Silly Girls

I’ve been accruing a rather large number of undocumented photographs on my camera. Mostly they are just of the girls being silly.

Miriam has been getting stuck a lot lately. This evening she was crawling around on Rachel’s bed. When she decided to sit down and have a rest she fell off the bed and wedged herself between Rachel’s mattress and her crib. (As you can see she wasn’t too upset about it).

She’s still climbing onto things too high for her to get down.

For about a week she turned completely hydrophobic—not in the rabies sense of the word but in the “morbidly afraid of bathing” sense. There was nothing I could do to get her to stick so much as a toe in the bathtub aside from plopping her right into the thick of things. That proved a dangerous method of getting her into the tub, though, because she would climb out faster than I could catch her.

I would set her in and before I knew it she would plop onto the floor. She did it so fast it looked like she was bubbling out of the tub like foam in a root beer glass. Her movements were very unhuman.

Eventually (like just this week) she warmed up to the idea of bathing again. It took one super-hands-on bath where I patted her back the whole time, saying, “Nice water! Oooh! Nice water! Nice water! Where are your toys? Oh, they like the water! It’s nice water! So warm! Nice water!” And then another less-hands-on bath before she was back to her regular bath-loving self.

It was a weird phase.

Especially because showering was still okay.

Whatever.

After her bath on Friday night (I think) I made her a funny hat out of her towel.

I tried to take a picture of Rachel with her funny towel hat, too, but she didn’t like her hat as much as she liked Meme’s so she ripped it off her head, threw it on the floor, and then pouted about it for ten minutes (or ten days…she’s been so pouty lately I can’t really tell which…it’s possible she won’t stop pouting for ten years).

We did have some happy moments with Rachel this week. Last Sunday she wore her Dorothy dress to church and we did her hair in a fancy braid-crown. She kept it in for something like four or five days.

Having church on Sunday mornings has been both a good and bad change for us. I think we’ve been late to church every week this year but we get nap time in the afternoon, so sacrificing our Sunday-morning sleep in is worth it, right?

Today we left the house at 8:57 AM. Considering we have to be at church at 9:00 AM that isn’t really a good time to be leaving the house. We meant to leave at least 12 minutes prior.

Given our lack of time we decided we had better drive to church. While we were driving our neighbour Vasanti flagged us down.

“I need your help!” she yelled.

So we pulled over and Andrew got out to help her. She’s got quite a remarkable story. She is an immigrant from Tanzania; she has three kids, one of whom was born with cerebral palsy and another who was hit by a car when he was thirteen and was left severely handicapped. Her husband died several years ago leaving her to tend to two very needy children all on her own—her eldest son no longer lives in the vicinity. Those needy children turned into needy adults and she just kept on taking care of them. Saloni has since passed on and now she’s left with just Mehul.

He was sitting in the car which was parked in their driveway.

“My car won’t start but I need to move it to get to my van,” she explained to Andrew, “And Mehul is just no help at all!”

Mehul yelled something incoherent from the car. It was probably a humorous rebuttal, knowing him.

Andrew helped her push the car out of the way and then we were on our way again. When we got to church they were still singing the opening hymn. Of course, they were on verse five of How Firm a Foundation but at least we made it before the opening prayer.

Rachel drew a picture for her Sunbeams teacher and delivered it to her right in the middle of the meeting. Wendy’s daughter, Natalie, sat with Rachel and Miriam while Andrew and I sang with the choir.

We sang Love at Home, which begins with the line “there is beauty all around when there’s love at home.”

This afternoon Rachel was singing, “There is cutie all around!”

We started making Valentines this week. It might be a little early for that but can you think of anything else crafty to do in January? I certainly can’t. Besides, February is a short month. There’s no way we can cram all our Valentine-making into such a short month.

I think Rachel was pretending to be a queen, which is why her favourite blanket is clothespinned under her chin.

Surprisingly enough, Andrew had no qualms about Rachel and I making Valentines this early in the year. I think we started on January 13th. That means we will have been “celebrating” Valentine’s Day for more than a month.

Andrew’s so picky about when he will allow Christmas celebrations to begin (no sooner than Thanksgiving pie) you’d think it would carry over to other holidays. Apparently it’s just Christmas.

Miriam is big enough to fit the camel jammies that Grandma bought for Rachel in Egypt. We still have to roll up the sleeves but they’re just too cute to keep packed away.

She has started to communicate by nodding her head yes and no. It’s very cute. She raises her eyebrows, puts her most serious face on, and then gravely gives her response. I will have to try to catch a video of it.        

Tonight when we were sitting on the potty we were naming body parts. That’s a game we play to keep Miriam entertained long enough to do her business. My eye was itchy so I started rubbing it and Miriam said, “Eye!”

Usually she says something a lot more grunty, something more like, “Eh!” Today she said it as clear as a bell.

She’s growing up!