Bedtime

    Putting Clara to bed used to be a major undertaking.  We'd read her ten to twelve books.  She'd have a "'nack," usually a banana or some graham crackers.  We'd rock briefly in the glider while she stared at the underwater scene her Fisher Price projector shone on the ceiling.  Ugly Baby, her favorite doll, needed to be rocked.  Afterwards, she'd hand the doll to Simon for safekeeping. He would hold it in his customary fashion, with its head wedged between his cheek and shoulder, and its body hanging limply down his chest.  He needed his hands free to select books and tuck the blankets under her crib mattress.
     Then we'd stand at her window and say goodnight to all the things outside: dogs, cats, trees, shrubs, sticks, rocks, neighbor's shed, fish weathervane on top of neighbor's shed, grapevines, bugs, moon and "luna," which is the Spanish word for moon.  At that point, Simon, who likes to play around with words, liked to chime in, "Good-night, Tom Luna." (Tom Luna is the superintendent of Idaho schools.  Not a bad guy, but his degree is not in education, as one might presume. It's in "weights and measures." He got it online.  I wonder if, in some corner of his unimaginative heart, he feels a warmth each night.  The warmth of the Shifrin family wishing him a good night's rest.)
    After saying goodnight to everything outside, we'd sing "A Bushel and A Peck." Then Simon and I would each have to kiss and hug Clara five or six times before finally putting her into her crib.  As we left her room, she'd scream baby obscenities at us, usually including the phrase, "Nai no wannu!" and "MommyMommyMommyMommyMommy!!" Sometimes also, inexplicably, "Abu Dhabi!!!!"
     It couldn't go on like that.
    "We need to spend less than an hour and a half putting her to bed," I told Simon. "It's like a marathon.  I'm so exhausted afterwards that I sit and stare at the wall."
    We brought the book count down to three.  Snack could be eaten concurrently.  Teeth could be brushed efficiently by pinning baby to the ground and injecting levity by first softly "brushing" nose, elbows and knees.  Window routine could be done away with altogether.  Screw Tom Luna.  Clara elected to drop, "A Bushel and A Peck." She seemed to find it tiresome.
     These days, we finish the third book and Clara says, "Bed."  She lets us each kiss her once.  If we try for another, she pushes us away with dimpled hands.  I think she's grown averse to Simon's scratchy beard and my chronic bad breath.  She arranges her stuffed animals on one side of her crib (they take up an entire half).  Carefully buried underneath the animals are her Winnie the Pooh figurines, a book called, "Good Dog, Carl," and her favorite rubber ducky.  Any attempt to dis-assemble the arrangement brings strong protestations.  She carefully puts her sippy cup on top of her stuffed dog each night.
     Then she points at the projector.
     "'Ic," she says.  We turn on the music dial.
     She balls two blankets (a soft pink one, and a brown one from her great-grandma Nina) in her arms and looks at us.
     "Out," she says.  If Wilbur is still in the room, she says, "Dog, out."
     Then she drops like a WWE wrestler into the corner of the crib, landing so her head is perfectly wedged into the folds of her crib bumper and the blankets are piled next to her.  And that's how she falls asleep.

Roaring Springs Water Park

     Yesterday we went to Roaring Springs water park for Simon's company picnic.  For those of you who are not Boise natives, Roaring Springs is the summertime mecca for Southern Idaho thrill seekers who don't want to travel to a larger town with more elaborate theme parks (Salt Lake's Lagoon, Anaheim's Disneyland).  Or for Southern Idaho natives who crave the turquoise glimmer of the Caribbean but have neither the time off nor the disposable income to go there.  Or for those who grew up swimming in the frothy, organic stew of the Snake River and improvising algae-covered irrigation chutes for water slides.
     I belong to all of the above categories.
     Clara, in her flowered bathing suit with tri-level ruffles across the bodice, was so gob-smacked by the park she didn't know where to start.  There was the kiddie lagoon, with a giant faucet that gushed water, and a big plastic mountain from which sprawled tunnels and slides, and which was topped with a dolphin that squirted water over everything.  There was a snaking kiddie slide that you went down in a tiny inner-tube, and two others that you went down on your bottom.
     She circled the kiddie pool area, running into and out of the water, her head swiveling to try to take it all in.

