There's a park in the middle with lots of trees and benches. And also, there are no roads, only train tracks.
One day I came home to this:
(home made soft pretzels dipped in chocolate with crushed faux-M&Ms on top)
and also this (took the pic the next morning because it was too dark):
Have I mentioned how much our nanny rocks?
Sam also had two playdates, both of which went well, and was in an experiment in our department. He was in a control group in a study on kids who have been through traumatic events. One of the questionnaires was a list of potentially stressful events that kids can experience, and one of the items on that list was "Has either of your parents even been in trouble with the law?" Sam: "Yeah. Sometimes." (Also: "Have your parents been divorced?" Sam: "What's divorced?" Experimenter: "It's when one of your parents has to go away and live somewhere else." Sam: "Yeah. My dad has to go away all the time. He has meetings in different countries and stuff.")
Frida, for her part, was so excited to have her favorite source of entertainment around ALL DAY LONG that she barely napped. And once her schedule is firmly established again it'll be just about time for us to go to FL...
She's been eating a lot more (solids, that is), having recently tried, and liked, avocado. This week's new foods: chicken (poached then pureed) and millet (ground then boiled). I'm also going to have to buy some jarred food, because when we're out to eat and she doesn't get anything, she gets notably upset. Packing cubes of frozen pureed food is a bit too involved for me, and she's not quite ready to just eat mashed versions of whatever we're having.
We've been watching the Olympics most evenings, and a couple of times Sam has fallen asleep on the couch watching. This pic, though, was after we'd just gotten home from visiting friends in their brand-new house (well, brand-new to them, and newly-renovated, and absolutely gorgeous). It wasn't very late, but it had been a long day:
We're running up against the "what's divorce" issue right now, too, (1. in a book we're reading where a main character has divorced parents and 2. because the father of a school friend just left the family) and I'm trying to figure out how to handle it. She hasn't actually asked yet, but between the book and the friend I anticipate the question may be coming. On the one hand I don't want to scare her about yet one more Big Scary Thing in the world that she didn't know enough to worry about before; on the other hand, unlike alligators in the closet, it IS something she's going to encounter in her environment in the years ahead. Did Sam have any after-reaction to the idea of divorce?
ReplyDeleteHe didn't bring it up, though he had a bad dream that night (which could have been about any of the many things they asked about and which he hasn't experienced, or one of the "bad feelings" they asked about, some of which he refused to comment on in his not-uncommon "I don't want to talk about that" way, or just one of his occasional bad dreams). My guess is that it will come up randomly some day when it bubbles back up in his mind... he tends to process for quite a while and then randomly say, "You know what I don't get?" or some similar conversation starter about something that he initially encountered days or even weeks earlier.
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