Gardening with Clara, Part 2

 This is how we get ready to garden: I put on a tank top and shorts and get a hat.  I take off all Clara's clothes, and smear her with SPF 110 sunblock until she looks like I dipped her in a jar of mayonnaise.  Then I spray her with aerosolized sunblock in case there's a spot I missed.

She is allowed to go down the two concrete back steps on her own, while I watch and supervise.  She skooches down one step and stops to enjoy sitting on a step.  She realizes it might be more fun if she had one of her babies with her, so she climbs back up the step, leaving behind a greasy sunscreen print of her bottom and thighs. She comes back with two babies.  She thinks how to navigate the steps with the babies.  She puts them each in a half nelson, with their heads sticking out from her armpits.  This is so her hands are available if she needs them to catch herself.

Ugly Baby nearly always gives Clara trouble in this configuration, because her battery-packed abdomen is so heavy and her legs get caught on the lip of the threshold.  Really, Ugly Baby gives Clara the most trouble of all her babies, and this is perhaps why she loves her the most. She always stops on her way down the steps to tenderly kiss Ugly Baby.

On a side note, Simon loves to squish Ugly Baby's malleable rubber skull in so she looks like an alien of some kind.  You'd think Clara would be appalled by this violence to Ugly Baby, but she actually thinks it's hilarious.  It invites discourse, perhaps, on the primal nature of parenting.  Animals that eat their young come to mind.

Outside, I turn the hose on a bit so Clara can splash around. She puts her toe in the water and whispers, "Ohhhhh.  Haaaahhhhht."

"No, Hon.  It's cold," I say.

Playing in the hose is one of Clara's favorite things to do.  She fills up an old water bottle over and over, and dumps it on the grass.  She found an old measuring cup that the previous owner left in the dirt.  From the looks of it, the previous owner's dog chewed on it regularly.  Clara likes to fill it up with water, too, and to wash the dirt off it.  I'm okay with it as long as it's outside.

Once, Simon said he saw Clara lick the chewed-up measuring cup.  I was horrified, but Simon is more blase about germs than me.  He says Clara must be fairly impervious to germs. Despite my constant washing of her babies, they are somehow always covered in dirt and food grime, and she makes out with them all day, he explains.  Therefore she must have the constitution of a gladiator.

Clara can play in the hose for like an hour without being distracted.  I always end up turning it off before then because I feel guilty about wasting water in a desert.

Immediately she comes to hang on me as I weed.

"'Nack, Mommy."

"Okay." I go inside, wash my hands, and get her a saltine cracker smeared with peanut butter. "Now, don't show this to the sugar ants," I say.

A minute passes, and I hear her shriek in horror.  She's dipped the cracker in the dirt.

"Maybe I can fix it," I say, brushing at the dirt.  Of course, it's sticking to the peanut butter, so brushing at it only mixes it in.  Now it looks like a peanut-butter, crushed-Oreo saltine cracker.  I use my finger to wipe the peanut butter from the cracker and then the edge of the concrete patio to wipe the peanut butter from my finger.  Then I look down at the dirty cracker and think, "Wait.  What am I doing?"

And I go inside to get her another.