     "Come on Honey, let's go down the slides!" I yelled, swinging her onto my hip and hustling up the walk.  Kids were bunched all together at the top, waiting their turn for the slides.  Clara, who is still rather fuzzy on the concept of waiting her turn, started to thrash.
     "'Ide! 'Ide!" she hollered, pointing at the slide and trying to snake out of my grip.  Attempting to keep my post-pregnancy paunch sucked into my bathing suit's control panels, I rolled her to the front of my torso.  She reached down and yanked on the curly brown mop of the kid waiting in line in front of us.
    "No, no! This me!" she yelled.
    The kid, bless his heart, winced stoically but didn't say anything.  He was held firmly in the grasp of the slides' powerful magic.
     "I'm so sorry," I murmured. "Clara, we do not pull other peoples' hair.  Especially not strangers' hair.  Well, anybody's hair, really."
     "Mommy! Mommy, Mommy, Mommy," she moaned, arching her back.  "Down, down. Nope.  Me down! Ai down!"
     We finally got to the top of a big, yellow slide.  She wanted to run down it.  I had to force her to sit down and was rewarded by her squealing giggle as we shot to the bottom.  The water down there was rather too shallow for an adult.  As my hind end hit the rubber padding at the slide's base, I felt an unpleasant sprong-ing sensation in my lumbar spine.  It registered only briefly.

     After we finished at the kiddie pool, we did the "Lazy River" on inner-tubes.  Clara was under the impression that she was riding her inner tube the same as the others around us, with her tiny body in the middle and her arms grasping the inner-tube's sides.  She giggled and kicked, ignoring the fact that I was awkwardly draped over the side of the tube, one hand supporting her under her swim diaper and the other arm under her armpits.   Those around us could probably barely see her pigtails over the side of the tube. We came to a raging set of waterfalls.
     "Daddy!  Daddy!" she said, looking around frantically.
     "He's right there," I said, swiveling her tube so she could see Simon safely bobbing alongside us.
     "Oh Daddy!" she said.  Then she pointed at the falls. "Pool.  Me pool."
     Though it was three years ago, it seemed like only yesterday that Simon and I were here in the "Lazy River," him pretending to be a professional kayaker who lost his purchase in the rapids and was hurtling to a certain death under the falls, and me the awesomely-muscled female park ranger who would ultimately catch him and drag him to the surface in the crook of her arm.
     After the "Lazy River," Clara started to get tired and very hungry.  She let herself become absorbed in the decorative basalt rocks that abutted the sidewalks.  She tried out several of the hundreds of lawn chairs set out around the various pools.  The chairs had flexible plastic slats that her legs kept slipping through.  She found one she liked and tiredly ate a box of raisins on it.  

    Simon let me go do one of the grown-up rides with his co-workers while he watched Clara.  Though we had been at the park for more than an hour at that point, I was still so excited that I kept repeating myself.  Simon gave me the look he reserves for when we go to parties with mechanical bulls and buffet-style Chinese restaurants with soft-serve ice cream dispensers.  The look said: "I'm going to need you to take it down a notch."

    At the picnic part of the festivities, Clara sat on my lap and feasted on barbecue chicken, pasta salad, cantaloupe and brownies. By the time the day was done, and I'd cleaned all the baked beans off Clara's face (after she delicately kissed me on the lips), and gotten all the rotini pasta out of my cleavage, we were all exhausted.

Wilbur goes to the vet

     On Tuesday we had to take Wilbur to the vet.  He had been eating copious quantities of grass, so much so that we had to make him walk in the middle of the street on his walks to keep him from other people's lawns.  The grass made him barf, in the yard, in the garage, in our bedroom.  (He ate some of the barf in the garage before I was able to clean it up.  I was extremely grossed out, but also somehow grateful.)
     When we arrived at the vet's, Wilbur bailed out of the car before I could stop him.  I caught him and put his leash on, then stood on the end of the leash while I finagled Clara out of her car seat.  She immediately bucked and thrashed because she wanted to walk, and she wanted to hold Wilbur's leash.
     "You can walk, but you have to hold my hand.  We hold hands in the parking lot, no questions asked," I said.
     "Yes," she agreed.  I threaded the end of Wilbur's leash through my arm, put Clara down and firmly clutched her hand.
     "No, no, no!  Me 'Bur, me hold!" she yelled, melting to the ground. I bent to get her. My shoulder bag, pregnant with wet wipes, granola bars, wallet, cell phone and a few library books, swung down off my shoulder and hit me in the side of the head.  I said a few choice words.
    Inside the vet's examining room, Clara went on an explore.  She found a drawer filled with syringes.  She pulled brochures about puppies off a brochure rack.  She pretended to leaf through Oprah magazine.  She rifled through my bag and found a miniature box of raisins and a banana.  She offered the banana to the veterinary technician.
    The vet came in and glanced at Clara warily.
    I had to hug Wilbur and say things like, "Are you Mama's good boy?  Yes, you're Mama's good boy!" to keep him from flipping out while they shone lights into his ears and snout.
    They wanted to weigh him.
    "41.9," said the technician.
    "Wow!" the vet replied in surprise. "I would have put him in the thirties."
    "He's muscular," I said, surprised at the hissy note of defensiveness in my voice.
    "W-e-e-e-ellll," the vet said, shrugging her shoulders with a sheepish grin. "I'm gonna say he's overweight.  He's a little fleshy in the chest-y.  I mean, do we need a man bra here ha-ha?"
     The vet said Wilbur was probably eating grass because he thinks it's delicious.  We just need to keep him from doing it.  I guess that means we need to xeriscape our yard.  Maybe we can also blindfold him and wrap his snout in Saran Wrap when we go for our walks.
 

