Today I put my foot down and have all three kids sit down, at the table, for breakfast. Unfortunately, Camille pouts a bit (it's so much harder to know how to respond when it isn't your own kid, too!). However, even she eats a little bit.
All three help me clear off the table when they are done. We all troop to the bedrooms so that my girls can get dressed, and I see that Mindy has a surprise for me: she made her bed! Yeah!
While I do the
dishes, I encourage the kids to play. Mindy makes a Colorform picture (I notice that she names the shapes correctly as she uses them), Camille listens to a tape on Talk'n'Play, and Lindsey pages through several different dinosaur books (making quite knowledgeable comments). Lindsey asks if it is her turn with the Colorforms yet, but Mindy says, “No, I want to copy my picture.” She gets out crayons and a piece of paper and begins to copy each shape.
Lindsey says, “I want to sit down and watch you, okay, Mindy?”
Mindy's fine with it, and I feel great. The peace here is wonderful! I think that Camille's presence sometimes causes my two to behave better.
(Except when it doesn't.)
Lindsey is now doing Colorforms on one half of the board while Mindy copies her picture, which consists of a house, snowman, sun, snow, and grass. Lindsey goes for abstract art, with a picture that is randomly arranged shapes and colors. (Actually, it's pretty cool!)
The kids discover the masking-tape number line I had laid out on the floor near the piano. I suppose it is the proximity to the piano that inspires this, but Mindy starts to use it exactly as I had planned to use it, singing “Little Bird” by numbers as she steps on each number. We all join in.
After we're done with “Little Bird,” we sing-and-step to “Thumbkin” and then “Mr. Froggie.”
Camille asks if she can measure herself. She carefully lies down along the number line, her heels at 1 and her head at... Her head is between two numbers, so I discuss the concept of "half" in a measurement. Of course, Lindsey and Mindy want to measure themselves, too. We round everyone's height to the nearest half.
Next we decide to do standing broad jumps. As each girl jumps, I play the interval jumped on the piano (1 to 4, 1 to 5, 1 to 6), and of course the girls compare their jumps, using words like longer and longest and best. I'm ready to defend Lindsey as shorter and younger, if the girls get competitive, but each is more interested in figuring out her own best jump, instead.
I make up a song about their ages, using the tune of “Thumbkin,” and we sing and step and hop and play the piano:
“How old's Camille? How old's Camille?And so forth...
She is five! She is five!
She is such a big girl! She is such a big girl!
Run, Camille, run! Run, Camille, run”
Finally done with the number line and the piano, I can hardly wait to see what's next. Mindy goes right back to copying her Colorforms picture. Lindsey gets out paper and crayons, too, and starts drawing; she is not copying her Colorforms abstract piece. Camille uses the Colorforms, too, this time. She arranges shapes while saying stuff like, “There are three balls. Guess which one is Mickey Mouse?”
Adventure
The girls are finally well enough to walk to the park. We take our plastic toy dinosaurs, some foil, and a camera with us. At the park, the girls use the wet sand to build volcanoes and swamps. They pick up leaves and twigs and plant these around lakes lined with foil (to hold water), and then they pose the dinosaurs in a scene, chatting about what to do and how to do it.
There are two other children at the park. Mindy says, “Make sure the other kids don't let the dinosaurs eat each other.”
Indeed, there seems to be no bloodshed at all in their play. Camille hides her dinosaurs from Tyrannosaurus Rex; no carnivorous eating allowed. The dinosaurs barely even growl and roar (although there is a little of that). Mostly, they just talk to each other.
Now the three girls have run off from their dino-land and are playing on the swings and slide. They are, of course, pretending to be some sort of characters—I can tell that they are changing identity every once in a while—but then they drop all of that as Mindy shows the others “a new trick.” Everyone happily copies the new trick.
Then Camille shows THREE new tricks. The others try to copy her but do not succeed. Camille does things that Mindy can't do (or won't do, from fear?), but Mindy seems a little more determined today and works really hard to travel across the bars. She succeeds with only a little help—she will probably soon be doing it herself.
Once again, I feel so glad that the kids aren't competing with each other. Nobody compares, nobody pokes fun.
