Wednesday, May 27, 2009
One reason you're glad you're not me right now


Eight to ten bottles to hand-wash every night. And, yes, I do boil the nipples. Noni set the precedent.
Saturday at Noni and Popi's
We spent about five hours there on Saturday. Noni and Popi had dinner plans so it was a shorter than usual visit. That turned out to be a mercy because Emma's behavior was pretty atrocious for much of the visit. The day went sour when Emma learned a hard lesson about "first strikes." That they most often lead to retaliatory strikes.

Popi was washing his motorcycle to get it ready for the Rolling Thunder ride to Washington DC on Sunday. Emma got ahold of the hose and started squirting it into his garage. She did it three times while he kept telling her to stop. Then, she turned the hose on him and got him wet. Now, you have to realize that a four year-old doesn't have the wisdom and experience to know where such behavior leads. Popi schooled her...


Her back was soaked. At first she thought it was fun, then her mood changed 180 degrees and she was outraged and indignant that Popi had squirted her. She was miserable in the sopping wet clothes so we had to strip her down and put everything in the dryer. She sat around in the house brooding and asking every twenty seconds when her clothes would be dry. She kept advocating that Popi needed to apologize to her for squirting her. We tried to point out that she did it first. Emma refused to own up to any responsibility for her plight. In the end I think she learned her lesson, but she had a difficult time conceding. She was the first one to apologize to Popi (of her own volition) but her sense of justice demanded that he apologize too. He did.

Once the clothes were dry Noni, Emma, Jack and I went down to the lake. There was a lot of complaining about making the princess *gasp* walk on her own. Still, we managed a few light moments there.




When we left we hadn't been on the road for four minutes before I saw this in the rear view mirror. In all fairness Emma was fighting a cold so I'm sure that could account for some of the crankiness.