Running Wild

     This morning I came upon Clara sitting on Wilbur's velour body pillow, wearing her footie jammies and a pair of cheap headphones she found in my nightstand drawer and pretending to read The Very Hungry Caterpillar.
   "Clara, Mom has to take a shower, so I need you to come hang out in the bathroom with me."
    "Bash?"
    "Shower."
    "Nope. Nai no wannu." But she smiled at me winsomely and finally followed me into the bathroom.
   While I soaped down, she put one foot in the wire soap holder that usually adheres to the shower wall with suction cups (it had fallen and made a terrific, exciting noise) and the other foot in one of my tin mixing bowls that had somehow found its way upstairs from the kitchen.  She tried to walk, banging and sliding and nearly falling.
     I got out of the shower and she began to rummage through my dresser drawers.  She flung aside tank-tops and workout shirts to find her favorite shirt of mine, a lime green Tee with a cartoon baby on it.  The cartoon baby is saying, "Argle Barble Babble," and the caption underneath says, "Read to me."  She hugged it to her chest.
     "Please don't take clothes out of my drawers, Clara," I said firmly, looking at the mess.  "These are Mama's things.  They belong to Mama."
     She dug through my underwear drawer and found my purple bra while I was blow-drying my hair (purple is one of her favorite colors, I think).  She threaded her leg through one strap and put the other strap over her head, so it rested around her shoulder and one side of her neck.  It looked like she was wearing some sort of body armor.  She wandered to her room, twittering softly to herself.
     Later in the day, we went to the Y so I could work out.  On the way into the building, Clara bucked and thrashed and refused to be carried.  I put her down, and, with deep concentration, she began to step on each of the petunias the branch administrator had carefully planted by the front door.
     In Childwatch, she had a diaper blow-out that dirtied her dress. So on the way out of the building, she wore only her diaper, some red and white polka-dotted bloomers, and her Crocs.  She caught her reflection in the windows and began to strut down the sidewalk, patting her tummy with splayed baby hands.
      After we got back home and I had fed her dinner, I brought her upstairs for a bath. She streaked back and forth through the house naked and finally ran into my bedroom, where I was folding laundry. She made her way stealthily to the closet, where Simon's work shirts hang on the lower closet rung.  She wove in and out of them, feeling the different fabrics, and then she crouched behind them, tooting softly.
   

Three-course meal with Shar and Kamilla (Shar's mom)

Aperitifs:
Cold water in BPA-free sippy cups, identical except for color, to avoid arguments over which is better. I give Clara a blue one.
"Tank-u," she murmurs.
  Shar gets a purple one.
"Purple!" she yells.

Course 1: Papa Murphy's Take n' Bake gourmet vegetarian with chicken.  Clara asks to sit in the "tair" next to me.  I dish up small chunks of pizza in a plastic bowl and give the bowl to Clara.
"Mmmmmm...Me, Mommy," she says, cradling the bowl in her lap.  She's wearing only a pair of teal underpants with a monkey on them.  Diapers are simply unthinkable today.  Her skin is silky and peachy-hued, her limbs round and soft.  Her little brown belly sticks out over underpants.
She munches a bite of pizza with mushroom, swallows hugely, looks at me with clear blue eyes and holds up her sippy cup.  As if it were an interesting archeological artifact she found under the inflatable wading pool.
"Mai tup," she says seriously.
She eats too fast because she wants to go play.

Course 2: More drinks, on the potty.  Shar has confessed she needs to go.  She sits for a long while.  There's some confusion over the cups.  A skirmish ensues.  Clara realizes she's left her cup at the top of the stairs.  Finally Shar hops off, not having gone at all, and Clara takes a seat.  Her feet turn inward and she clasps her hands in her lap.  She's briefly distracted by her belly button, but then her shoulders round forward and her face flushes peachy-pink and acquires the intensity of a woman giving birth.      
     After a moment she hops off and we see a tiny puddle inside the potty. Kamilla and I erupt into cheers and Shar shrieks in jealous rage.  She must sit on the potty again.  She quickly produces a whole lot of pee and we give her a good cheer.
      Outside, a moment later, Clara looks down at her soaked underpants in surprise.  Her baby hands go palms-up, and she shrugs her shoulders in astonishment and consternation.
     "Pee-pee, potty," she says, patting the front of her underpants.  She puts her hand in the warm puddle on the concrete patio. "Pee-pee. Mai potty," she says softly.

