and tuesday
Tuesday morning pre-breakfast saw Raspberry and I watching a video depicting the dismemberment and gutting of a wolf. Combining our love for animals and anatomy, it was awesome. So awesome that Raspberry has now seen the video a total of three times and probably counting. This is like the time she watched the NOVA video of the tongue-eating parasite over and over. Later in the morning, as I browsed through old posts on The Brain Scoop's Tumblr, Raspberry busied herself watching a couple of guys with a crazy-long extended hose clean the windows of the building. Inspired, she grabbed a few paper napkins and got to work herself, cleaning the insides of our own windows and waving heartily at the guy who finally came by to do the outside of ours.
Being a sunny-ish, warm-ish, totally ish kinda day, I thought we could go to the bombed-out church, as they have a bit of green space there to frolic about. Raspberry didn't seem too keen and kept saying she wanted to do "the first option," except she didn't remember what the first option was and honestly, neither could I. So I took her to the bombed-out church anyway, not telling her where we were going until we actually got there. Along the way, she hopped, skipped and jumped, picked flowers and sticks, and refused to have her picture taken repeatedly. She picked up a rather large, cumbersome stick on campus, broke off some branches the way Jamie showed her way back in October, and carried it around until she got tired of it several blocks from our destination. "Don't just toss it on the sidewalk," I told her, "wait until we get to some grass to ditch it." And as we neared the church, I said slyly, "Oh look, there's some grass. Let's go in there to get rid of the stick," and so we went in and stayed.
I'd brought some bubbles along but it was too windy and the bubbles weren't even forming on the wand, so she abandoned that pretty quickly. She didn't seem to want to leave the patch of grass we were on, even though I'd told her she could run all over, just as long as I could see her. Instead, she preferred to pick daisies, some of which I stuck in her hair, and used a landscaped part of the lawn as a ditch to get her feet imaginarily wet. It was too bad we couldn't actually go inside the church as the doors were locked. I would've liked to have seen or sat in the grass inside. Perhaps another time, I guess.
As it began to cloud over, I suggested we go to FACT to watch more music videos, to which Raspberry happily obliged. We actually didn't end up watching any videos though (except for a tiny bit of a Bjork one). Rather, part of our time was spent making pictures with solid poster paints (forgoing the stencils this time) and running and jumping off the shallow stairs. Parched from all that physical activity, she sweetly asked for a cup of tap water from the cafe and seemed to melt the heart of the girl working there. Raspberry thought the corrugated cardboard cup was cool and declared that she would only drink cold water if it came in that cup. Unfortunately, she dropped the cup on the sidewalk a couple of times on the way home, so I guess she won't be drinking any cold water for a while.
I was glad she was worn out from all the fun of the day but she had a massive forty-five minute tantrum about not wanting to get dressed for bed and then wanting us to get her dressed instead of doing it by herself. Ugh. I hate nights like this, when she's so tired that one little thing sets her off and it's an epic disaster. Well, at least that's over with. For this time.
We've had a nice two carefree days this week. I think if the weather's nice tomorrow, I might try for a third. Spontaneous and carefree. It's a good way to be.