Maggnificent Monday

It was spring! For an entire week, it was warm and sunny and gorgeous and prime outside playing weather. Mags and I spent a lot of time outside in the yards. Digging, repairing, tidying, cleaning up, dreaming, planning, and making messes. Maggie has a radar for puddles and mud. We’ll be at the park playing with friends; I look up and she’s on the other side tromping through the soggiest part of the lawn she can find. Oftentimes she has to ride home completely naked because I just can’t let go quite that much with the car and carseat. When she walks Eliza in the afternoon, our rule is always dry on the way out, puddles on the way back. Then we stop at the bottom of our street for a half an hour while she runs from one corner to the opposite, through the biggest, widest, deepest puddle in the whole neighborhood. Most every day there’s at least two pairs of shoes on the front porch drying off and waiting to be whammed against the sidewalk to loosen the mud clumps.

She’s also really interested by spitting. Sometimes I’ll walk into a room to find her on all fours staring at the floor, blowing raspberries to see the patterns her spit makes. When she has to go to timeout, I used to place her on the hearth for her minute and a half. But then she just started to spit on the bricks to amuse herself until the timeout timer went off. Now I have to place her on a rug and move the furniture out of the way so there’s no visible spitting surface. At times she thinks it’s also amusing to spit out milk or food, because that’s much more interesting than saliva, but mostly that one has disappeared thanks to the “then your meal is over” rule. I guess I should be thankful that she’s good at amusing herself and thus hardly ever bored.