Interlude: The girls decide they are done eating pizza, and go downstairs to cook in the play kitchen.  Shar finds the pink plastic cradle. Clara snatches it from her hands and beats a hasty retreat with it.  She holds the cradle's fabric-covered handle in the crook of her arm as though it were a purse.
     "Clara, Shar had this," I say, bringing the cradle back to Shar. Shar puts a plastic roast fowl in the cradle and rocks it, softly crooning a lullabye to it.
     "Let's go upstairs and get your baby to show Shar," I suggest to Clara.
     We go to her crib and find Ugly Baby.  Ugly Baby, whose striped purple pants are perpetually falling off, due to her misshapen, battery-packed butt.  Ugly Baby, who hasn't worn a shirt in months, whose fabric torso is stained, whose cries seem more and more like a sad, pensive chicken.
     We bring Ugly Baby and Winnie the Pooh downstairs and I attempt to wrench Ugly Baby from Clara's arms so Shar can give her a test drive in the cradle.
     "No, no!  Mai bee-bee!  No, Mommy, no, no!" Clara shrieks. She turns and burrows her face into the couch, clutching Ugly Baby around the neck in one arm and Winnie the Pooh in the other.  She must keep her babies safe.
     We decide to let Shar hold one of the lesser babies.  She finds Raggedy Ann in the toy box but quickly chucks her aside. ("She doesn't trust gingers," Simon later says.)  She finally settles on Bahama baby.  Clara is fine with this, until Shar looks away.  Then she sneaks over and collects both Bahama baby and Raggedy Ann, and brings them to where Simon and I are sitting.  Being especially careful with Ugly Baby, she wedges the babies between us, where she knows they will be warm and safe.

Course 3: Graham crackers smeared with peanut butter, water.

A Day in the Life

     Today Clara woke up and ran wild around the house.  I couldn't get her to settle down enough to dress her.
     "Hi, 'uddy!" she yelled at Wilbur.  "'Bur, 'Buh! 'Buh!  Eeedle deedle deedle dee.  Beedle weedle!"  Wilbur lay in the upstairs hall, panting.  She straddled him like a horse.  "Ha-ha!" she yelled.
     "Honey, please do not ride Wilbur like a horse.  It's not good for his back."
     Wilbur looked back at her and then wiggled out from under her, sending her rolling.  "Ha-ha!" she said, getting to her feet.
    "Mommy! 'Nack!"
    "What do you want for snack?"
    "'Oast dam."
     I made her some toast with blackberry jam. "Tair peese," she said, pointing to one of the chairs at the table.
    "Okay, but sit on your bottom.  On your bottom!  All the way.  No squatting.  And no climbing on the table, okay?"
     "Dam.  Eeeeeeeee-oasty. Dam, dam, dam.  Mommy, Mommy, Mommy." She nodded her head with pleasure.
    After snack she went to the living room to play with a big box that a plastic basketball hoop came in. She'd created a dent in the middle of the box, so it was like a slide.  I looked closer and realized that at some point in the last few days, while she was running around diaper-less, she'd peed on the "slide."
     "Okay, let's go downstairs," I said, lifting her off the box.
     Later, we got ready to go to the library.  By the front door, she suddenly became fragile.
     "Mommy! Mommy!"
     "What's wrong?"
     I crouched next to her, and she let out a combination moan-chuckle.
     "He doo doe," she said, handing me her Crocs.  Then she twined her arms around my neck and curled her legs up like a little monkey, snuggling against me.  I kissed her behind the ear and put her shoes on.  It seemed like she was in pain, and I divined that it was probably either gas or her diaper rash.
     But a second later she wiggled free and took off for the pantry, where, while I was distracted packing her diaper bag, she grabbed a can of vegetable shortening and a jumbo can of tuna off the bottom shelf to make a tower.
   

Criterium

     Saturday night we unleashed a tiny monster the likes of which Boise has never seen.  We took Clara to the Twilight Criterium, a road bike race that laps the downtown area several dozen times (fifty?).  The sidelines were crammed with spectators, babies, dogs. Clara ran up and down the sidewalks, causing traffic jams and making people trip in her zeal to greet every pooch within a half-mile radius.

