Is always an adorable answer, but can also be humorous because she doesn't pay any attention to whether or not the answer of "sure do" is an appropriate grammatical follow-up to whatever she's been asked. Instead she uses it as a straight synonym.
For example, if I said, "Phoebe, do you want some breakfast?" and she answered, "Sure do!" that...makes sense...grammatically.
But yesterday we had a package dropped off and the deliverer of said package rang the doorbell, which is always very exciting at our house. The kids run to the bell like a pack of puppies (or ignore it completely; there is no in between). Andrew was the one to retrieve the package and since it had my name on it, he handed it to Phoebe and said, "Hey, Phoebe, can you give this to Mommy?"
"Sure do!" she exclaimed.
And, see, that response doesn't make grammatical sense in this case. "Sure can!" would have worked. "Sure do!" doesn't work. But it is still an adorable response.
*****
The other night Andrew was very excited to sleep in his very own bed. It has been a long while. He spent several nights (weeks?) on a mattress in the music room. And then he spent several nights sleeping on the chair in our bedroom so he could be somewhat upright (he and I both developed an incredible cough with this last round of COVID (which has been just swell)).
"Finally," he said. "I'm going to sleep in my own bed!"
But then, at around 2:30 in the morning I woke up to hear someone rustling around in the hallway. Not even just "rustling" really, but outright rifling through cabinets and things.
We've been having some trouble with squirrels lately. Like we know they're in the walls in places (we have people coming to help us with that on Monday), so I thought, "This is it. They've made it inside the house."
It was either that or there was a person out there rifling through things, which somehow seemed worse than squirrels.
I poked Andrew until he woke up.
"Listen!" I hissed.
Andrew jumped up, grabbed his phone, and ran to the bedroom door.
We don't even latch our bedroom door at night (yet) because Phoebe likes to be able to come in. Usually it seems like she runs full speed ahead from her bedroom to ours and then crashes through the door—BOOM! It usually hits the wall, she opens it with such force. And then she'll close it and pitter-patter over to our bed.
So I knew it wasn't her in the hallway.
But it did allow Andrew to stealthily swing the door open and catch the culprit by surprise!
He shone his flashlight/phone into the hallway and there stood...
Phoebe.
She stared at him with wide eyes, clutching a big ol' vat of Vaseline she'd wrestled down from a shelf.
"Hi Daddy," she said.
"What are you doing?" he asked her.
"Gettin' this," she told him, still cradling that vat of Vaseline in her arms.
"But why though?" he asked. "It's the middle of the night. Come on, let's go back to bed."
She has never—to our knowledge—decided to get into stuff instead of finding Mommy in the middle of the night before. She has, however, gotten into that big ol' vat of Vaseline before. She knows it's fun to smear. Thankfully we got to her before she managed to open the lid!
 |
| January 23—Phoebe learns to open the Vaseline |
Andrew ended up falling asleep in her bed, so he didn't get to sleep in his bed after all. And she was such a stinker, too! It took her a couple of hours to be ready to fall back asleep, so Andrew was still awake when I woke up at 4:00 in the morning.
I sat bolt upright in bed and listened. Something was scritch-scratching around some papers in my room. I've heard such scuttling before and so I told myself there just was a cockroach somewhere.
These words might not sound very comforting to you, but they are nonetheless comforting to me.
Cockroaches are a sign that spring is coming and those sneaky bugs (who spend most of their time outdoors) will start crawling through cracks in the doorways and getting inside the house more and more.
"It's just a cockroach," I told myself. Either that or something worse—a mouse! A snake!
I tried to coax Alexa to turn on the bedroom light but (a) my voice would't work right since I'd just woken up and have this awful cough and (b) in my having-just-woken-up stupor, I couldn't remember what to say to Alexa to have her turn on the light for me.
First I used the phrase that her turn on the lights downstairs.
"Good way to confuse an intruder," Andrew told me in the (actual) morning.
Then I told her to just turn on the lights, but she responded and told me we have multiple devices coded as lights. Ugh.
I finally got her to turn on the light and the scritch-scratching stopped.
I didn't know where to begin looking for a little critter, so I...decided I'd just go to the bathroom instead...since my glasses were on the bathroom counter, anyway, and I'd need them to do any sort of effective looking. But as it turned out, I didn't have to do much looking at all!
On my way out of the bathroom I saw exactly what I was looking for—a cockroach was brazenly shuffling across the carpet.
I grabbed a Cool-Whip container that was sitting on my bedroom floor for some reason—my bedroom is filled with inexplicable things (right now, for example, I see a toy cannon, a pair of Alexander's underwear, one of Phoebe's water bottles, and a whole armful of books Phoebe brought in and chucked on my floor; it's a constant battle)—and covered the cockroach, prompted Alexa to turn off all the lights in the house that I'd ha her turn on (accidentally or otherwise) and went back to bed.
*****
"Phoebe, did you have a good sleep?" I asked Phoebe this morning.
"Sure do!" she said.
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