The Yellow Dot Skirmishes

Here is Birdie, in the penalty box so to speak.  You can tell that she was really broken up about being there, right, Brigade?  These days, as dinner winds down, Clara winds up.  Her first trick is to dash from the table to Joe's bed and fling herself on it, cackling and screaming.  Sometimes this will set Joe to wailing and crying and other times, it will make him also act like a goof, keeping both bambini distracted from getting themselves out of their clothes and into the bathroom for their bath.  Naturally then, they are good and wound up for bath time in the smallest room of the house with hard surfaces everywhere where nothing could go wrong with three people packed in it, two of them wet, one of the wet ones them incapable of reason and the other only just barely so, and a dog wandering in and out.

The shenanigans continue after bath.  Joe attempts to put on his pajamas while Birdie attempts to distract him from that by running around hither and yon and doing anything except "stand on the yellow dot."  Longtime readers and visitors to Raleigh House may have observed that the rug in the bambini's room has yellow, green, and cream-colored dots on it.  One of the yellow dots in positioned such that Clara can stand on it and use her crib for support as she does it ("I do it!  I do it!  I do it!").  What Birdie likes to do is stand on the green dot, look at you with a grin and say, "Green dot?!"  This is when she isn't busy running around, running off with Joe's pajamas, or throwing herself on his bed.

With just one bambini, one can quash this sort of behavior with some degree of success by ignoring it.  This strategy also works if both bambini are acting like hooligans.  But it is less successful when one bambini is doing his four-year-old utmost to toe the line so he can do his quiet activity with Daddy and read books with Mommy, and the other bambini is doing her two-year-old utmost to distract him and everyone else from anything and everything save her antics.  One starts to feel more than a little ridiculous, too, standing there snapping and snarling about a yellow dot.  There is also this: the two nights before last, Julie hadn't read books to Clara which made Julie very sad, and Clara, too, once she caught up--too late--to the consequences of acting like a wild thing.

So we'd decided to separate the bambini during pajama donning time.  For now, Joe will get his on in the living room or porch while Clara is made to stand on the yellow dot to get into hers.  If she is not on the yellow dot and on her way to being in her pajamas by the time Joe is into his pajamas, then she'll go straight into her pajamas and to bed.  We hope that removing Clara's favorite audience member will help, and that she'll understand the consequences of acting so silly between dinner time and bed time sooner rather than later.

That was our plan.  But last night, Ted had to go and pick up Berenice (someone forgot when she was coming across the river form St. Paul), and when Clara started in and up before bath, Julie decided that she wasn't up for the whole bathroom scene.  So Clara went straight into her pajamas, and then was asked to sit in front of the doorway to the bathroom, which she did, very nicely, and while chirping, "I not crying.  I not crying," no worse for the wear.  And then Julie read her books, which made Julie very happy because she will be out of town for the next three bedtimes. Birdie seemed happy, too.