Spring Break

Monkey traps me by lying across my legs; Miss sits on his head. "This is my evil plan," he cackles.

After a long day with a lot of sunshine, wherein Monkey had some amount of difficulty following direction (which is parenting-speak for was a pain in the ass and went out of his way to do exactly the opposite of what he was asked), both children conked out at 5.30. So I put them in bed and went on my way.

The house was eerily quiet as I made dinner, and I thought, This is what it will be like when they're old and I have time to myself again. This is what it used to be like all the time. How strange. How silent. How odd not to have to keep looking up to make sure nobody's killing anybody, not to have to worry that the quiet is an ominous sign of someone getting up to no good.

(Tell me I'm not the only mother who sometimes finds her children have gone to bed without actually getting round to eating dinner. No, I probably am.)

Miraculously, they slept until the usual time in the morning, with only the usual number of wakings (Monkey: one, alleged bad dream, nursed and took a while to fall back to sleep. Miss: several, for one of which she was very awake telling me, "Dora. Dolly." But she nursed back to sleep after a while too.)

At the playground this morning, Monkey, of course, needed to go. So we found a tree and he went, as per usual. A little while later, Miss was observed to stand herself in front of a much less secluded tree (right beside the picnic table, in fact) and proceed to lift up her shirt and arch her back.
"Is she ... peeing against the tree?" asked one of the other mums.
"Um. Maybe we need to stop answering the call of nature in nature quite so often."