I pick up a plastic dinosaur and start making footprints in the wet sand. Mindy notices and comes over to do the same thing with another dinosaur. Camille decides to make her own footprints in the sand.
But wait! She IS a dinosaur!
Soon we're all dinosaurs. The girls decide that we are a family of duckbill dinosaurs. We are peacefully eating when all of a sudden an invisible T-Rex shows up (so to speak). We all whack it with our tails until it leaves. (Strictly self-preservation!)
Home Again
Once we're home, we get cleaned up and then sit down to watch a Disney tape about health and nutrition. When that's done, it's lunchtime. The kids take turns “taking orders” from each other and me, then they carry those orders to the chef (also me) while they set the table. When the food is made, the kids serve the customers and then become customers (me, too!), and we all eat.
With our little outing taking the better part of the morning, and both breakfast and lunch enjoyed at the table, like proper meals, the food situation is working out much better today!
While I do the dishes and put away the food, the girls choose to play outside. Soon Lindsey is back inside and upset. She's being left out. The older girls are mean to her. I sympathize and then coax her into playing a tape on the Talk'n'Play.
I hurry to finish the dishes, but before I get done, Mindy and Camille are back inside, too, Mindy in tears. The girls tell me that they have hit each other with plastic bats!
Yikes.
The lovely peaceful home, gone, just like that.
I suggest to Mindy that she play Kermit's Electronic StoryMaker, and she agrees. Camille takes my suggestion to tape record a message and a song on the piano. Both girls get happy pretty quickly, and soon they trade off activities. When it's Mindy's turn with the recorder, she plays “Little Bird” on the piano, for the recorder, but then also expands on the tune with her own improvisation.
Mindy and Camille go back to the bedrooms to play together. After their altercation outside, I am hoping they play well together this time. I peek in and see that they are combing their little ponies' hair and putting clips into the manes and tails. I decide to try to keep Lindsey busy with me (especially since she is tired and crabby). She agrees to a story, and I pull her into my lap to read to her.
Camille uses her sixth sense, or something, to realize that SOMEBODY IS BEING READ TO—and she comes running in to hear, too.
It seems to me that it is hard for me to do ANYthing with Lindsey without accidentally interesting one of the two older girls, too.
(Oh, well, the next time Lindsey goes to Mommy and Me class with Camille's cousin and aunt, the older girls will get a chance to free play alone without the lure that Mommy is having special time with someone else!)
So we read and read. Fairy tales, The Puppy Who Wanted a Boy, Who Sank the Boat?, When It Rained Cats and Dogs. After a good long reading session, all three girls squeal their way through a game of Raining Cats and Dogs: they gather up all the soft toy cats and dogs they can hold, count to 3 and then throw them into the air. The stuffed animals come pelting down, of course, and the girls gather them up affectionately and come to me saying things like, “Look, I have two dogs and a cat!”
I say, “Where on earth did you find all these animals?”
The girls' answers vary from things like, “It was raining cats and dogs!” to the more practical, “They fell on my head!”
Of course, I'm just using a line from the book, but there really are an awful lot of stuffed cats and dogs in there. I ask the girls to count them, and they do. Twenty-seven.
Good grief, we have 27 stuffed cats and dogs?
We have even more bears and rabbits, and who knows what other sorts of soft-and-cuddly critters? Wow!
The kids proclaim that they are ready for a snack and ask me to read again. This time, I read Jack Prelutsky's Read Aloud Rhymes for the Very Young. The girls are excited that one of the rhymes is about a dinosaur.
Pas
sport for more Adventure 
Mindy has been wanting to play “passport” for a long time. Inspired by the passports given out at the Wild Animal Park (in San Diego), she puts all the stamp pads outside, in a line, and then puts one animal stamp next to each ink pad. Each of the girls has her own passport, and the three travel down the line together, carefully inking each stamp before pressing it onto their passports, and waiting “in line” patiently.
Obviously, at any time one or another of the girls could avoid the line and go to another stamp station, but doing this activity quickly is apparently NOT what it's about. They keep together the entire time.
When Maria comes to pick up Camille, we have another session at the piano to show her all our songs. So ends another day.
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