     She tried to squeeze through crowds, gripping the calves of strange men for extra leverage or just for something to lean against.  She dipped her lime-green Crocs in the trash-filled trickle of water that ran down the gutter. She wielded a giant stick she found and denuded the trees along the sidewalk of the ornamental rocks at their base.  She cleverly evaded my attempts to ensnare her.

     Simon and I took turns running after her, apologizing to her sideswiping victims and men whose calves had been manhandled, snatching her out of the gutter water, wrenching old gum wrappers out of her hands, keeping her waving stick confined to our "bubble," and holding the fistfuls of rocks she found.
     At the beginning, I tried to get her to sit on my hip, but she lifted her arms and did a hula-hooping gyration with her middle.  My arms could find no purchase.

     Finally I walked with her about a block away from the race, to a giant hole where they're building a new bank.  I guessed there might be some big rocks and back hoes to look at, and I was not disappointed.  Behind a chain-link safety fence were huge chunks of concrete that had been ripped from the foundations of the previous building.  The chunks resembled boulders.
    "Bocks," Clara said in awe, pointing through the fence.    
    "Huge ones," I replied.
     After the charm of the construction site had worn off, I brought her to the Clif Bar sample table, where she enjoyed two black cherry square gels that the hosts assured me contained relatively low levels of electrolytes and vitamins.  "They do have a bit of caffeine," one of the hosts added as Clara chomped down on her second one.
   

Wading Pool

     Yesterday we inflated the wading pool and invited Shar from next door to come over for a dip.  The pool has a little slide and a canopy from which squirts about a dozen streams of water.  The girls splashed around for a few hours.  They shared an orange and had cold water from sippy cups.
     Sharing became the theme of the occasion.  Clara had to be firmly coaxed to share the hose, the little plastic umbrella from her bath toy collection, and the play lawn mower.  At one point, a comb made it's way outside from the bathroom.  Clara stood under the water canopy and tried to comb her hair.  Shar immediately and dexterously made a successful grab for it.
    "Mine!" Clara squealed, her legs and arms going stiff and her baby fingers splayed like a villainess lusting for power.  It's unfortunate that she has such cute little cheeks.  At times like these, when they're flushed with rage, I just want to bite them.
    "Shar," Kamilla (Shar's mom) chided. "That's Clara's comb.  We don't grab things out of other people's hands."  She wrested it away and gave it back to Clara.  Shar bent her knees and let her upper torso become slack with despair.  "I want it," she moaned, flopping her little round shoulders.
     "Hey, Clara, you may have the comb for one more minute," I said, "And then it will be Shar's turn, okay?  When we go to Shar's house, she lets us play with her toys.  So we should let her play with ours."  Clara glowered at me from beneath her bangs.  "Nope," she said, but when her time was up, she obliged.
     Later, as they were playing, Shar reached down and yanked a bunch of Clara's hair.  It wasn't done out of maliciousness.  Instead, she seemed interested to see what would happen.  She seemed aware it was crossing a line somehow, and this was exciting.  Clara wasn't hurt, only surprised. She was also interested to see what would happen.
     "You need to tell Clara 'sorry,'" Kamilla said, after reproaching Shar in a admirably neutral voice. (She muttered to me, "This is a time-out offense.")  Some part of me felt that we, the mothers, should explode with gesticulations of horror and shock, to give the little girls the good show they seemed to be seeking.  For example, I could leap up on my patio table and shake the umbrella at the sky.  Kamilla could howl and do cartwheels across the lawn.
    Shar sighed.  "I sorry," she said finally, puffing out her pink rosebud mouth a little.
     "I think you should give Clara a hug," Kamilla continued evenly.
     This proved to be harder than anticipated.  Shar was standing and Clara was sitting.  They both seemed unsure of how to navigate the embrace from such an awkward position.
    "Maybe you should sit down next to Clara, and then give her the hug," Kamilla suggested.
    Before Shar could move, however, Clara leaned her head softly against Shar's belly, and some approximation of an embrace was reached.

