I made a zoo!

Tonight after dinner, Joe decided to make himself a zoo. First he gathered up all his stuffed animals and dropped them on the floor, then he collected various object with which to make a fence. We gather there was a school activity recently or he has come to the same opinion as his parents, which is that our house is a bit of a zoo.

Deer

Tonight, on the way home, we saw a deer. After we passed, it dashed to the other side of the road. We were talking about it, and speculated that it must be headed home, too, for dinner. Joe agreed, and then added that it would have to take a bath, and go to sleep, and read books with its Mama.

Moon River

Brigade, Our Birdie was apparently standing on the little sofa in the little library in her room today, and attempted to take flight, and thus has a rather large goose egg in the making on her forehead, and a rug burn on her nose! One of her cheeks is all a-flame, historically a telltale sign of a tooth coming in, so by the time she'd supped and bathed, she was clearly over the day. She suffered one book, and then got down from the chair, looked at Julie, and bawled. Julie took this to mean Birdie wanted to turn in. So Birdie was taken to her nest. Julie even skipped the singing.

When Joe was Clara's age, Julie used to sing to him when she trimmed his nails as a distraction. The standard nail trimming tune is now ABCD (as Joe first called the ABCs--does his still. . .?), but the original nail trimming ditty was The Beatles' Eight Days A Week, for no other reason than it popped into Julie's head one day and seemed fitting.

Clara has a soothing song, too: Moon River. It's almost always broken out at bed time, when Clara is all discombobulated. But tonight, Clara was all, "Huckleberry friend, let's skip it," and drifted off, to sleep.

The Garden Gnome, In Her Glory

Halloween 2011

Halloween 2011 is in the bag (the pumpkin?), and it was about as grand as you can get. As we headed out of the house at dusk, Clara spied the crescent moon, pointed up at it, and said "Moo!" Then, the bambini piled into the wagon and we began our abbreviated and selective tour of the neighborhood, the scent of woodsmoke in the air. Our first stop was Celebrity Babysitters Sara and Emily's house where Emily, dressed as a cat, was dolling out (full-sized!) candy bars. Clara motored up to the doors by herself, hot on Joe's heels, like this wasn't her first time at all. Of course, trick-or-treating is all about gathering things into a bucket and as our Devoted Readers know, Our Birdie, is all about gathering things into a bucket. We hit the twins house on the corner, Graham's old house, Darby's house, and a few others along the way that looked inviting. Between houses, in the wagon, Clara kept poking her little hand into her pumpkin, popping out with something, and then plunging her hand back into the pumpkin to pull out something else.

Once home, Joe said we had to get ready for our trick-or-treaters and ran off to et his pumpkin. Fans, he was all set to offer his candy to our trick-or-treaters! Presumably the confusion stemmed from the fact that many people distributed their candy in the same vessel in which Joe was collecting his candy: your classic orange plastic jack-o-lantern. Once that confusion was cleared up, Joe asked if he could have a treat. We told him he could have as many as he wanted so he and Julie settled in on the porch to wait for trick-or-treaters while Ted gave Clara a quick bath. He began with M&Ms. From there, he moved onto an (organic--we kid you not, Dear Readers) sour apple lollipop. Our Hero maintained he liked it, and Julie thought, "Better you than me, Pal-o."