Checking in on Alice

... trying to crawl into the geodome ...

Alice was alone in the backyard this afternoon.

I was sitting there first, letting the afternoon rays of the sun fall on my back.

The yard had just been mowed that morning, so the smell of newly cut was in the air.

Alice was alone out in the yard.

.... and now with the other hand ...

She had a tube of bubbles in her hands and she was trying to hanging upside-down from the geodome and at the same time blow the bubbles.

The tube kept dropping out of her hands.

I walked over and asked her if I could hold the bubble container while she got herself in a position where she could both hang upside down and blow the bubbles.

She let me hold it for a while so that she could figure out how to do this.

As she experimented there were a few more times that the tube of bubbles fell.

... hanging with 2 hands ...

She had trouble finding the right position to keep herself steady and hold the wand and the bubble jar.

When she had finished blowing the bubbles, I coaxed her over to the patio table, telling her I had a new easy reader that has some great words: words like too-wit-too–woo.

And the word cockatoo which of course rhymes with kangaroo.

... trying to balance to start blowing bubbles ...

She was available to me to try the new words as she was getting ready to practise reading in the new reader.

When she was through with the flash cards, she went straight to reading the book and then she switched to playing with the a re-useable sticker book she brought home from a birthday party today.

There were a lot of complicated directions in the book, especially for someone who can’t read yet.

... getting a good float of bubbles going ...

One instruction said that certain stickers are meant to go on certain pages, which she wished she had found out before she had randomly stuck a good selection of them, everywhere.

We practised putting a marker in the front of the book to show which page we were working on, and then we went to the back of the book to find the stickers that were made for those pages.

The back of the book has a lovely flap that we could use to capture pages of stickers and keep them out of our way.

... Richard's jeans on the clothes line ...

I thought our afternoon was going well, but the sun began to go down and Alice said, “Let’s go to my house. I am cold.”

“Let’ go to my house instead,” I said and we moved inside, only to break one of the new rules of the family.

Rule one is that a parent has to agree that a child can go to grandmother’s.

... blowing down the whole row ...

The second rule is, if grandmother is not there, no one gets to go in the house. (In one word, retreat.)

The third rule is meant to protect me – no one can come into the house, if grandmother doesn’t have time to play.

Betty mostly ignores rules, unless it is rules other people should be keeping. but when she heard Alice had come inside because she was cold, Betty with a bit of consternation in her voice said “Well, I am cold too.”

... trying to get my balance, grandmother ...

So in the house she came to play matryoshkas while I continued to help Alice figure out how to use the sticker book.

Betty is a high-maintenance third child.

If someone older than she is busy with play, Betty wants to join in with that play, whether it is age appropriate or not.

... and now to start climbing up ...

In fact she is just right on top of that other child.

I deemed it necessary to keep the two girls apart, since moving stickers is a one person job that cannot be enhanced by having Betty give her opinion about every move Alice is making.

I went over to play Russian nesting dolls with Betty, still making the occasional suggestion to Alice.

... a one-handed hanging move ...

A set of 8 dolls was on the table and I was trying to figure out who these nesting doll women could be.

The obvious answer was all of them should be women in the Johnson family, so we had everyone from real people like great-grandmother
Jerry (in real life, Joan Turnbull's mother) to a mythical baby and small sister.

... the hammock inside the geodome ..;

Miranda got to be the largest figure in the group.

My figure was on the smaller size, which makes sense, given Joan should be larger, given she has the favourite grandmother status.

My figure also had to stand off to the side – I wasn’t allowed to be in the Betty-Alice-Joan group.

... Alice working on her sticker book ...

Thank goodness I don’t try to do psychology to make sense of the stories Betty is telling.

I have already let her into my house on a very hot day when she was professing she needed to get out of the cold, and that will do for my description of my part in her life.

At least for the rest of that hour.

And I forgot one last note to tell all.  Alice's hands need some powder or perhaps gloves made for people who hang off of bars often, for they palms are getting scarred.  I tried some vaseline to make them smoother, but then she wanted a few bandaids, which didn't work on top of the vaseline.

Well, taking care of those little hands.  A task for another day.

Arta