You're Killin' Me, Wilbur

     Last night I couldn't get to sleep.  Wilbur was snoring.  Simon was downstairs in his office, working until late, and so was not on hand to hear the Cuisinart juicer in Wilbur's sinuses.
   Sometimes Wilbur will snore deeply for a few breaths, and then suddenly his fleshy adenoids shift, and his breathing turns quiet.  Other times he snores, with varying bass, for a half hour or more.  At those times there's no rest for me.  It's like trying to sleep next to a submerged Jetski.
     "Wilbur!" I hissed last night.  Instantly he was silent.  I pictured him lifting his head swiftly in the dark, holding his breath, eyebrows raised, ears slightly cocked.  Suddenly alert.  Yes, Mom? Do you need me to go out front and protect you from the squirrels?  Do you want me to make sure the baby is alright?  You're not still mad about that roll of toilet paper I ate, are you?
     "Stop snoring!" and I snapped my fingers to show I meant business.  Yes, he seemed to say, I agree that squirrels are a terrible nuisance.  I'm glad you woke me to tell me that, and I like that finger-snap thing.  It's exactly how I feel, too, about those squirrels.
      There was a shuffling sound, and I knew he had put his head back down on his paws.  After a moment a slightly more orchestral snore emerged from the dark.  Something like a bassoon section.
     I jumped out of bed and grabbed him by the collar and pulled him into the hall outside our bedroom.  Then I tossed his bed--my velour body pillow--out into the hall after him.  I heard a "hurrumph" as he settled, unperturbed, next to the wall.
     About fifteen minutes later, Simon came upstairs to bed.  I heard the jingle of Wilbur's collar as he let him in the room.
     "Don't you dare let him in!" I said.
     "He's not going to sleep out there," Simon said.  He was right.  Wilbur let us get comfortable and then started scratching on the door.  We let him in because we were afraid he would start baying and wake the baby.
     Simon settled back into bed with equanimity; it turns out he is not bothered by snoring at all.
     Today he told me: "Just think of it like the sound of a waterfall."

   

At the Library with a T-Rex

     Yesterday Clara and I went to the library to check out some new books and music.  We haven't been back to Toddler Tales since that momentous occasion a few weeks ago, but we have been going on our own to practice what it's like to be at the library.
    I let Clara go as soon as we entered the kids' section.  She ran to the computers.  She's not so much interested in what's on the monitor as sitting on the stool in front of the screen.  She sat on each stool in front of each of the six computers.  She played with each mouse, turning it over to examine the red light underneath.  She tried on headphones.  She insisted that I try on headphones, too.  She banged on the keyboards.
     As soon as she was done with the computers, she jumped up and ran to the carpeted amphitheater steps at the back.  On the way, she stopped briefly to watch a family play Monopoly.
     Some kids were sitting in the amphitheater, sucking suckers and reading comic books.  She cruised past them to the mural on the wall, said "Hi," to the dog on the mural and patted it with her hand, turned the corner and stopped at the toy box.
     The toy box is filled with puppets and a set of big, plastic dinosaurs.  Sometimes Clara props the puppets up next to the dog on the mural and pretends to read them a book.  Yesterday she pulled out two brontosauruses and a T-Rex.  She squatted next to the T-Rex and patted him and spoke to him gently.
     I sat down cross-legged next to her and grabbed one of the brontosauruses.
     "Rarrrrr!" I said, making him gnaw on the T-Rex's neck.
     She picked the T-Rex up carefully and cradled him to her chest with both hands.
    "Be back!" she said.  Then she took off running back to the computers, her hair bouncing and her shorts bulky from her diaper.  Talking to the T-Rex in a high, soft voice, she made him sit on the stool next to her at the computer.  Then she made him read the cover of a book about whales that was on a plastic display.
     She brought him back to the amphitheater and generously bequeathed him to a tween with a jet-black ponytail.
     "Uh, I think her wants to be with you," the tween said, handing the T-Rex back to her.
     Yes, maybe she was right, Clara seemed to think.  She made the T-Rex sit beside her on one of the carpeted steps while I read them a book about parrots.

Pink Poodle in Paris

     Yesterday we went to a birthday party for Fenix, one of Clara's friends from the Y, at a park.  We boiled in a little late, frazzled from the heat, diaper bag spilling over with snacks, swim diapers and a gratuitous amount of sunscreen (and yet, I had left Clara's bathing suit in the car.  And where was her sippy cup?)
     The park had an ornate playground with multi-level slides and climbing walls and aerial walkways connecting them.  The ground underneath was a synthetic, super-spongy cork.
    Best of all, there were a bunch of different fountains squirting up from the ground.  We put Clara in her bathing suit and turned her loose.  She instantly found a playmate, a purple balloon.  She brought it over to one of the fountains to wash it.  The fountains' jets trapped it, and she couldn't get it out without getting wet.
     She shrieked in indignation and walked away in a huff.  If the fountain was going to be like that, it could just play by itself.  After a moment, she reconsidered.  She went back and reached for the balloon, gasping in shock at the cold water.  Then, quick as a wink, she snatched the balloon and ran away, smiling with triumph, but also with delight.  She hadn't realized it could be fun to be squirted by cold water on a hot day.
     The party's theme was "Pink Poodle in Paris."  There were place mats with pictures of pink poodles on the picnic tables.  There were pink and white and purple and polka-dotted balloons.  There was a cake with a pink poodle on it, and cookies with the Eiffel Tower on them. There were also pink, plastic Eiffel Towers in the middle of the picnic tables.  Every guest got a little box containing the following:  a little, stuffed pink poodle; a charm bracelet with a Parisian theme; pink poodle stickers and a pink poodle notepad; and a small, pink box of crayons.
     There was also a stack of water pistols on one of the tables.  I was pulled into a water-gun skirmish with a four-year-old named Lexi.  Imagine my shock when I turned to find that Clara, my own flesh and blood, had apparently joined forces with Lexi.  She grinned at me with pearly white baby teeth behind the plastic Beretta hybrid.  She couldn't figure out how to squeeze the trigger, so she held it by the barrel and menaced me with it.  Then she chased me, giggling and sweaty and making squishy sounds while she ran because of her soaking wet swim diaper and wet Crocs.  It was terrifying, simply terrifying.

