Weekend update

A recap of the past few days:

Friday, to beat the 100+ degree temps, I took the girls to our town library for a special showing of "The Little Mermaid 2." Definitely not an Oscar-worthy production, but it was nice to sit in the air conditioned library community room, and the movie seemed perfectly acceptable to the girls. We started out sitting in the chairs that were set out, but once other kids started filing in and sitting on the special pod-seats that were set up right in front of the big screen, Madeleine got the I-wants. "A sit a bouncy? A sit a bouncy?" she asked repeatedly, clearly noticing that the other children sitting on the pods had a habit of standing up and jumping down onto the soft seat over and over again. I finally relented and let both Madeleine and Julia move to the front of the room and sit on pods, and they behaved in typical fashion. Julia sat quietly and rigidly on hers, watching the movie with captivated attention, in contrast to all the other children in the room who thought it was more fun to flip their pods upside down and jump on them than to view the movie. Madeleine alternated between sitting on her pod and watching the movie and running around the room throwing herself on empty pods with a squeal of excitement. During her movie-watching moments, she made sure to provide loud commentary throughout: "Oh no! The BABY!" "Where shark go?" "Yeah, dat's a WHAAAALE!" She also continued with her commentary at points while marching about the room, and was even so taken by one of the songs that as Ariel and her daughter Melody sang together in the climactic moment, "Here we go!", Madeleine felt the need to immediately, vociferously bellow, "Heeeeeeere weeeeee goooooo!" And then do it again. And again. Over and over as she marched about the room, which led to her sitting on my lap (unwillingly) for as long as I could keep her there, shushing in her ear.

Saturday we took a family trip to the Children's Museum in Boston, which was a raging hit with both girls. Julia's favorite parts were "following the Yellow Brick Road and shopping," which undoubtedly doesn't make a lot of sense unless you were there. The entire reason we had made the trip was because of the Wizard of Oz exhibit that is currently showing, since Julia has recently fallen in love with the movie. Upon entering the museum, we got to follow a little path with yellow bricks drawn upon it up three flights of stairs to the exhibit:


We're off to see the Wizard!

The "shopping" refers to the Boston Black exhibit, in which children got the chance to walk through replications of various ethnic Boston neighborhoods and enter shops like the fruit market shown here:



Since she has been begging me to take her back to Georgia to go to the Children's Museum and pretend to food-shop with Auntie Shannon again sometime soon, I'm pretty sure this experience truly hit the spot.

Madeleine's favorite exhibit seemed to be the hands-on bubble room:



In fact, upon leaving the museum, Madeleine answered my question of "Was that fun at the museum?" with "A fun a bubbles!"

Following an out-to-dinner extravaganza, complete with ice fweam twuck for dessert, the girls were wiped out enough to get to sleep with relatively little stalling, although they made up for it by waking up at the crack of dawn this morning. Today's exciting activity was Wyatt's birthday party, which featured a slip and slide down the hill in their back yard, tie-dye t-shirt making, face paint, dinosaur chicken nuggets for lunch, chocolate birthday cake, and goody bags. The party took place from 12-2, so my plan was for Madeleine to take a (very late) nap during the car ride home, but instead she was so excited over her goody bag (or "wasket" as she insists on calling it, a label which likely comes from her "Cat in the Hat" flap book, in which the flap for "basket" has the rhyming nonsense word underneath.) She finally conked out during the last ten minutes of the car ride, only to be woken up for good once we returned home, and no amount of snuggling, head scratching, or lullaby-singing was going to get her back to sleep. When she finally got her hands on her wasket, all of her longings seemed to be fulfilled:




Julia is also enthralled with her goody bag, nor only because of the water bottle, markers, and bubble gum inside, but also for the bag itself, which she has used in a variety of pretend games already this afternoon. She spent most of the afternoon with the goody bag - filled with her ice cream play set - around her wrist, pretending to be a delivery girl bringing us all the scoops of our preference:



All in all, a pretty exciting weekend for the Rowe family!