some things around the house, including an overhaul of the gardens in the backyard. Before we'd left to collect Clara for her doctor's appointment, we'd set up the water table so the sun would warm the water and in hopes that it would provide enough entertainment to allow us to do a bit more work in the yard.

As you can see, success! In the wake of our week at the lake house, Joe is quite comfortable around water, and quite keen on being in it no matter what. (Baby Doll is back as well. She'd been tucked in the garage for a time until Clara was walking with more confidence. When we play outside, Joe spends a fair amount of time ferrying things out of the garage and into the yard, including their automobiles.) Curiously, Joe will often pitch a mini-fit if Clara splashes him. We think it is not so much that he doesn't want to be splashed, as he just isn't expecting it. He wants to play with Clara, but you can sometimes see him wrestling with the limitations of her age. (Doesn't she know that you don't knock the arctic wonderland down from the water table? Doesn't she know we are taking thing out of the bucket, not putting things in it?) Still, she is so much more fun than we are. This morning, Clara was following him around while he said "Blue!" (or shoe? or goo?) over and over again at not quite the top of his lungs, but with conviction. So they get on, and maybe one day, not so far from now, they can open up a pretend restaurant, and bring us pretend lemonade which we can pretend to sip while we sit on real chairs, and watch them having real fun together.