   

Clara the tormentor

     In Clara's mind, she and Wilbur are best friends.  In Wilbur's mind, she is a miniature person who must be tolerated until pieces of cheese can be quickly, noiselessly extracted from her fist or smears of peanut butter licked from her face.
     On the night of the Fourth of July, I spent a half hour soothing Clara, who seemed to be worried that Wilbur was somehow stuck outside and the fireworks were hurting him.  Wilbur was blissfully dozing downstairs on the loveseat, curled up tight like a meatball wrapped in bacon, and probably dreaming of that very thing.
     Today, Clara's tormenting reached new heights.  She tried to put her socks on Wilbur's paws.  Then she tried to put a sock on his snout.  She put a rock she found outside in his water dish.  I caught her delicately sampling his dog food.

   




She tried to dress Wilbur in my clothes, but only succeeded in getting my jacket draped across his back.

Toilet water and basketballs

     This morning Clara took a tea towel from the bin on the bottom shelf in the pantry, shut herself in the bathroom, dipped the towel in the toilet, and used it to delicately swab her face.  Yesterday, she twice dangled her fingers in.
     I said, "No, no, no!"
     With each "no" her arm moved in deeper until she was up to her elbow in toilet water.
    I washed her hands, picked her up under the armpits and put her in the hallway outside the bathroom.
    "That is not okay!  It is yucky!  I feel very angry when you do that!" (Note that I was able to use "I" statements, even in the heat of anger)
     I sat down on the stairs in a huff.  She came up behind me and leaned against my back, twining her arms around my neck.
     "I do not want to play.  I feel very, very angry.  I think you should say 'sorry.'"
     She put her head against my shoulder contritely, twisted my head to the side with her hands and kissed me on the mouth.
     Later, we went to the park.  There were kids her age on the swings, but she was drawn to the basketball courts, where boys in fourth and fifth grade were playing ball.
    She has been succumbing to the lure of older men a lot lately.  Last week a bunch of elementary-school boys were running around the park with sticks they'd found.  She really wanted to play with them.  She wanted a stick, too.  She looked up, way up, at them hopefully, but they didn't even see her.
     Today she took a basketball from a boy with braided hair.
    "It's okay.  She can play with it," he said.  She ran up and down the court with it, chucking it up towards the baskets.  She figured if she sat down on the concrete, it would make her aim steadier.  Unfortunately, it also placed her further from the baskets.
     She wandered over to where some other boys were sitting by their bikes.  They looked at her uneasily.  This baby was all up in their space.  I whisked her away to the swings.
     I think she likes the older boys because they can climb up the slides backwards, without any help.  They climb on top of the tube slides and monkey bars.  And, of course, they bounce basketballs and rides bikes and run fast.  Of course, girls can do these things too, but none of the girls who do these things seem to come to our park.  Maybe Clara will be the first.

