"'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.
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