Fourth of July Parade

     We went to the Fourth of July parade this morning with our neighbors, Shar and Kamilla.  Shar is two (Kamilla is nearing 30, I think, not that it's important here).
     We set up shop in the shade near a storefront with zebras on the windows.  The little girls examined the windows briefly, but there were better things to do.  Shar quickly procured a miniature American flag to wave.  Clara tried to sit in other people's chairs.
     When the parade began, we moved forward to sit on the curb next to a slew of eight-year-old girls in ponytails with patriotic hair-ties.  They were sitting on a blue gingham comforter.  Owing to his suspected vampiric origins (the kind, reticent vampires that drink deer blood), Simon hung back in the shade.
     The first part of the parade was not very interesting.  It was mostly old cars and citizens' groups.  There were some seniors in a retirement-center van.  The Tea Party "float" was a trailer with people dressed in colonial garb, including one very elderly man in breeches who looked as though he had been around for the actual Boston tea party.  There was a citizens for peace group who, in a stunning display of ingenuity, simply walked down the street flashing the peace sign.
     Then came the family on unicycles, the car stuffed with plush animals ( the Humane Society or something like it, I think),  and the BAGPIPERS.  There were about twenty-five bagpipers and some drummers, and they were all dressed to the nines in kilts and other regalia.  They marched with precision and played patriotic songs. Their sound was huge.  They were so cool.  Clara, who had been running up and down the sidewalk, petting dogs and trying to steal other people's snacks, was suddenly riveted.
    The only thing that could come close was the candy.  Nearly every group after the bagpipers were throwing candy.  I morphed into a rabid sidelines-mom, trying to get Clara to go after the candy.  It wasn't that she wasn't interested.  It was just that her reaction times were naturally a good two to three times slower than the little-girl vultures sitting next to us.
    One of the little girls, a scavenger with a brown ponytail, looked to have recently lost her front teeth, but that didn't stop her from diving for salt water taffy and jawbreakers like a pro volleyball player.
    Once, a whole handful of Smarties and tootsie rolls landed right in front of Clara.
   "Clara!" I shrieked, my finger quivering just inches from the loot at her feet.  "Look!  Look at all this candy!"  She looked down at it intently.  Maybe she was absorbing the beauty of the patriotic-candy wrapping against the melting black asphalt of the street.  Finally she reached for a piece.
     After a few tootsie rolls, she started running after the floats, yelling "Tan-eee!  Tan-eee!"
     "That's the spirit!" I thought.
     Simon was coaxed from the shade to sit with us on the curb.  Regrettably, not long after he sat down, someone winged a butterscotch melt-away at his head.

Rainbow Cream

     Today I had to go to work for a few hours.  After the excruciating molar melodrama last week and weekend, Clara seemed relatively cheerful this morning.  I got her ready for daycare and put her in her car seat.
     "'Bur?" she asked.  "'Bur in car?"
     "Do you want Wilbur to go with you to daycare?"
     "Yes."
     "No, Wilbur can't go to daycare.  Daycare isn't for dogs, only little boys and girls."
     She seemed to accept this.
     "Mommy, book," she said, pointing at the radio.  I put on her favorite CD of nursery rhymes.
     Her new favorite childcare provider was at daycare.  His name is Josh.  He's probably about nineteen, and tall and muscly.  He also wears enormous CZ studs in his ears.  I think his bling is one of the main reasons Clara likes him so well.  He has a lot of little brothers and sisters, and is okay with the kids climbing all over him.  He gives them "roller coaster rides," which means he grabs them by the outsides of their arms and jiggles them and swings them up and down really fast.  The only rule is they have to squeeze their eyes shut to complete the experience.
    "It takes a lot of energy," he told me.
    When I went to get Clara after I was done working, she was happy to see me, but she also wanted Josh to sit with her at a little plastic table and read her a book about puppies.
     On the way home, we stopped at TCBY and I got Clara a little cup of rainbow cream frozen yogurt.  She wanted to sit in a big person's chair.  Since her armpits barely cleared the table, she had to tilt her head up like a baby bird to eat.  The yogurt was hard, but she refused my help.
     She immersed herself in the pleasures of creamy rainbow-ness and declined any chit-chat.  She looked out the window between bites, having some sort of secret inner conversation.  This was my signal that I should leave her alone to enjoy her fro-yo.
     After a minute she came back to earth and noticed that I, too, had a cup of frozen yogurt.  Mine was not as colorful, but still worth trying, perhaps.  She took my spoon and helped herself to my dish (pistachio and chocolate, side-by-side).  She held her spoon aloft in her other hand.  The remnants of multi-colored yogurt on it melted and dribbled down her fist.
     She dropped her spoon.  I got another from the counter.  When she noticed my new spoon was pink, she wanted to trade.  Then she wanted to trade chairs.  "Baker Street" was playing on the overhead, and she swayed in time to the saxophone while she ate.  She went back to her own yogurt, working on the yellow and pink, and then finishing with the blue part.  She got a bit on her collar and cocked her head to one side to lick it off with a blue tongue.
     She stopped eating for a moment, a look of intense concentration on her face.  Her face flushed red.
     "Shall I change your diaper?" I asked.
     She scowled at me deeply.  "No!!"
    Finally she finished.  I tried to clean as much of the pink and blue smears off her face and arms as I could with a napkin dipped in water.  She drank deeply from her sippy cup.  We stepped outside and I kissed her right on her sticky blue lips.